53 Minutes of Instagram & YouTube Marketing Advice to EXPLODE Your Personal Brand - Josh Ryan

Social media, some consume it, some create on it, some get used by it. It's everywhere and it's not going to go anywhere anytime soon. Look, every day I get pitched by people on I'll grow your social media channel and often when I look at theirs, they've got a few hundred followers. So Josh Ryan, New Zealand based, started social media in his early teens, grew a number of channels, one in particular to almost a million followers, and then started sold it. He does this for clients all over the world in all different niches. And I wanted to sit down with him to ask what is involved? How do we do it? How do we go about it wrong? And for those that are maybe anti social media or don't think it's relevant for them or their industry, should we consider it? So please sit back and enjoy today's show.

The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at NZMortgages Co NZ. Josh, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

I'm so glad you're here. I can learn a lot from you and I think the listener's gonna learn a hell of a lot too.

Hopefully. Hopefully I can share some stuff that helps people out and gets results.

I know you will. You've already got great results. I mean, I've seen what you've been doing. I've been following and Instagram, YouTube, are they dead?

Certainly not. In fact, they're probably more alive than they ever have been.

What makes you say that?

I just think as these platforms have evolved, it's probably harder to get results with.

Basic levels of input. But if you put a bit of thought into it and a bit of strategy into it, the algorithms understand the content so much better and you've got more potential now to take off and go viral. You've also got more people using the platform. So if you're in a niche where previously 5 years ago there might not have been a lot of your target customers on these platforms, pretty much everyone uses these platforms now. So it doesn't matter what business you run or who you're trying to reach, you probably can find them on one of these platforms and you probably can get in front of them and you can probably use it to grow their. Grow your business.

That's so fascinating because yeah, often we have business professionals, leaders go those platforms. LinkedIn's my platform. But actually a lot of those people and their customers are living on Instagram, they're living on YouTube and they're watching things and Learning from things on there. So actually, in terms of building engagement with them, marketing to them, you've got to be present on those platforms.

Yeah, exactly. I think I even saw a stat the other day about YouTube, about the different platforms, and YouTube had more people who earn above, I think, the threshold with a hundred thousand dollars a year than any other platform. So, like, they had more of those people were using YouTube than LinkedIn or Instagram or anything like that. I think LinkedIn was second, and then I don't know what was third, but YouTube was the most used platform by those top earners, top performers.

Incredible. I'm really excited to talk about both those platforms and probably from a point of view of personal brand. And I think that everyone is a personal brand, and some people nurture that and some people neglect that.

Yeah.

So I'd love to talk about where you started to start with. So you're 15 years of age at the time, you start an Instagram account called Millionaire Drink Dream. Millionaire.

Millionaire Dream, Yeah.

Millionaire Dream. So why did you start that and where did it go?

I started sort of reading books that were, you know, about business and success and motivation and that kind of thing. And all of them were talking about vision boards and dream boards and. And that kind of thing. And so I went to Instagram and. And started essentially posting that kind of content. I just created an account on the side as a bit of fun that was like, you know, quotes that I thought were cool or it was cool cars or houses or travel stuff. Things that were inspiring to me at the time. I didn't think too much of it, but I wanted to grow it a little bit more and just see what I could do. I've always sort of been fascinated by how I can get the best out of something and how I can do the best job possible. And so I reached out to an account that had, I think, about 200,000 followers at the time. It was the biggest motivational account on Instagram at that point. And I just asked if he could share some of my content to help me grow. And he was like, yeah, sure, but it's gonna be. I think it was about $50 US at the time.

A bargain.

Yeah, Well, I. I was just surprised. I was like, this guy is getting paid to post on social media because no one really was getting paid in 2015, or no one knew it was a thing. It's. It's more common now. Everyone knows about building an audience on social media. You can earn money from it, but I didn't know any of that. Stuff back in 2015.

