How to UNLOCK Massive Growth in 60 Minutes | Stop Doing Your Content Calendar WRONG

Tamar's content calendar is going to be one coaching session a week and one masterclass a week. Those can all be batched, right? So the coaching sessions all happen on one day and the masterclasses can all happen on one day. And that might just be one full day a month to do both. You're doing 4 coaching sessions, half an hour, 45 minutes each, an hour if you want. And then you're doing 4 masterclasses. It's a lot of, um, energy to do. But whether it's one full day of filming or two half days of filming, this is usually when I'm working with big names. Like, talent's time is always the hardest thing to get a hold of. So when you can chunk it, it's a lot easier than just coming to the studio, make one video and leave. But you can make enough content for twice-a-week videos in the equivalent of one full day per month. We don't want to only talk to our 3,000 subscribers. We want to reach people who've never heard of Tamer before. This is how we're going to grow. We expect these videos not to do super well, but because it helps me grow my business, then it's worth doing.

I've got a YouTube channel which is about how to scale your business basically, um, by becoming the CEO of your business. So how do you understand how to run your business using strategy, using systems and processes, finance? So it's, it's a more sort of broad view in terms of how to grow your business. It took us about a year to get to 1,000 subscribers, but actually it's taken us about 5 months to get to 3,000. And we're scaling pretty fast. I'd love to see how we can sort of take it even further faster, hopefully.

What's the service or product that you're selling?

We sell a 12-month program called the Firestarter Program. And it's basically for business owners that are earning over 6 figures. So this is not about how to find your niches early on. This is about you've got a business model, you know it works. Now, how do you actually scale it? And this is a 12-month program, which is a mix of online learning, consulting, coaching, kind of hybrid put together. And it really takes the business owners to that next level. I'd love to talk to you about my story, but I'll leave that for another time because it'll put things into context and why I'm doing this.

Cool, I mean, I'm excited to dive deeper and learn. So this theme is content calendar and structure. What are you thinking through for your content calendar?

What we've been doing previously is doing a video every— I've been trying to be consistent to do a video a week, but actually in the last year it's kind of become more one video every two weeks. But I've hired now, as we're scaling, I've hired a content team, an editor in-house. And we're trying to go for 2 videos a week, one of them, which is a kind of a normal 10 to 12 minute episode that sort of takes one of the topics within business, like systems, how do you look at your systems or strategy or whatever. And then we want to have a second one, which is more of a quickfire, maybe 3 to 4 minute Q&A. So we get people within the community tab to ask us questions, and I just sort of fire it. My team have decided to call it Tamer Time because it kind of like, has that whole sort of hammer time thing. But yeah, I don't know. I'm not convinced. But yeah, so that's where we're at. So we're aiming to try and do 2 videos a week from March. That's the plan.

And is it coaching that you want to sell or is it the programs and the systems and the—

It's the programs and the systems, I think. So we're not aiming, we're aiming more at the really small sort of solopreneur businesses who have got maybe about 2 to 3 outsourced people, but they really want to understand how to grow a business. I've grown, just as a quick background, I've grown businesses to $100 million, and I've also failed catastrophically where I've had $2.5 million in debt personally, and having to bail my business partner out of prison in Dubai. Not our fault, but that's another story. Yeah, so I think what I was looking for at the time, I know it's an incredibly saturated market, There's a lot of people out there trying to help people grow businesses. But I wanted to come from it from a different perspective in terms of really, how do you actually integrate and embrace failure? Because things go wrong in your business. How do you really look at it as becoming the CEO of your own business? So I'm not really focused on the marketing side, which is where a lot of business people, sort of like, you know, gurus online at the moment are doing. This is more of an overall strategic view of how do you actually learn how to run your business. So how do you look at the strategy? How do you look at the systems, finance, budgeting, and being able to understand that in a bite-sized way where it's not for large-size organizations, but we're kind of bringing it down to the small business owner. And yeah, as we scale, we want to make sure that the program, the group program for us is what scales otherwise. Just one-to-one coaching is not scalable for us. 90% of our signups in January, which is really surprising, 90% came from the YouTube channel organically, from people all over the world. We were expecting the YouTube channel to sort of really kick in for us 3 to 5 years' time to start generating revenue. And we were kind of looking at other ways, but actually it's has just gone much, much faster than what we had anticipated, and it's fantastic. So we're trying to keep up at the moment.

That's great. I think— look, is this the channel here?

Yeah, yeah, that's the one. Yeah, we're going through a thumbnail change at the moment where we're going to do less yellow, but yeah, that's the one. And as you can see, we've got about 3,000 subscribers, 2 of those 1,000 in the last 4 to 5 months. And you'll see that if you scroll down a little bit, you'll see some of the videos, the popular ones. If you sort by popular rather than by release date, you'll see that we've got some which are doing really well at the moment.

Whatever you wanna make money doing, showing the process. As we think through content calendar, right? I guess the theme for today, whatever you wanna make money doing, show me the process of you doing it. And so this is a great example of you got 90% of your leads from YouTube. And you got 3,000 subscribers. You know, like you don't need to have a 10 million subscriber channel. You're targeting a specific niche. And so for anybody who's targeting, if you were targeting how to make your first $100 as an entrepreneur, now we're going super broad, but you want the people who are already six figures, which is not most entrepreneurs, right? People like, they would love to be making six figures and now helping them become seven, eight figure entrepreneurs. Now it's a really, it's a niche. Now, obviously it could be more than 3,000 subscribers, but it's a great example of if you're making, really targeted content, how it can lead to growth for your business. If we're looking at, as a good little example to start with, if you want to sell, so you know, what is Tamer trying to sell? He's trying to sell his services to help CEOs grow organizations. You have a mix of you just talking to camera, right? Looks like, and there's some fun little elements in there. And then you taking questions and doing Q&A off of there. Like you're responding to their comments, right?

Yeah. As the last one you see here. Yeah, that's exactly, yeah.

