YouTube advice and tips (ft. @thegastronerd and @robertoblake)

All right, so, uh, welcome back everybody, doing another session. Uh, super excited to have, uh, a new face on the channel, The Gastro Nerd, a fellow YouTuber. And, uh, we're at the same agency, uh, in New York. Where are you actually based?

I'm New York City, born in New York.

Okay, I'm in, I'm in Toronto, but we're both with Two Market Media that is based in New York. So, uh, we're gonna talk about her channel and try to give her some advice, and hopefully you guys learn, uh, in the process as well. So Gastro Nerd. You want to give a quick intro what the channel is all about?

Yeah. Hi. Thanks. Thanks, Evan. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Gastro Nerd is about feeding your inner food nerd and using fun nerdy tricks and tips to really, like, you know, pimp everyday foods and make the kitchen more accessible and more fun.

Cool. And so, so the channel is Gastro Nerd. You guys can check it out. I'll put it in the description below too. What— tell me about the channel, your early progress, struggles.

Yeah, I'm a classically trained chef. I worked at some 2 Michelin star restaurants. I currently work as a private chef. But my fascination with the food world is really the nerdy side, the history and the mysteries behind everyday ingredients and how if we better understand them, they're actually— they teach us how to become better cooks. And the better you understand where your food's coming from and what it does, the better we can cook with them and the more we can also appreciate them. The goal with the Gastronerd is to really teach you and get you excited about all the nerdy sides of foods and maybe some cheesy food puns too. Yesterday I came up with a good one. What did the cucumber say when he fell in the vinegar?

Okay, I don't know.

He said, "Help, I'm in a pickle." That's sort of the baseline for my humor. I made that up. It's fun. It's supposed to be like the quirkier— it's so much of food today, you know, obviously food's really hot, it's really fun, but my struggle is with a lot of stuff on YouTube especially, and you know, other major networks, is that people don't really explain why you're cooking food certain ways, why you're using certain ingredients, and what you're doing, and that's really what I aim to do is to really educate, but do it and it should be fun.

So, you know, my first thought is, do people care enough? Like, do people care? Do they care about the history? Do they care about the origin? Because I've watched a number of cooking channels. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a cook. I'm not the cook in the family by any stretch. But do they care enough about, about that? Like, is it important enough, the history? Do people care these days? Like, they're watching a YouTube video, do they care?

Well, it's not, to be fair, it's not a long history lesson. The idea is it's like a fun fact. And so, I mean, if you think about so much of what's exciting and on thriller, or so much fun media online, it's just like a quick tidbit and something to infuse that dish. So if you're like eating a piece of Parmesan cheese, it's shaved over your salad, you're like, oh, I didn't realize Parmesan cheese was originally made by monks. Like, that's like a, oh, So it's not necessarily the long history, which I can imagine most people don't want to read a 1,000-page book on the history of Parmesan cheese, though I might enjoy it. But it's to kind of take that, distill it down to one really cool thing that would give you another layer of flavor and appreciation for a dish or ingredient.

Got it. Okay. And so do you have that kind of theme, like fun fact about cheese is X, Evan? Yeah.

Okay.

I'll do like gastro facts. Like, or nerd facts. And I recently just filmed a couple videos about how to pimp your kitchen, pimp different like everyday meals by using like fun nerd facts. Like, for example, I just made grilled cheese with Swiss cheese and fig jam. So instead of take a regular grilled cheese that everyone probably, I hope, I hope at least you know how to make. I know like my brother doesn't know how to cook at all. But if he can make that, then It's usually my baseline. But taking something like fig jam that you can just buy in the store, and fig works really well with cheese, and understanding that together and then just grilling it and it becomes a totally different sandwich. It looks artisanal and fancy and it takes the same amount of time. So just little fun facts like that, just things that, you know, understanding what things work together and just different techniques and different fun cheats and tricks. The idea is to make the kitchen more approachable, less scary, And knowledge is power, whether you want it or not. Once you know something, people who watch my videos tell me like, oh, I never thought to do that, and now I do it all the time, and whatever I make tastes so much better because of it.