And so I saw that this guy was making a business out of it and I was just curious in it. And probably from that point forward, I spent a little bit more time learning about growing and putting out more content and.

Trying to really turn it into something bigger because I saw that there was potential for it to be a business when previously to that it was probably just a bit of a hobby on the side.

And from there is where I probably got a lot more aggressive with it and started trying to really grow the page and grow the audience and build it into something amazing.

Well, you grew it into something you grew into north of 900,000 followers. Subscribers, what we want to call them, but followers on Instagram, quite remarkable. What did you have to do to get that, that level of subscribership? Followership?

The main thing above everything was just a high volume of content and trying to get better and better as we went with it. So people talk about trying to post on social media consistently. We were posting at times, four or five times a day, just trying to crank out as much high quality content as we could. Lots of it would not really perform that well, but some of it would do really well and grow the audience. And if, if you're posting five times a day, even if 80% of it is going to flop, you've got a really good post each day that's performing well. And so that probably really helped and just sticking at it for a long period of time.

We talk original content here or sometimes repurposing content and then collaborating and yeah.

So it was a lot of repurposing, it was a lot of collaborating. And even the stuff that was technically original was still. It wasn't me coming up with something. It was, you know, you'd find a cool quote, you'd find a cool image or a cool video to pair it with and you'd edit it together. But it might only take five minutes to make. And so when I'm talking about posting five, six times a day, it's probably still only half an hour of content creation a day. A local business, a personal brand, definitely shouldn't be trying to go for those levels of content. If you have to think about something, plan it, film it, edit it, publish it, you might be going for four to seven times a week.

But yeah, high volumes of content over a long period of time and just being really, really consistent with that. It was like day in, day out.

Consistency is key. I love that. It's interesting. So let's say someone's listening right now. Or watching, going, hey, yeah, that's nice. You did it in 2015, you got almost to a million subscribers followers, but too late to do that. You can't grow like that anymore. What would you say to them?

I would say in some situations it's actually a lot easier now because back then it was, it was a lot easier to grow on a linear path back then. You could grow 50 followers a day, a lot easier back then than you probably could now. But to grow a thousand followers a day to get to the bigger numbers, it's so much easier now because back then all you had was you could post photos, you could post videos, but they weren't, they weren't reels. Actually. I don't even know if you could Post videos in 2015.

But yet you were posting content which would go to your followers. You had hashtags if you wanted to reach people. But there was no Explore page, there was no suggested content, There wasn't stories for people to share your content to their stories and get in front of new people. You didn't have any of that. So the ways that you could grow was like use hashtags and have someone search that hashtag and found your stuff. You could reach them. You had collaborations where someone would post you to the audience and then you had things like follow unfollow, commenting on stuff, liking people's stuff to try and get in front of them. Like there was genuinely times where I would leave a thousand comments a day, where you just go to a hashtag, like hashtag motivation and then you comment on a thousand posts. It might be a hundred comments spread out, you know, 10 times during the day to grow the audience. And so it was very like linear with your input to output on things. Whereas nowadays if you want to grow, yeah, it might be harder to get a bit of, a bit of momentum going. But you could have a real pop off that gets a million views and then brings in 10,000 new followers from one piece of content. And you can get that going a few times a month. And all of a sudden you're growing 10, 20,000 followers in a month and you're getting millions and millions of views on your content when you never had that back then. And so some things were definitely way easier, but other things are easier now as well.

This is fascinating. I love it. So let's talk about some of the tactics of it nowadays. So if someone's going, okay, what do I do? I would like to have the 10,000amonth growth or whatever it might be, or just some Growth hashtags strategy for content itself and creating that what's working right now.

So firstly I said don't even worry about hashtags. Like hashtags pretty much do nothing. In fact, the, the CEO of Instagram did a a podcast recently with a big YouTuber where the YouTuber had asked him if hashtag works and then he sort of turned around and said that he wants to buy a domain that's like do hashtags improve reach.com and then just put a big no on it.