So this is great. And for anybody who is a coach, an expert, a thought leader, whether, whether Tamer wants to sell coaching services or not, showing that he knows people's challenges and how to help them through can be great content. I would love to see this be a video of you actually helping people as opposed to just—

you mean, yeah, do you mean actually have them on the call, on the video itself, live? Okay, yeah, that might be a really good idea.

Yeah, yeah, because— and, and I mean, you've seen this, the question that people come in with is very rarely the question they actually need help with, and it's hard to give a deep answer on like a one-liner question without having context about their business. So you can give a standard answer. Hey, Tamer, what are the 3 ways to grow my business to $1 million? You know, you can give your standard answer. But if they're right there in front of you, you'll actually dissect what their real problem is and help them through it. Which then, because you know what you're doing, really showcases, oh my gosh, this Tamer guy's legit, not just another guy on YouTube making content telling me how to grow a business, right? So it's a much more specific answer. And also, if you can get entrepreneurs on who are in your target market, as you light up their eyes, then other people watching will say, oh, this guy is, this guy's maybe for me, I want to, can I hire him? Does he have a program? Does he have services, right? Um, so there's a couple of ways to do it. You can do it based off of who's on your email list already. You can do it who's following you on other social channels and offer it to them. You could do it as a reward for people who are in, like, how many people are in your course or your training right now?

So, um, last month we signed up 20, by the way, it's, it's, um, a $12,000, uh, program. And we haven't done a tripwire. They come straight in from YouTube into this program. Which is phenomenal. Phenomenal. Yeah.

So as a bonus, and is it an annual, like is it $12,000 a year or $12,000 one-off?

It's $12,000 a year. Yeah. So it's for the 12-month program. It's $12,000 a year or $1,200 a month if they pay monthly in installments. But yeah.

So, you know, 20 people, it's a fantastic start. You could offer to all 20 of them that as part of it, as part of their first year, they get a half an hour coaching session with Tamara that would go on.

That's a really good idea. Yeah. Yeah, actually, that's a really good idea. And I hadn't thought of that. That's a really good idea.

So you get content. Now they may not want to make it public, but that's, that's the caveat. It's like, hey, this, this is going to be public on our YouTube channel so that other people can learn who are in the same situation as you. And it's a chance to talk about your program without talking about your program. "Here's John from our program and he's a six-figure entrepreneur." What's John gonna say? John's gonna say, "Oh my God, Tamer, I love the program so much. This has been fantastic." Now you got an advocate inside the video. And then you say, "Hey John, how can I help? What are you struggling with right now? What problem are you going through?" And he's gonna tell you something and you're gonna be able to help him. You don't need a brief and a pre-interview because you've seen all the challenges, you know what people are going through.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, back to Michael's original post in the Facebook group about content calendar, what is, what are you trying to sell? And then show me the process of you doing it. So if Palmer's trying to sell his, his program, it's great that he can answer these questions. Then this could be a great series, but even better is showing you with somebody who's actually in the program and taking it to the next level. 'Cause your stuff, Tamer, is about next level thinking, not beginner level thinking.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So you have to dive into what are the next level problems that people are struggling with.

Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense 'cause if you actually go to the homepage without running the trailer, if you pause that, yeah, if you have a look at the one immediately, the business masterclass, that was much, much longer video, it's an hour, and that's actually the one that's driven us the most sales. Oh, for sure. What I did was actually walk through the process and I gave 3 case studies within the program actually in terms of what it was. And I didn't wanna put this masterclass behind an email wall like a lot of people do. I thought, let me put that there and then if they wanna download the slides, then they can come and sign up and sort of get on our email list. And what you are saying actually just takes that to the next level where it's like, okay, now not just are we talking about these case studies, but they're live with us and we're sort of having that one-to-one interaction. So I really like that.

Yeah. And I mean, everybody here, you guys can all do the same thing. Take the people who are in your programs, reward them for being in your programs. They're gonna feel amazing. Like, oh my God, I get a one-on-one time with Temer as well to ask whatever questions I've got on my mind. And the only caveat is it's gonna be on YouTube. Like some people may say no, but most people see it as an amazing benefit that otherwise you can't hire Tamer, you can't work with him one-on-one. This is the only way to get access to him, get your question answered. Longer videos for sure, 10 minutes plus, but the biggest growth category is 1 to 3 hours. So we've talked about this. It's your first time here, we've talked about this before. People are going to learn. And for all of you, so you look at Tamer, if I want to grow my business, if I want I'm a 6-figure business, I want to get to 7 figures. Where am I going to learn? Who am I talking to? Maybe I have a mentor, probably not. I'm not going to the library. Like, where am I going to go to learn? I'm going to YouTube. And I want to learn. And I'm going to YouTube not just to get— I don't want just a quick hit of motivation to tell me, you can do this. Just keep going. Don't quit. You're like, that's great. That's Instagram. I'm going to YouTube to actually figure out how do I do this thing? What are the steps that I need to take? And so if you make an hour-long video, I'd be doing regular masterclasses. If you can, you know, this is now a bigger time commitment, but people are going to learn. Uh, and so the longer the video, again, with the biggest growth they're seeing is 1 to 3 hours. So I would say 10 minutes at a minimum. So These are going to be really hard to ever do anything with in terms of picking up and taking, taking off.

Yeah, these ones were actually pulled out of a longer video and we just made them into smaller bite-sized videos. But with regards to what you were saying, a lot of people were saying to us to make shorter videos. And then when we did the masterclass, which is an hour and 5 minutes, YouTube promoted that video more than any any other of our videos. So the video's actually been out for about 2 months now, and it's got 2,000 views on there, whereas even the ones that have got to about 13,000 views, um, it took about a year to get, to get to that level. And this is by far, in terms of how, how long it's been released and what YouTube is doing in terms of the impressions it's showing, it actually is pushing it out even more. So that completely validates what you're saying where actually we've seen that firsthand, that the longer videos are the ones that are getting us more views.