Cool. Welcome, Roberto. He's giving some shoutouts there in the comments. Yeah, and the audience is, you're aiming for younger audience, you're aiming for people like your age, like your brother or me who don't know how to cook, or you're aiming for people who do and want to get better?

Yeah, everybody. I think, yeah, definitely my generation doesn't have the current voice that really can speak and really educate people in the kitchen. So I'm looking to, you know, if I want to be the next Martha, that'd be great too. But yeah, definitely. And but, you know, everyone wants to learn, everyone's into food, and I don't— I try not to alienate any particular crowd, but I think I have a certain sassy, silly sense of humor that definitely appealing to my, my age demographic.

Cool. And then, so what's the challenge in getting the channel growing in views and comments and the growth? What are the problems you're facing right now?

Um, I, I guess I started doing all this by myself and I have very little social media background other than what I've sort of picked up on the road and figured out. So just figuring out— I'd love some tips on better ways to post my videos. Someone once told me, you know, just to post one video every day for for 2 weeks and that'll help with like where you place in the searches. I see videos that, not to say my videos are the be-all end-all, but I certainly think they're more entertaining than other equivalent versions of them that have many more hits than I do. And it's not necessarily because, I think, I don't know if they've just been around longer or the way that they placed and the way they tagged certain things, like something like how to tag something. That would be really helpful.

Cool. Okay, so I would come from two different approaches. One is the content itself, and the second is the analytics and the data. Like, one is the heart and the other is the head. And in terms of thinking about the heart, it's— I watched some of the videos and I watched a story. You know, I didn't know that you were a classically trained chef, right? I didn't know what your background was. If it was in the intro video, I missed it. And it can sometimes be, I think you work on the pitch, right? And just making it consistent, the same kind of themes. And I get you're figuring it out and, you know, it's not quite a consistent format for each video yet, 'cause you're still playing with it, but something quick at the beginning. And if you name it Gastro Fact or whatever, I think that would be helpful. But in terms of looking at the analytics side, Titles matter. I think— I wonder if the title might be a little misleading. Like, I wonder if, if people are looking for recipes, if they're going to get what they're after for by looking at your channel, right? Like, are they coming for recipes? Are they coming for entertainment? Um, are they going for that mix? When you're looking on the back end of your analytics, you want to see where the watch time is. So the way the YouTube analytics works, the YouTube views work, I guess, showing up and ranking A new video will rank fairly easily at the start, especially if you have some kind of traction, but then it's all about watch time. So at the beginning, it's all about the title. It's all about what's in your description. You have decent titles. You have some descriptions in there. You could put the recipe. I don't remember seeing if the recipe— you put the recipe in there?

Yeah, sometimes, sometimes not.

You can put it in, or you can use it as a lead gen to your website. I like to get the recipe, come check me out at gastronerd.com, and then that's a sign up for your newsletter. Um, so kind of optional. Uh, so the early, like the first 2 weeks of a video's existence, it's— that's what YouTube is looking at. They're looking at does it hit these keywords, and they start ranking for those. After that, it's all about the watch time and relevancy. So they'll look at YouTube's goal is to have people stay on YouTube for as long as possible, right? They want people to spend their entire day on YouTube. So if you're part of that, then they're gonna, they're gonna rank your videos higher. And if you're sending people away, then you're gonna not rank as much. So what you should be doing is on your different series, look at the watch time for all your different videos and see where are people tuning out, right? So it starts at 100% and then it drops to zero at the end. And you'll see a graph like going down. I mean, you may have some spikes up and down. There's absolute and there's relative. I prefer looking at the relative, which basically means, okay, you have, you know, how to be a great dinner guest. That's a 3-minute and 19-second long video. It'll put you against other videos that are 3 minutes and 19 seconds long, and it'll show how much do you capture the attention of your audience and are they clicking away. And you can see this is what my audience really cares about. This is where I am gaining traction. Just like those, when you watch the presidential debates, the live tracking audience and you see, oh, Trump said this and so he gets a spike. And so you'll start to see where people, what they really love about your channel and what they don't and where you're losing them. And it can give you some insights into what you can do to fix it, right? What series are working well, what series aren't. Uh, so the longer term is all going to be about that watch time and relevancy. The short first 2 weeks, Google, YouTube doesn't know what to do with the video, so they, they use the keywords and the tags and description. But after that 2-week window, it's, it's almost irrelevant, especially if you're getting down to the tags. Doesn't make a huge difference anymore.