So he's come out and said many times that they don't really do anything just because the algorithms are so smart these days that if you post a, a 60 second long reel, the algorithm can know exactly what you're saying in that reel and they can see who's in the reel and they know everything about that. So you putting hashtag motivation in there isn't going to give them any data that they don't know. And nowadays so much of the suggestions on the platforms is not about no one goes in there and searches for a hashtag like they used to. They go to their Explore page and they get recommended content or they go into the reels feed and they get recommended content or they go and search just a keyword post instead of putting the hashtag in front of it. And so hashtags, yeah, pretty much do nothing nowadays. In fact, it probably hurts you more than they help you because it just, it looks a bit ugly having a bunch of hashtags on your account. So I wouldn't worry about hashtags. I would just get really clear on like one who you're trying to reach with your content. So get super clear on that. Instead of just posting what you think is going to work, think about who you're trying to reach and really hone in on that. And so that depends on what your business is. If it's a service based business, it makes it really easy. If someone's an accountant that works with business owners who make between one and five million dollars a year, they can think about like who are these people? What content is going to resonate with them? What stuff's going to be relatable to them? What stuff's going to be helpful to them? What stuff are they going to want context around, like what legal updates and changes in the business world are they going to want to understand? What problems are they facing every day with their business? What stuff are they going to laugh and relate to and then create content based around that? And so you're really speaking to these people. And if you can really nail that, that's where you get all the growth from. Because if you create something that shows up in front of one of those people and they learn something from it, they laugh at it, they share it with their mates, one of those sort of emotions, Instagram will go out and find a ton of those people and share it with them. And that stuff there, like, if you're going really niche, you might not get the massive, massive numbers. But equally, if you're trying to work with a specific person, you don't need millions of people to do really well as a business. You can reach 10 of those people, create a relationship with them, sell them your services. It might be thousands of dollars. And all of a sudden, off a small audience, you're doing really, really well.

It's getting clear on, why am I doing Instagram or YouTube, whatever. Like, why is it? Who am I serving? Who am I trying to help? What are their problems? How do I answer those problems with my content? Or at least hook them and get them interested.

Yeah, exactly. It's pretty straightforward. You just got to figure out who you're trying to reach and how you can create something that's going to be useful to them.

I love that. And you've had. The thing is, I talk about believability rating. So believability for me is like someone done the thing that they're telling other people that they can do. So one, you've done that, you've taken a channel, it's went north of 900,000, you've went the same on YouTube, you've had tens of thousands of subscribers on YouTube. But the believability factor, like, is you've done it for yourself. Can you help others do it? And so when I look at what you've done, you're helping others do it, you're helping your clients make millions through with their businesses through social media.

Yeah.

So that to me is like, okay, we've got a lot to learn from you.

Hopefully. Hopefully can pick up some good stuff.

No, 100%. Can I ask you. So we chatted a little bit before we hit, you know, record about my social media. And so obviously I'm a rookie, but I've got a team that work really hard. They're not so much rookies. They're constantly learning and eager to learn and try and grow. And we've had growth in different ways and at different speeds, but of course, we're keen to reach more people. Now, that's not a billion people. Yeah, but hey, it would be great to say, double our reach in the next year. Yeah, maybe quadruple if we're lucky. But I don't think luck has much to do with it. I think there's going to be strategic focus. So if you've had a chance to look at mine, have you got any feedback, Anything you see? Good, bad, ugly?