YouTube loves long content. YouTube's goal is to keep you on YouTube for as long as possible. Now, to your credit, you're holding people, right? Like it's not just an hour-long video just to have an hour-long video. If you weren't holding attention and giving value in this video, I mean, I haven't seen it, but you know, you're holding people's attention or YouTube wouldn't be promoting you. But given the choice between holding attention on a long video and holding attention on a short video, YouTube always wants to go a long video inside of thought leadership and education. So these videos, I wouldn't remove them, but they're mostly dead. Like the chances of ranking for a 1-minute video is like, unless you're Star Wars trailer or something crazy, you're just not going to win in 2022 with it. Um, so yeah, more of these if you can. And There looks like there's a lot of production quality on here as well, like Simpsons and, you know, cartoons and stuff, which is fine. I'd even look at dropping the production quality if it means getting more videos out, because it's quality of thought more than quality of production, because you have knowledge that people don't have.

Thank you. Yeah, that— and we're getting comments on the channel now when people come in. I think that's the thing, because even if you see the masterclass, there's a there's obviously the initial drop of people just not staying on, but once people do, it's a flat curve all the way through the whole hour. And that means that people that have stuck around are sticking around, and then they're commenting and saying, this is really good. How is this channel not even bigger than it is? And then they— you can see them commenting on other videos and binge-watching the channel. And I think that that's why YouTube has begun to start showing it to even more people. And that's why we've kind of grown in the last 5 months quite rapidly.

Yeah. So if this was, if all your content was like that, now I know that's a high bar compared to making a 4-minute video, especially on your time. So, but if 90% or 80% of your leads are coming from YouTube, it could be a worthwhile investment of your time to spend a little more on making content. A lot of those can be batched. So again, content calendar, if, if Tamar's content calendar is going to be one coaching session, uh, a week and one masterclass a week. Those can all be batched, right? So the coaching sessions all happen on one day and the masterclasses can all happen on one day. And that might be just be one full day a month to do both. You're doing 4 coaching sessions, half an hour, 45 minutes each. An hour if you want, and then you're doing 4 masterclasses. It's a lot of energy to do. But whether it's 1 full day of filming or 2 half days of filming, this is usually when I'm working with big names. Like, talent's time is always the hardest thing to get a hold of. So when you can chunk it, it's a lot easier than just coming to the studio, make 1 video and leave. But you can make enough content for twice-a-week videos in the equivalent of one full day per month for the channel.

Yeah, this is something that we've struggled with at the moment because that's, that's been, that's been the thing is that we've not been able to push out content as consistently as, as we'd like. So being able to come and batch, batch record these things I think will help us a lot.

Yeah, like you and your team, you say, hey, on the first Thursday of every month we're filming.

Yeah.

And I mean, for me, it's every Tuesday where I'm filming content. And we have one giant filming day once a month, and then we have smaller— the other Tuesdays are smaller filming days. But every Tuesday I'm making content, and the team gets it ready for me. So like, your team is booking the calls. It's not you saying, hey, do you want to come on a call with me at this time? Right? Team gets all that lined up. You just have to show up. And for most people, that's the most fun. You know, if you just show up and you're helping and there's a client in front of you who really needs your knowledge and you're giving them a lot of value, it's the time flies going through that kind of content as well. Yeah. And then the masterclass, and we can do a deep dive on a later session, like actually look at your analytics. If it's dropping off a cliff at the beginning, we, you know, we, it's great that you're holding people, but now How do we learn from that so that it's not dropping off as big a cliff ongoing? How do we make our intro better? And that's going to be super common for everybody. If you look at your retention curves, the first minute's going to be pretty poor because people don't know you. Like the people who know Tamer are going to love his stuff and can't wait for the next one. But we don't want to only talk to our 3,000 subscribers. We want to reach people who've never heard of Tamer before. Like this is how we're going to grow. So when they see you and they And they don't know who you are. It's harder to keep their attention versus somebody who already loves you. Um, so, you know, we can, we can dive in and look at, you know, retention strategies and all that later, but for content, I think there's a good one for you. Um, you're coaching people who are in your program or thinking about being in your program or who've downloaded your triage quiz. You know, like you might run out of people. If you only have 20 right now in the program. If everybody says yes, that's 20 weeks of content. That's not bad actually. You know, it's almost half the year. That's not bad if they all say yes. And if you need more people, people who filled out your triage quiz, you can also bring them back for round 2. You know, like if it's 6 months later, they have new problems. I mean, that's the— that's the benefit of it, you know, so you can, you can rotate people and have them come back 6 months later, that's fine too. Guests. So this is another interesting one for content strategy. Hopefully everybody can learn from. So is this guy— who is this guy that you brought on?

Actually, he interviewed me and we just had highlights of it on that way. But we have been considering doing a sort of guest session where we bring people in and we interview them, and it's related to somebody who's grown a business but actually has had struggles as well, because what we want to do is we want to highlight that business is not all glitz and glamour. It's how you sort of get through and the learning lessons. So we've been considering this, and I wasn't sure whether that would fit within this channel, would it need a separate channel? And that was kind of one of the questions I was going to ask at a different sort of date, but, uh, I don't know.

I think it's helpful to the discussion and I know we're spending a lot of time on you today, but we haven't seen you before. And it's also great to, uh, it's content calendar. So it fits the theme. Um, it really depends on the goal of the channel. I don't, I wouldn't recommend starting a second channel when you're not like, you're still getting your feet on consistency on the first one. Right. So I wouldn't worry about that yet. Does it fit into the main channel? It's really more about what do you hope to accomplish? Because if you're trying to sell more people into your program, then it's much more about you being the guy. I want your methodology. I want to learn from you and how you overcame these problems. And you're the expert that I'm signing up to listen to, not how you interviewed Like I'm not buying your course or your membership because you had some big entrepreneur on and you interviewed him. Like you're the Larry King or the whoever. Um, so if it's some big name, maybe that gets you new eyeballs on a channel. Like if you had whoever, uh, you had Gary Vee or Grant Cardone or, or somebody who's got a big audience, you're going to interview Oprah about business. Awesome. Because then that brings a lot of new eyeballs. But if it's just an entrepreneur that has had a lot of success, but we've never heard of, which is most people, like most entrepreneurs have had big success, you wouldn't recognize their names because they haven't made a point of getting out on social. That probably doesn't help your channel and your business grow that much.