Um, are there any initial tags other than— I mean, the— I tried, I go for a lot of the obvious ones that, that fit in with what my video is about and what it could possibly be connected to.

Yeah, so when you're doing your keyword research at the start, uh, different people have different methods that they like to use. What I like using is the YouTube search bar itself. So if you go to YouTube, at the top there's that search bar. Uh, I would type in one of the keywords. So if you're doing, uh, what do you have, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, right? You could type in oatmeal and then see what other keyword suggestions are coming up, right? You'll see what, uh, what YouTube thinks are, are relevant topics that people are searching for, and it may give you an idea of what to call the video, but also what other videos that you should be typing in, because it's based on YouTube search preferences, right? People are actually searching this in, uh, and so those are good keyword topics, uh, definitely put in your title and put in your description and tags. A challenge. The challenge is you don't want to just be all keyword stuffing, right? If it's just keyword, keyword, keyword, then it's not really going to help you. Another tactic with the tags are look at a popular video that's already ranking really well. So if I type in quinoa fried rice like you have there, who's the number 1 ranking video for that? And people will often mimic and copy the tags that are from that video. So hopefully it'll show up, they'll show up that video and then they'll show your video. Or if somebody watches that video, then they'll watch your video as well. A couple other things, you know, things like thumbnails, super important.

Yeah, I'm working on making better thumbnails because those are— if you have any tips to better thumbnails, I know you have a very consistent thumbnail format though.

Yeah, I like the font. I like having text on there. You can play with it to see if you like it or not, but I like having text. I'd make it bigger because it's hard to read. Your logo and name is super hard to see.

Yeah, I just, I had someone, I recently recreated a new logo, so I'm going to be using that.

Okay, Gastro Nerds. Does it say presents? I can't even read it. Presents Gastro School or Gastro Adventures. Um, and I'm assuming these are ongoing series, like Gastro School is a series, Gastro Adventures is a series. Yeah. Okay.

They're different playlists.

Okay. And you set them up as playlists?

Yes.

Okay, perfect. Um, the way I handle it is I have little logos for each one too. So I have on each video, I have my, my plain logo. And then I have another logo next to it that represents the theme. So, you know, entertaining might be a little bottle of wine, school might be, you know, A+ on a paper, you know, whatever. You don't have to, but I find that helpful as kind of visual markers instead of making people read. You could do different colors, play around with it so that one color is for this theme, one color's for that theme. You may want to, in the video itself while you're filming it, think about what the thumbnail is going to be. Most often it's the food. If you look at cooking channels, it's usually the food, a beautiful picture of the food. Your thing is not necessarily about the beautiful food yet because the, the, you know, the, the way to stand out for you is going to be harder in that field because people spend a lot of money on the lighting and making it look really nice And yours might be in the kitchen, a little dark, but you can add the extra fun, sassy, nerdy component to it. So I would be thinking about the thumbnail while you're filming, not afterwards.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

In the recent videos I did, we, yeah, we included a thumbnail shot while we were filming the videos.

Okay. So your most recent one is Cookies for All.

No, the ones I filmed today, they're not up on YouTube.

Oh, okay, okay.

I literally filmed them earlier today, so— Okay. I know, I know. I'm a little late. I'm sort of learning things after the fact, unfortunately.

No, that's okay.

Yeah, and part of, part of why I was so hesitant to even put YouTube videos up in the first place is I wanted them to be perfect, and then I realized that's not going to happen, so I just started putting up content.

Um, but if you look back on my channel, look at my first videos, I sucked.

You know, it's obviously a learning process and there's certain, obviously there's certain metrics and ways to measure things and yeah, and it's true, fine-tuning my message and making it as approachable as possible is definitely something that I'm working on and I know, you know, I think being a nerd is fun and cool but it has to be, you know, nerd in moderation too. People still want easy recipes that are approachable and get them in the kitchen. Yeah, I guess also when you, when you post a video, is there anything as far as like Twitter is concerned and other forms of social media that you have suggestions about?