Yeah, I had a bit of a look through it yesterday ahead of this podcast. And so, I mean, the one that we've already talked about is I wouldn't worry about hashtags. Just put the thought that goes into hashtags into the. The content itself. One of the things I noticed, it's probably less of a growth strategy, but maybe more on branding is just I noticed a lot of different fonts and colors and edits, and that was sort of all over the place. It was hard to get, like, clear brand on it. So, like, having a consistent thing there would be really good. And then when it shows up in someone's feed, they know it's your content and your brand and it's easily recognizable. So little things like that can help. The other thing that I think would make a big difference would be looking at different types of content that you can create. So mixing it up, I see some of the podcast clips have done really well, but sometimes you could try a carousel. So try a carousel post where you've got someone talking about leadership and a podcast. And so you might post it as a reel, but then you might also turn it into a carousel piece of content where it's like, you know, five lessons from the Navy SEAL person that we interviewed or the listened to the one with the CIA agent. So you might have, you know, five misbeliefs about the CIA and create a different format of content, because sometimes that stuff can take off and do way better than reels, especially if you start testing it. So you might post some reels, you might have some carousels. You might also do some content where it might might be just you filming yourself without being on a podcast and just giving some insight on a certain topic, a certain update. We find content reacting to things works really well, especially news and current events. So if you see a big news headline in your industry, you could turn around and just do a really quick video sort of reacting to what's going on that content actually can do really, really well. Like, one of the clients that we work with up here has a podcast and has amazing content. Like it's all shot incredibly. He spends a ton of money on it and it looks awesome, but Sometimes the videos of him literally just like phone at his computer showing a news headline and then talking about it with average audio, average lighting, average, all of that. But it's a topical piece of content that people really want to hear and it's raw and it's authentic, performs way better sometimes than the really fancy edits. So you can, you can have a mix of all of it and then just see what's working, post some carousels, post some reels, post some raw content and just see what is performing well. Because especially with that reactionary content like reacting to, you know, if the government makes a change here, if a big player in the industry makes a change, or for myself and the world of social media, if Instagram come out with an update, I can record a really quick off the cuff video and people will stop and watch it. Because if I give a video that's five tips to grow on Instagram, people might have seen that a hundred times. But if I talk about an update that Instagram made yesterday, no one's seen it. And so that's going to get people to stop and watch and pay attention, even if the lighting is not perfect, even if the audio isn't perfect, even if it's not well scripted because it's topical and it's, it's interesting and that content works well. So I would try mixing up those formats of content.

Great advice. And this idea of reacting. So I've seen some videos where the person posting it is in the video at the top and then at the bottom is like a video of Donald Trump speaking.

Yeah.

So is that what you're meaning in terms of reaction like that? Or could it be even more basic than that?

It can be more basic than that. It can be, yeah. You can do that stuff there where you've got a nice camera and you shoot it and then you put the video underneath it. You can screenshot an article that you see on a news outlet and then you can green screen it where you can just come on and be talking over the top of the article. You can film the, the screen and show something on the screen and then talk about it. There's, there's all sorts of ways you can go about it. You can keep it simple as you can even just record yourself and say, you know, recently this happened or go from there. So it doesn't have to be fancy edits, you can do that. But sometimes that off the cuff stuff works really, really well.

And this idea of timing. So I remember five, six years ago, you got to post on a Sunday.

Tuesday and a Thursday or something at 7pm Is that a thing?

Not really.

Okay.

To be honest.

Because in the past, these platforms were chronological with their algorithm. So if you went on Instagram and you pulled up your home feed, the content that you would see from other people would be ranked in order of when it was posted. So the piece of content that was posted 2 minutes ago would be at the top of your feed. The piece of content that was posted 10 hours ago Would be at the bottom. And so you wanted to post at the time where everyone was active. Because if all of your audience were active at 6pm and you posted at 9am in the morning, by the time everyone checks their phone after work, Your post is 9 hours old and it's so far down the feed that no one sees it. Nowadays, the platforms, you could load up Instagram right now, and the most recent post that you see could be from two weeks ago, because Instagram thought that you would enjoy that piece of content. It might not even be from someone that you follow. And so the post timing doesn't matter anywhere nearly as much. You still want to post when people are active, but it's, it's not the end of the world. I would, I would figure out roughly when you think your audience is most active. So you know if there's going to be different people who've got different behaviors to when they're using social media. But typically you're going to find there's a big group of people that use social media in the morning before they go to work. There's going to be a big group of people, probably the same group of people that use it in the evenings after work.