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

So like reasons behind the content, if it's fun, Great. It can be great biz dev. So again, for everybody here too, if you're thinking content calendar, if there's somebody who you really want to meet, Tamara, could be a good biz partner for you or referral for you or connection for you. It's a lot easier to build the relationship by doing an interview with them to say, hey, come and be a guest on my show and you're deifying them and giving them all this accolades, right? And then it leads to a connection and hopefully some business afterwards. So that could be great. There's a reason to do it besides the growth of the channel, right? That it carries a business ROI for you. So that could be like, okay, we expect these videos not to do super well, but because it helps me grow my business, then it's worth doing. This is a fun topic. This is something that I obsess over. How do we get our 1-minute audience retention? It's It's a super geeky topic. Uh, of all the things that, um, that I try to teach when I'm doing presentations, uh, this is the only thing that I get technical with— the audience retention curve, the audience retention curve, the audience retention curve. Like, remember this thing, pay attention to it, look at your data because it's easy to get lost in YouTube data. But this one is super, super, super important. Understand that YouTube's goal is to keep you on YouTube. Right? That's their goal. So the more you're keeping people on YouTube, the more they're going to promote your videos. And so many people focus on the entire video, which is important. But what often happens is if you get the first minute down really well and you're keeping people for that attention, they'll watch the rest of the video. If you go look at most of your curves, you'll see it's mostly flat or just slowly sloping down. But that first minute is where we tend to lose people. So people are often shocked. If you go look at your own stats, people are often shocked at how poorly their videos are doing in that first minute. So today, that's what we are talking about. Let me share my screen. Boom, specific strategies that boost viewer retention. I'm excited. Okay, let's dive in. So the goal, the goal is 70% at 1 minute. This is a really hard number to hit. Especially consistently. Nobody hits this number consistently. Not, not inside Thought Leadership. I don't do it. Nobody that I've looked at does it. Um, it's really, really, really, really hard. And I've looked at everybody's channel, at least the big channels inside Thought Leadership, but it's still the goal. It's still, it's still that elusive. Here's what we're working towards. And this curve, that's the audience retention curve. You'll see this on every single video. This is free. Inside YouTube Studio product, you can get lost again in data, but this one is super, super, super important, and it'll show you basically where people are falling off. So wherever, you know, here, whatever happened here, that sucks. Then that was good, then that sucked, and then that sucked at the end. And then these little peaks here, this is what we're going to share to social content, right? We've talked about this in the past, but just quick refresh. This slide is one of you guys may have seen in the past. 1-minute retention. This video we did had 73% at 1 minute, has almost 3 million views on the channel. And this is what a typical curve will look like, right? It should be slowly just declining over time. And it's this part that we're really trying to optimize in this first minute, trying to make sure that we're keeping it not that big a slump. So you'll always get this, you'll always get this little drop here at the beginning. The key is not making that drop and losing 40% of our audience, which happens to a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of channels. So here's something that we haven't talked about yet that I wanted to just bring up, uh, on your radar. TubeBuddy has a tool that I requested, uh, and helped them build called the Retention Analyzer. Now it's a little buggy and they don't update it very often because they basically made it for me and some of the people who like using it. Um, but it's not part of their core thing that like everybody's using it for. But if you are using TubeBuddy for split testing right now, TubeBuddy is a tool that we use. We've done over 10,000 split tests on the channel, thumbnails, titles, et cetera. If you're on that program, you're on that package, I think that's $50 a month, something like that. It's not, it's not crazy expensive. They have something built in here as well called Retention Analyzer. So if you go to your TubeBuddy, you click on data and insights on the left and then scroll down to retention analyzer. It'll pull up your most recent— it's not all, it says all videos. It's not, it's going to be your most recent, I think 50 videos. And then you can sort by retention at various timestamps. So I'd say we sort by the 1-minute mark and see where you're at. And you can just get a sense of how well you're doing, which videos are performing well, which videos aren't. Just to give you a sense, you know, instead of having to go videos one by one by one by one by one, this will help you get an overall sense and see where you're doing well and which videos are not doing so well and where you need to make a few adjustments to help your channel grow. So definitely check that out. If you're, if you're on the package for the split testing, you're already paying for this anyway, so you might as well take a look and see which videos are performing well and where there's some room for improvement. Okay, so today we're going to talk about a lot of the dos, but before that, I want to talk about some of the don't dos. So these are the things you want to avoid when you're starting your video. Okay? These will destroy your audience retention curve. Intros. Hi, I'm Evan and I XYZ, right? No intros. Livestream welcomes are the worst. You know, a livestream, the first couple of minutes usually really, really, really suck. On the live stream, you're welcoming people, you're saying hi, you're asking about their day. That's great for a live stream environment, but not great for a YouTube video. Again, we're trying to assume that people who are watching our videos don't know who we are. That's our target audience. We're not talking to our subscribers. We're talking to our non-subscribers. This is the first time they're seeing you. So we want to hit them with something that's going to be really powerful. Don't do a sizzle reel, you getting out of your car looking fancy, or, onstage looking like a special person. Like none of that stuff really brings in a lot of attention. Call to actions. We don't want call to action at the beginning because we lose people. You'll see a big drop in your audience retention curve. And then audio only. Audio only is really hard. I'm working on a couple strategies actually with some podcasters. Like how do I turn my podcast into a YouTube video when I don't have video, when it's just an audio stream? And every time I've seen it, it's really tanked. But if you can make it visually appealing, I think there's a case. I think there just hasn't been a lot of innovation on the podcasting side for how you can play with visuals. So these are all the don't-dos. Don't do any of these things. And if you're looking at your data and you're seeing that you're at 40% retention at 1 minute, you're probably doing one or multiple of these and it's not helping