The, the biggest thing that helps my videos go is the related video. So they watch a video, then they watch another, then they watch another and another. So it's the backlog. And as you build your catalog, then they keep watching more. And so the important message there is being consistent. So how consistent are you in your video. So I see you had, you know, your cookies one is from 2 days ago, then there was a gap where you had nothing, and it's like 3 weeks ago, and then a whole ton 3 weeks ago, and then 2, 4 weeks ago. So it's having a schedule, right, and keeping it consistent, and also training people who subscribe to expect videos on certain days. And I know at the start it can be tough, and you may be doing other things besides just the YouTube channel, Um, but you know, I was doing— when I started with 2mm, I was doing a video a day. Every day I did a video, every day one video. Uh, and Steve like pounded it into me and, uh, reviewed my videos and I got better. And then I moved to 2 videos a day, and now we're at 3 videos most days. Um, weekdays are 3 videos, weekends are 2. Uh, so just 3 videos, 3 videos a day. Yeah, but I have a team, so it's like there's 6 of us working on my YouTube channel. It's not just me.

You know, it's, uh, actually I still need to make money otherwise.

And I get it. And I didn't really start to expand until I was doing one a week when it was all me. And then once I hired somebody to do the editing, I could move to one a day. The editing was insane for me to do. It's not my skill or forte. Um, but, but some kind of consistency, right? So having 3 weeks go by not having a video is not great to build up the momentum, and also for you to practice and get better. Every time you do a video, you think about something new, you get a little bit better, a little more comfortable, find your rhythm a little bit more. At the start, I found you might be watching other people's videos and you take a little bit from them, but the more you do it, the more you practice, the better you're gonna get at it and find your flow to make it uniquely you and not kind of just pick and choose copies of other people. Um, so consistency is really important, and you'll find that people watch one and then another and then another and then another. I also wanted to talk about community because I found that, um, one, there wasn't a lot of comments or people responding to the videos, and that's the hardest part at the start. Like, you see some views, you see some thumbs ups, but you don't see, uh, the reaction, and so that can keep you fueled and motivated. That's the best part of my day, seeing the comments from my YouTube subscribers. You wanna respond to every comment, first of all. Like anytime somebody leaves a comment, you wanna respond. At least that's been my strategy and what's really helped. There's data out there that says, you know, for every comment, every new subscriber that you leave a comment and you respond to their comments, they're 7 times more likely to subscribe to your channel. Now, I don't know how much that's in your, like, if you like doing that, if you like engaging with the community or not.

No, I would love to. I don't really, I just tend to get a lot of comments from one person.

Oh, well, that's fine. Like, I saw one on your blueberry cobbler one from 7 months ago. There was a comment, but there was no reply. I'll get that too. I have hardcore fans who watch every video and they leave a comment. And I've actually scaled my team where there's 3 of us answering comments, 'cause I want everybody who has a comment to get a reply. So you're not getting an insane number of comments. It's not gonna be too overwhelming yet, but you wanna keep an eye on the community, especially in the early stages, 'cause those hardcore fans, they follow you along and then they tell their friends and then it grows and grows and grows. I would ask for requests.

I don't know if you have, if you ask that at the end, Yeah, I, I have in some of my advice videos, but I should definitely do that more.

Yeah, I asked a question at the end of every video. Pretty much every single video, ask a question. Um, if I'm doing a profile of somebody famous, then I'll say, who do you want me to profile next? Or if I'm sharing my advice on a topic, I'll then ask, uh, what challenge are you going through right now? You know, all of my videos pretty much are based off of requests. I very rarely— maybe one or two a week— I have to actually think about what am I going to talk about today on my channel. It's all from the community, um, and it's grown to the point where we have way more requests than we have space on the channel. That's even with doing 3 videos a day, uh, but you want to encourage that because you have a lot of lurkers. You have people who watch and then never leave any feedback, maybe they give it a like, you know, you have a few thumbs up there, but you want to encourage them to participate. If they leave a comment, they're much more likely to watch another video, they're much more likely to subscribe to your channel, come back, and if you reply to them or then make a video like, hey, I'm making this video because Roberto Blake asked me to do a recipe on— I don't know what Roberto likes, he's watching, so Roberto, whatever you like, then he's much more likely to subscribe to your channel as well.