You want to post roughly at those times, but you can post a video today, it can flop and get no views, and then a week later it starts getting picked up in the algorithm even more. So with YouTube, you can post a video that gets nothing for three months, and then all of a sudden it gets picked. And so it doesn't matter what time it was posted three months ago.

Well, we've seen that actually with YouTube, I'd like to go deep on YouTube in a minute. It's a. It's a fascinating platform.

Yeah.

With Instagram, if you were to say, look strategically. So you've given us some really good tactics around branding and consistency. If you were to say, look, James, your goal is to get to a million followers on Instagram. And of course, what I do is I'm a personal brand, but, you know, I'm interviewing some of the world's greatest leaders, world's greatest influencers. And then from a professional standpoint, I go in and deliver corporate training on leadership and high performance. So it's quite broad in terms of what I speak about and what gets shared. If you were to say, look, your strategy, here's a suggested strategy to get to a million followers, what might that include?

So I guess the big one that you've already got is a broad audience and that's probably something worth noting for people is that if they're targeting a really niche, specific group of people, it's going to be really hard to get those numbers. If you're creating content for New Zealand business owners, you've only got so many people that are New Zealand business owners on social media and not everyone's going to like you or like your stuff. And so your total audience might be pretty small. If you broaden that to, like you just said, leaders worldwide, then all of a sudden you open it up and you've got potential to grow a lot more. The con, it's just content above anything, getting really dialed in on how you can make the best content in that niche in the world so that people want to follow you, so that people want to engage with your stuff. If you can look at the other people who are in those spaces who are doing really, really well and take note of what's performing for them, what's doing well and how you can do a better job of it and then just get it out there. So how can you make the best content possible? Post each day, simple stuff like that, and just constantly iterate to make it better and better and better. You can look into ads, some people look at ads, but when you get organic working, it is going to go so much better than ads. I don't think there's anyone that's really built a big audience off ads. You might be able to sell stuff for sure. You might be able to reach specific people if you're going for a really niche audience. But if you're trying to hit a million followers, it's going to come down to figure out the content that works, double down on it and just hammer it out there.

Great advice. And in terms of monetizing. Yeah, Instagram. So in my case, what would your suggestion be in terms of, hey James, you've got reasonable following there. It's building and growing, it's engaged. What's your thoughts around monetization?

Yeah, so the simple way is just going to be keep putting out good content that people enjoy, that builds trust, that.