your videos grow. Okay, so we just finished, uh, a breakdown of 990 of our videos. This just happened on Tuesday. So what day is today? Thursday. So 2 days ago, I haven't even gone through all the data myself yet, but, uh, I had one of my guys— I've, I have a full-time data analyst on my team, and that's what he does is goes and looks through our data and gives us suggestions on what's working, what's not working. And he compiled this giant spreadsheet of of which videos are popping hard. You know, we're at 78% retention at 1 minute and which ones are underperforming. And so I'm gonna share with you some of the insights that we found today, which I'm excited 'cause I didn't even know some of these things until Tuesday. Having a full-time data analyst really, really helps. So I'm excited. Let's dive in and look at some of the data. Okay, so, That first minute, again, our goal is to capture attention. So multiple camera angles, we found really, really has been helping. And this is some of the stuff that I used to do that I haven't done as much. It's shocking when you look at your data, you might find, oh, something I was doing back in 2019 is actually outperforming what I'm doing right now. And all of these numbers are for the past 90 days on my channel. So it's not lifetime of the video, this worked. I've been around for 12 years or something, so it's not like this worked back in 2014 and it doesn't work anymore. All the stats is based on the last 90 days. So multiple camera angles, we did 4 transitions in the first 15 seconds, and that helped lead to 78% at 1 minute. Okay, getting outside, switching up the background, having some color. Again, this one, 4 transitions, in 18 seconds, 70% at 1 minute. So I'm seriously looking at, okay, what, what can we do besides just using— I love my studio, but besides just using the studio, what else could we use? Where else could we go? Now some of this requires more editing. This one is pretty simple. This one, even if you're doing it yourself, you could just do different camera angles for the intro. This is only for the first minute. Don't worry about making it highly produced. I value editing, but I think ultimately it's gonna be your capabilities to pull out great information that's gonna carry the day. But in that first minute, especially, the editing can make a difference to hook somebody's attention. So you could do this even if you're filming on your own, but if you have somebody as a camera operator helping you, you can move to the side, move around, just have different angles. And again, just getting outside if you can, if it's warm, we got summer, I'm sitting right here. So can you do anything outside to just shake up the background, just to make it a little more interesting, a little more appealing? One hack that Billy Gene loves doing for his ads, if you don't know Billy Gene, he's one of the experts on advertisements. So YouTube ads, Facebook ads, et cetera, is go look up in your city, what are the top places that people like to go to? And then try to film there. So it takes more time, it takes more budget, it takes, it takes a team to maybe help you, but if there's an interesting background, so I'm in Toronto, there's, you know, the CN Tower, there's Niagara Falls, there's, you know, different places, but if you look at the top places people like to visit and then that happens to be in your background, that could help just get people interested at the beginning. Fast cuts. So here's an example where we did 10 transitions in 21 seconds, where we're doing a preview of things to come. And this is something that after looking at the data on this, we're going to be playing with it instead of longer clips, doing coming up, leading with shorter clips, but more of them as opposed to longer, more in-depth clips. Really that first minute is people are justifying their time with you. I don't know who you are. I like the topic. Do I want to watch this video? You know, it's like people will skim an article before they read it. That's what's happening right now. So if you can give them a chance to skim the video before they watch it, you can hook them in. So this is something we're going to be playing a lot more with. Uh, we're— after seeing this, I just instructed my team, hey, I want our next 2 weeks of videos on the top 10 channel, I want to be doing 10 cuts. For each one, and let's see if we can play this out. So think about your own videos, think about your own content. You don't have to have 10 rules, but how can you take some of the highlight moments and instead of just 1 or 2 highlight moments, go for 5, 6, 7, 8 highlight moments that are in more rapid succession to say, okay, there's a lot, there's a lot of meat coming up in this video. I want to watch it. So this, this was really mind-blowing for me. This was some experiment we did, I don't know, back in 2016, just as a, as a one-off, and never went back to it for whatever reason. I was like, wait a minute, that actually worked. Let's go back and look at it. And you know, when you have 10,000 videos like I do on my channel, uh, there's a lot of data to pour through to get some interesting information. So super fast cuts, I would definitely play with some of these for your videos. So solo videos, the most important thing is to lead with a powerful opinion. And the question I always ask people is, what do you believe that others don't? So you're going to make a video on habits, great. What do you believe about habits that other people don't, that they would find weird? Like, I can't believe you said that. Because this is our goal, is to hook somebody in. This is specific for thought leadership videos. You are a thought leader. You are an expert. You know things that other people don't know. That's the whole idea. Why am I watching you? Because you're going to teach me something. So what do you believe that I don't already know? And that's the first thing that comes out of your mouth. So, you know, I've done, when I've done my Thought Leadership Academy, we'll spend half a day just working on this stuff. Practicing it, like writing it down and then saying it to the camera, because it's really hard. A lot of times it's hard to get out of our own heads. And so imagine— what I find helpful is imagining somebody. Imagine one of your clients. So Stephen might imagine an entrepreneur, Robert, or his wife might be imagining somebody who's, you know, dealing with trauma, like you picture somebody. And then that's the first thing you're talking to this person. I would always picture this photographer friend that I knew who always seemed to struggle, could never seem to figure it out. And instead of talking to the camera, like I'm talking to this guy, I'm talking to you. How would he react? When I had my cameraman, there was one of them that always seemed to kind of disagree with what I said at the beginning. And it's like, great, you're perfect. So I pitched my first sentence to him and then I see what his reaction was and then that would that would change how I would then pitch my next sentence, right? If he said, "Wait, what?" Like, perfect, I got my first sentence. If he agreed with me, it's like, okay, now I gotta change it up. So lead with a powerful opinion, the first thing out of your mouth. This is really hard, 'cause again, a lot of times people click record and then they go back, they default to how they've done it. "Hey, welcome back, it's Evan." Like, no, I just told you, don't do that. Powerful opinion, first thing out of your mouth. That's how we need to lead this session. So