He can request a recipe and I'll make it for him.

Veggie lasagna.

All right, veggie lasagna. Any particular veggies you like or just a veggie? How about a mushroom lasagna? You like mushrooms? No? Maybe?

We'll see. Veggie lasagna for Roberto Blake. Mushrooms are good. Spicy is good too.

Okay, spicy mushroom. Alright, that's the next one, spicy mushroom lasagna.

There he is, there's the man, Roberto Blake.

Hey, can you guys hear me?

Yeah, we got you.

Alright, awesome. Yeah, I'm trying out a new laptop from Dell, believe it or not Evan, so I'm kind of like tweaking the setup here. But yeah, I know I've been listening in the whole time. I actually was looking over your YouTube channel, I brought it up here over on the Mac and I was looking through and You know, great quality, great strong start in, uh, the consistency, the branding, the fact that you have playlists, you have a customized channel. You're doing a lot of things right that I see the majority of beginning YouTubers not do very well, even from the start, um, on their way to their first 100 subscribers. Evan gave you a lot of great actionable, um, advice. Some things that I would add to that is things like What he was saying about taking suggestions from the audience, that is huge. I also use a listening strategy in Twitter with hashtags around the type of audience that I want to find out what those people are looking for. And usually I think of a word and then I use the word problems after that, and I can find a lot of great stuff in that hashtag.

On Twitter?

Yeah. And if you want a really good listening hack for Twitter, you can use IFTTT, If This Then That. Which is ifttt.com. There's a great recipe for actually taking all of a certain hashtag and populating a spreadsheet in Google Docs with that. So you can have a database of great content ideas just off of that.

That's awesome.

Very cool. That's awesome. That's his word. He's all about great, awesome.

So, yeah, I didn't even know.

So, yeah, see what I did, Evan? But, um, another awesome tip that I would give you would be, um, another way of utilizing playlists is to do limited run series that are easy to find and easy to consume. Evan talked a lot about search, and, um, as I talk about often on my channel, like, that was how I like grew in YouTube, and it's the focus area for me is specifically search. Everyone obsesses over social. Um, I found that the video SEO stuff accounts for about 70% of my overall views because of 36% of it being searched, the other 34% being related video content. Um, and then I find that like external traffic is like 10%, and then a lot of that's still Google itself, and very little of it comparatively is search— I'm sorry, social. I still use social though. My advice would be what I call gateway and stepladder content, meaning that if you wanted to get people, um, into this, I would say maybe a video with, um, that says 5 meals to get you healthier or something like that. Whatever you think would be something that works very well in search. And you— I'll give you a tool in a minute you can use for better search, but something like that. The first video introduces what those 5 meals would be, but then you tell them that in this playlist you will actually show them how to prepare each of these 5 meals. And then it's a 5 and that they can get the recipes from the link in each video. And then you now have, OK, that's a reason to subscribe. I might not be able to watch all 5-minute videos right now, but I don't want to lose this. So I'll subscribe so I can get them. And I see that that's the kind of thing that this channel's going to be like, oh, and there's like 50 other really good videos here that might be about healthy recipes and ways to eat. So then you could do that, and you have this quote unquote gateway and stepladder content. You can make each of those 5 recipes in that playlist, and each of those is now gateway content too for how to make healthy veggie lasagna, or how to make this thing, whatever it is. And then people will be able to also share that content more easily. And I would ask for the share in the video without even waiting to the end. I would go ahead and create some of the upfront value, get 1 or 2 minutes into that video if it's 5 or 8 minutes, But then say, you know what, it's like, this is really gonna help you. I think this is going to really help you with your health goals and everything like that. If there's someone in your life that you think could be eating healthier right now, go ahead and share that with them in Facebook or Twitter or wherever you think they're gonna get the value from it. And just something like that, however you phrase it. But this is a call to action or what could even be called, what is it that Robert Stern likes to say, an engagement to action because you're engaging, you're initiating, you're speaking directly to the audience and then moving them to act. So, you know, you're engaging first, you're making the first move, you know, you're asking your audience to the dance.