most important part, deliver it with power as well. So this is where a lot of thought leaders also struggle is that, okay, you finally get the perfect sentence out, but it's not delivered with any enthusiasm or excitement. And this is from some top people as well, who I know are great speakers. They're trying to memorize that first sentence. And then when they say it, The words come out perfect, but there's no emotional commitment to it. You have to be emotionally connected to the thing that you're saying, as if somebody is in front of you right now and they're struggling with that very thing and they need to hear from you. I know sometimes that's hard just talking to a camera in studio and you're trying to stress out about memorizing that first line, et cetera, but your, your, um, your stage presence really, really matters. If anybody's done speaking, You can get up on stage and say the exact same words, but if you don't have stage presence, you don't believe what you're saying at the core of your being, you're not going to sway the audience. It's the exact same thing when you're talking to a camera, you're just talking to, you're talking to a bigger stage than you would at any other stage, but you don't see them. And so that makes it a little more challenging. So whether you can call yourself out on it, or if you've got somebody on your team who's filming with you, who can say, Hey, that wasn't very good. Do it again. I remember when I recorded my audiobook for both Built to Serve and Year One Word, I had two people in my ear, my producer who's looking at all of the technical stuff of like, oh, you know, your stomach rumbled or something. Do that again. And then I had another producer who was in LA who was more paying attention to the tone. Like, hey Evan, you read it perfectly, but There was no energy there. He's like, okay, thank you, man. Do it again. And I just pick up from that line. So the emotional commitment, like, are you actually feeling the words that you're saying as opposed to just saying the words really, really, really, really matters. Once you get into the teaching, you'll be fine. I very rarely meet somebody who signs up for this program or other thought leader experts, trainers, coaches. I'm not here to teach you how to teach. For the most part, you guys do that great. Once you get into the teaching, you're fine. And you see that in the retention curves, like people are watching. It's just that beginning part. And if we don't hook them in at the beginning, they're not going to watch the rest of our teaching. So powerful opinion, first sentence. Second sentence is context sentence. Like, what did you just say? You just told me something that doesn't make sense to me. You told me something that's challenging one of my belief systems. So repeat it again in different words, make it make a little bit more sense. And then raise the stakes and raise the stakes. Says, what happens to me if I don't change this thing about myself? If I don't, if I don't make this change by watching this video, this video is going to teach you something that's going to change my life. I'm going to become a new person at the end of this video, right? That's the, that's at least your emotional state going in. That's why we're making this video to shift somebody's belief system on something that you know about. If I don't make that shift in this video, what happens? What happens to me if I stay stuck? What happens to me? Your job as a thought leader is to give perspective. It's not just this one-off little moment that I'm struggling. It's my entire life. And so that's your job is this one little thing that people think they care about. They need to, they need to have a much broader view of how this is impacting every area of their life. And if you fix that, it becomes, uh, the cornerstone habit to change everything in your life, right? It's like, oh my God, I thought I was just searching for a video. Now I'm watching this person who's about to change my whole life, right? So that becomes your job. So powerful opinion, context sentence, raise the stakes. If you have to write those down, those 3 sentences, if you have to record it 30 times until you get the energy and the flow right, it's worth it. Because once you get through this and you get into the teaching, You'll be fine. I don't need you to do another take when you're 20 minutes in and you're on point number 2 of whatever your teaching is gonna be. But if you don't nail the first 3 sentences, film it again and film it again and film it again until you got the words right. And most importantly, you got the heart right. So here's Anna, who, a member of the channel. I don't see her today, but Robert, her husband, is here on the stream. Robert can be taking notes. Uh, this is one of her videos, Trauma Bonding Explained. And YouTube has added something relatively new for cards on these, um, retention curves. So if you ever see an I here, you can click over and it'll show you what's going on. So she's got 3: intro, continue segment, and dip. Uh, intro is going to be here in that blue section. Continue segment is probably going to be here, and then the dip is going to be at the end, and it'll give you some data on it. We're not super focused on these other two segments. We're focused on what happens at the beginning. So if you hover over the eye on this one, it says 81% of viewers were still watching at the 30-second mark. This is higher than typical compared to your other, other recent videos. Nicely done. Hey, hey, good job. Good job, Robert. You guys are doing it. Uh, so we look at this video, right? It's a 13-minute video, trauma bonding explained. And I pulled, okay, well, what is she doing? You know, what's happening? Why is it so good? So at the 1:18 mark, she's still at 73%, 1:18 into the video. She's still at 73%. So this is a great video. How does she start the video? There's one kind of romantic relationship that I wouldn't wish on anyone. And that's the kind that's been made intense by a trauma bond. If you were abused or neglected as a kid, you've probably been through it. And I want to help you make sure it never happens again. Right? Robert's smiling. Hey, she's doing a good job. She's doing a good job, Robert. Give her, give her some props. Uh, this is great. I mean, it's 4 sentences instead of 3, but it's still great. So, you know, we have a powerful opinion, context sentence, raising the stakes. The only thing I would swap out here is probably. If there was one critique on here, I would not use the word probably. At the beginning of any video. You don't want to hedge this. If you were abused or neglected as a kid, you've been through this. And if there is a hedge, then you address it later, but we don't address the hedge at the beginning. Um, and that's where, you know, if anyone were here to ask you, well, okay, how many people who've been neglected and abused as a kid have not been through this trauma? Right. And it's probably some really low percent. So don't hedge, but everything else is great. And so she leads with a powerful opinion. She's hitting 73% at 1:18 into the video. Uh, YouTube's giving her props for having such a great intro on it. And look how well the video is doing, right? So this video is just over a month old, 40, whatever, 43 days, let's call it 20,000 views, which is 5,500 more than usual. So the gray line is what a usual video would do, and here's how this video is doing. So all in, great job, you know, and Anna used to start her videos with something else. It used to be, "Hi, I'm Anna, I'm the Crappy Childhood Fairy," on and on and on. She switched it to powerful opinion and it's working. So we like sharing the success stories as well. Now, I also pulled an old video from the channel that didn't have the powerful intro. And this one is about meditation. So one, I mean, the thumbnail isn't as good, you know, it's an older video. So Robert, we can go back and work on that one. But look what happens at the beginning. You know, just tanks. Why? Well, look at what's happened on this video. It's the typical logo with music, copy childhood fairy, right? And boom, instantly tanks. Right? So now this also, this video also talks about meditation. That's the promise, how to meditate twice a day, something. The meditation doesn't actually start until here. So this is where we need to match the thumbnail and the title and the beginning of the video, because people are skipping ahead to get to here because they don't want to see all any of this intro, or then Anna starts talking about meditation, etc. This is what I mean. This is a 24-minute video. So this is at least 3, 4 minutes into the video, 5 minutes maybe, before something actually happens that delivers on the promise. So when you see a curve that drops this drastically, there's something wrong with our intro, right? So now we can't go back and fix this, but going forward, it's a great example of what is working and what is not working for the channel. We're talking about something that I haven't talked about inside of Brandlytics, but, but also just in general. I haven't really talked about ad strategies yet, and I think it's, it's interesting and helpful, uh, if you have budget. Not everybody does when they're starting their channel, but if you have budget, how can you use it to actually grow your channel? Where a lot of people do it incorrectly. I can't tell you how many accounts I've joined, I've looked at, uh, where they are just making a disaster of their ad spend. Either one, just going completely off the books and not using Google, but using Reddit, using other kind of fake sources. There's one guy, big, big name guy who— that was my first call with him. He's like, wow, you're doing so well. Look at your channel growing. But how come you're getting— you're not getting any subs? Oh, like we just buy a bunch of subs and views from Reddit from Brazil. And then his channel got banned for a week. He's like, okay, never buy again from Reddit. I get that the metrics matter and the vanity matters. I get all that, but if you're going to buy views and buy subs, let's do it in a way that's actually kosher with YouTube. So that's what I cover today. I'm not teaching any black hat stuff. All of this stuff is Google approved. We're using Google's own tools to be able to use it and can really propel your channel forward. So I'm going to talk about the different ad formats, in-stream versus discovery. So in-stream, this is one of the big mistakes a lot of people make. In-stream are the ones that show up before video usually, and also sometimes in the middle of a video or at the end of the video. In-stream ads are great if you just wanna get views. Think about it, you're interrupting somebody's video. So this video, this is a video that Russell Brunson put out recently, Proximity is Power, talking about him and Tony Robbins. When you click play, you see this before, right? So there's two ads that will show up. This is the first one. I wanna watch Russell Brunson and Tony Robbins, but I'm getting this ad for dugout mugs. You know, I probably don't care a lot about dugout mugs. Now, these are great ads for conversion. So, you know, Casey in the house, I know you're great at direct response marketing. If you have something to sell, This is actually one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways right now. A lot of the people who are Facebook ad gurus are moving to YouTube because there's less restrictions and it's getting a lot cheaper. And these are the ads that they're doing, is this pre-roll. So if you have something to sell, you have a business model attached to it, whether you're running it before your own videos, one of the great reasons of building an organic YouTube audience is that then you can run pre-roll ads against your own channel at a discounted rate and then sell whatever program you've got. It's at a discounted rate because you make money from the video as well. So you're paying to be on your own channel, but then you make the money back on AdSense. So if you got something to sell, it's fantastic. And every view, anytime somebody goes past the 15-second mark, it counts as a view, but it doesn't lead to organic growth for the channel. These guys are not going to be subscribing to the channel. So if I'm sitting here, I may watch this ad, I really want to get to this video, I'm, I may be trying to skip as soon as possible, but if I go past the 15-second mark, it counts as a view. But there's no place for me to actually subscribe to Dugout Mugs, and I'm probably not going to, right? Because I want to watch this video with Russell and Tony. So this is where a lot of people are buying ads, and it's just the wrong method if you want growth for the channel. If you just want views, if you say, hey, it, it's really important that I get 10,000 views on each video, the cheapest possible rate, this is the way to do it. But nobody's going to subscribe to the channel. So it's just about balancing priorities. And I'm not here to judge you to say how important views are for your, for your brand and everything else, but it will not help you grow the channel. It is fantastic for selling and pitching your product. The first 5 seconds of the video is a pitch for the rest of the ad, 'cause I can skip after 5 seconds. So you've gotta hook me in the first 5 seconds to make me wanna watch the rest of the ad to then go buy your product. So the options that I can do here is learn more, you know, about whatever this program is, get emotive, or skip the ad. But nowhere can I subscribe to it, but this will count as a view, okay? Not recommended for channel growth though. Discovery is the other one. Okay, so that's called in-stream. The other is discovery. Those are your two options. In discovery, your ads are showing up as a suggested view. So they're watching a video. Most views do happen on mobile, so this is what it'll look like. This is the watch page. You'll see a bunch of videos underneath, and then your ad will show up right above all the other suggested videos. This is what you want to be doing. The targeting becomes super important to make sure you're targeting the right audience, but they're opting in to actually watch the video. So I'm watching this video. This was the, the, if this was the same video, this was the Russell and Tony video. I'm watching it here underneath. I see your video. I still have to click to go and watch it. So I'm opting in versus the the in-stream ads where I'm being forced to watch this commercial. So when you're getting a view, it's much more a real view and also leads to a normal video page. This page is leading to a sales page, it's leading me offsite. This page is leading me to a video that then I can watch, I can then subscribe. And so this is how we can get a lot of channel growth, subscriber growth count for our audience, but the targeting becomes super important because you can get your video in front of a lot of people. It doesn't mean it's the right people, just like ad buying across any other platform. So we want to be going for discovery if you care about the channel growth. So this is just, I