We gotta cut it off 'cause I gotta go on another call, but love it, man. Awesome info for people watching and for our gastronerd friend, how to reach you?

Yeah, you can—

handle.

So yeah, you can find my Twitter handle. Actually, go ahead and direct message me because, um, uh, because Evan thinks you're so awesome, I'm gonna do something I've never done before. I'm going to give you a free YouTube channel audit, something I usually charge my clients money for. And, uh, we're gonna work together, um, you know, for a day on strategies for your channel. I'm gonna do that to you totally free because Evan thinks you're awesome.

There you go. Thanks, man. Thanks for joining.

All right, thanks. Take care, you guys.

Bye.

Cool. There you go. Live Blab, Roberto Blake. Yeah, I mean, I got to hop off quickly, but two other things that I had in terms of creating titles, you can learn a lot from magazines, right? You can learn a lot from the popular websites and blogs that cover your area. So I love the strategy of the 5 ways to do whatever, 5 ways to use apples this Christmas. You'll get more than Sausage Fest or a lesson in biodynamic wine, right? Like you can tweak the title to be a little more, have a little more pizzazz to it. And then for the requests, if you don't have enough requests coming in, so I mean, you owe Roberto a veggie lasagna with spicy mushrooms.

Oh, I know, I know, it's coming.

But for other ones, right, you can look at other forums, right? You can go to somebody else's YouTube channel or you can go to chat groups or a Facebook page of somebody you like. You'll see people asking for requests and you could respond to them and say, hey, I'll make a video for you and then let them know that you made that video for them and say, hey, you know, somebody wrote that they wanted a chocolate chip cookie recipe, so I'm making this for you, Julia. And then you send it to Julia and then she'll likely come and look at your channel, right? So if you don't have enough on your own side yet, you can always connect with other people's audiences and try to bring them in.

Yeah, that's great. Is there any Twitter tips you have?

I don't honestly get a lot of value from Twitter for my YouTube channel. I post all my videos up on Twitter, but I don't get— it's just a different platform. When people are on Twitter, they're not going to YouTube. When people are on YouTube, they're ready to digest YouTube. So I'll post it there. You can ask people for requests, like you can tweet to Jerry Seinfeld and say, "Hey Jerry, I wanna make a recipe," or, "What's your favorite New York City food?" or something, and then you can say, "Hey, I tweeted Jerry Seinfeld," and like, I've got a response from Jerry Seinfeld and Donald Trump, and it's hit or miss, but you can use that as outreach for kind of name brand people to then make recipes around. And then if you ever do collaborations, That's always a huge thing, whether it's in the cooking world or not, right? Like, this is going to go up on my YouTube channel. People will— I'll link up your description. People will then come to your channel and check you out. The more you do that— and kudos to you because I offered you, hey, we could do this private or we could do it online. Like, no, let's do it online. Let's spread the word, right?

Yeah.

So it's great. And so, you know, doing more of that and you can reach people through Twitter or through YouTube. But I find I get most of my YouTube value on YouTube. Most of my Twitter value on Twitter. Not just like— just blasting your videos out on Twitter is not going to make a difference. You want to— you can connect with people and engage. If you're going to use Twitter, engage in real dialogues with people, and then they may check out your YouTube channel. But I think your best use is probably going to be trying to get name people, name brand people to give you recipe ideas you can then plug in your videos, be a way to hack it.

Yeah, I like that idea of tweeting at people, and this could be Jerry Seinfeld's famous sandwich from, I don't know, from Carnegie Deli. I don't know, I don't want to get in trouble for that. I don't know where—

No, but you could, you could.

Yeah, and that's great. Well, yeah, this has all been wonderful advice, and I'm gonna— hopefully you'll see in my next more consistent content posting. Some of the branding obviously needs to be tighter. I know there's a lot of work to be done, but this was really helpful. And Jani has always, by the way, spoken so highly of you and referenced you many, many times. So it's great to finally meet you and talk.

Awesome. Well, I love seeing you grow. I'm going to subscribe to your channel right now. There we go. I'm subscribed. And keep me posted. Happy to do it again in the future.

Right. Thank you so much. All right. Have a great day.

Cheers. You too.