need tons of views, but they're not going to ever be buyers, they're not going to subscribe to the channel. This is, I care about getting views and I want to grow my channel, get more subscribers. So I'm going to focus most of this talk on discovery. We could dive in if you have questions in the chat or at the end about in-stream if you want to, but discovery is how we're gonna actually grow our channel. So if you're, if you're trying to create a discovery campaign, YouTube is Google, so you use Google AdWords when you're creating a campaign. There are no campaigns that you can set up yet that optimize for channel growth. AdWords was designed to to be a conversion sequence. So if you see all the options, you can get sales, leads, website traffic, brand consideration, et cetera, promote my app, local listings, but there is no option for YouTube subscriber growth, which actually creates an opportunity because not a lot of people are doing it. So the cost is still relatively low to really get in. So we're gonna create a campaign without a goals guidance, and I'm just gonna walk you through kind of step by step so that If you're super familiar with AdWords, great, use it. If you're not, here's a step-by-step sequence you will do it. Next, we're gonna go video, continue. Then we're gonna go custom video campaign. This one we would do for the in-stream if you wanted, but custom video campaign. And then here, okay, so some of the settings to pay attention to. These settings can save you a lot of money. If you do it properly. Okay, setting number 1, always uncheck video partners on the Display Network. These are all on by default. Always uncheck this. All we care about if we're trying to grow a channel is being promoted on YouTube, not across YouTube's and Google's entire Display Network, other websites, Gmail, etc. We don't be showing up there. We only care about YouTube. This one is hit or miss, search results. If you really know your audience and you really know the keywords that they're going to be searching for, this means you're going to show up under search, or this one means you're going to show up underneath somebody else's video. This is for sure a winner because they're already watching videos. This one is a little iffy because we want to not just be a utility channel where they're just searching and not continuing the sequence. We want them to watch multiple videos from our channel. So when you're showing up here, they're clicking on suggested. Now we're bringing in the audience that loves clicking on suggested videos. So they're more likely to watch another video and another video and another video where people who are only on search don't necessarily always follow that breadcrumb. So you could play with it. This one's going to get you way better results. This one I would just test to see if you're going to do it, really refine your keywords and then pay attention to if your channel is growing or not. Location is a whole other discussion. So this is another one when I'm, when I'm talking to, um, you know, Drew works with clients. I end up just helping my friends who are most of the biggest people in thought leadership on YouTube. And when they're looking at growing their channel, the next question becomes, how much do you care about where they come from? And this is different depending on the person. Some people, they just want to get the 100,000, the 1 million, to get the plaques, to get the, you know, prestige, a little ego boost, um, reputation, and they don't care where it's from. And so if you don't care where your people are coming from, it's all countries and territories. Some people really want to build a list of buyers, like, hey, I want to, I want to sell my stuff to them eventually. I want to sell my subscriptions. I want to sell my consulting, I wanna sell my programs, courses, et cetera. If you're doing that and that's your goal, then the four, these are the big four, usually people go after Australia, Canada, UK, US. Those are the people who have the most money, who care the most about personal development and are most likely to buy your thing, right? So how do you balance it? And this is, there's no right answer. There's some people I've worked with, it's like, I don't even care about buyers. I have my own business model. I figured all that out. I need for people when they go to my YouTube channel, they see big numbers of real subscribers, not like fake subscribers that might get me banned, right? It's like, okay, well this is the way, but just turn on all countries and you'll get a bunch of people from India and Argentina and Brazil and global, but you're not building a North America, you know, Australia, UK buyer list. So there's no right answer, just what's the right answer for you and your business for you right now. Some people do a switch. It's like, okay, once I get to 100,000, then I'm gonna switch over, or once I get to a million, then I'm gonna switch over 'cause now I have a little more prestige. 'Cause especially if you come from a different industry and you've had success and you're starting on YouTube, you don't wanna start and only have 800 subscribers. So this is a faster way to be able to go off and do it. Other settings. Always uncheck TV screens. Always uncheck TV screens because you can get a lot of watch time on a TV screen because it autoplays to the next video. So some people just leave their TV on, go do something else, go to the park, whatever, and your videos just keep playing and playing and playing. But to subscribe from a TV screen is really hard. They have to get out their their remote and click over. It's just a really big pain. And so most people do not subscribe from a TV screen. So there's another thing. If we care about only views, TV screens are on. If we care about actually converting them to subscribers, growth for our channel, TV screens are off. The other 3 are all fine. Peter's saying it's cheaper to go everywhere. Is there a country you've seen as cheapest? It'll be 7 to 10 times more expensive to target these countries. 7 to 10 times more expensive. If you don't care and you just want views and subscribers and real people, you just— you don't select certain countries, you just go all countries and territories. India will definitely be number 1 just because they're so huge and everybody's on YouTube there and they all have their phones, etc. Then it'll probably be Argentina, Brazil, South American countries, but it'll be 7 to 10 times more. So it's like, of course I want these countries, of course. But do you wanna pay 7 to 10 times more? Ooh, okay, maybe not. So that becomes the, there's again, no right or wrong answer. It's just what fits for your goals for the organization and how much do you prioritize conversion versus just the branding of having X number of subscribers. On your channel. Okay, so that's in-stream versus discovery, right? We want discovery, and those are some of the settings to pay attention to to help you save a lot of money. Almost everybody gets this wrong. If I'm looking at somebody's campaign, they always have TV screens picked off, they sometimes have countries picked off, they're making a lot of— they almost always have these all 3 clicked off, and you're just basically losing money with those settings. This will save you a lot of money and get you better results. If you want to see this full video as well as train live with me twice a you want to blow up your brand, join the Brandlytics training program. There's a link to join right there next to me. Continue to believe. I'll see you there.