Builds a relationship with those people. And then sprinkle in some call to actions for people to want to work with you. So you can do some simple stuff to get people like on your email list. So you can have call to actions for people to go and download a free PDF, watch a free training, subscribe to your newsletter and try and get them off Instagram, which is a platform that you don't own and that you don't control the reach of, to a platform like email, where you do own the distribution. You are going to get more consistent reach and you can follow up with these people. So that's probably the first big one is like get people across to your email list where you can then consistently reach them, consistently monetize, do a good job there. And you can also make direct call to actions on your Instagram as well. So if you've got an offer coming up, if you're wanting, if you've got a few slots coming up for people to work with you, you can post something. I personally find the best way that you can do things is you want to work with the platform rather than against it. And so if you post it real and you tell people to go to the link in your bio, for example, Instagram don't like that because you're sending people off the platform. You're sending people away from their platform where they're making money and they're capturing attention and now loving it because people are scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. You're telling people to go off the platform to stop scrolling, to stop making Instagram money. They're not going to like that. Not only that, it's more effort for people to. Then it sounds silly, but if you're scrolling and you've got to stop that scroll, click on the profile, go to the profile, click the link tree that someone's got in there, find the right link, click on it, go to the website. There's a lot of steps there. Most people just won't do it. So instead we find you can use a tool called ManyChat, which helps. I don't know if you've used it or heard of it, but instead of telling people, go to the link in your bio. You can just say, hey, like comment this word and I'll send you a dm. And then so all of a sudden it's really easy for someone just to comment ebook or training or PDF on your post. You send them a DM with the info. And that's way better when you're trying to collect leads and make sales. The other benefit is It'll turn around and you get way more engagement on your content. And so all of a sudden your content gets pushed to more people. We did this with a client who's got a rugby brand, like they sell rugby tees and training equipment and they made a short PDF, like a 8 page PDF on how to kick goals better and how to do that better. And they made a good reel about it and they've got a big audience, so that, that helped. But they were getting sort of 10, 20 comments on their posts and we just, you know, comment, kick, and we'll send you the ebook. And that reel is still, we posted that like eight months ago. It's still getting views and leads and sales come in and it's had like, I think over 10,000 comments. Is it like just going crazy organically? Because people like, oh, I want that. They comment, they get sent the stuff. And so you can collect a ton of leads, make a ton of sales off. Switching from pushing people to the link in your bio, so getting people to actually comment or DM you to do something, you can do the same on your stories. Instead of putting a link there, say like, hey, you know, if you want to get this free ebook or you want to get this free PDF or if you want to work with me, respond with this word and we'll send you, we'll send you the info on it. And it just drives all this engagement Instagram, love it because everyone's engaging on the platform and it just, it'll skyrocket the amount of reach that someone can get, but also the amount of leads and sales and monetization off the back of it. So I love that.

Yeah, George, that's amazing. So. And ManyChat obviously will automate all of that in terms of. Yeah, I've seen it happen. I've actually been client, I guess you could say, or a subscriber. So Lewis Howes, who runs School of Greatness, and also Stephen Bartlett with Diary of a CEO. So both of them said comment such and such and I'll send you the link to the episode before it drops tomorrow. Yeah, I want to see it before everyone else sees it. Of course I comment episode. Yeah. And instantly I get a DM right away. They're like, give us your email address. Okay.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's interesting.

And in terms of the share button, like you want to, you know that little like kind of airplane type thing to share with a friend. In terms of the algorithm, do you think that's a powerful thing when you get lots of people Sharing does that tell the platform like, hey, this is good content?

Yeah, definitely. Instagram have come out and said that that's like the biggest sort of factor in the algorithm is how many shares a piece of content gets. So you don't want to sort of go too over the top with like only trying to get shares. But if you can create shareable content, that's going to perform really well because that's what Instagram have realized works really well for them. To keep people on the platform is like you send reels to each other, you send posts to each other and it keeps people on the platform longer. On YouTube, shares aren't as important because someone goes to YouTube and they just want to sit and watch a piece of content. So it's like what's the click through rate on your video? What's the watch time on your video? That's what YouTube are optimizing for. If you go to Instagram, it's all about sharing content. It's all about sending it to your friends, sending it to your mates and then Instagram push that content. So if you can get more shares then that's really, really powerful. And that's why I guess I touched on it briefly before about if you're creating content, create relatable stuff that people can understand that people might laugh at, that people might be like, oh yeah, like I've, I've seen that or you know, I've felt like that before or you know, get people feeling like this content is speaking directly to them and then they send it to their mates or they send it to their partner or they send it to their work colleague or whatever. And that content performs really, really, really well.

And for someone who like I don't see myself as being very funny. Right. Yeah, my partner thinks I'm funny and behind the scenes nobody sees that. But when I'm talking interview, I guess I'm pretty like serious and curious. But yeah, for me, what advice would you have for me in terms of hey, the be more entertaining with your content. What could I be doing?

Doesn't have to be funny, it could just be relatable. So you know, there's probably lots of silly mistakes that you might make that other, other leaders and stuff like that. You know, you can talk about forgetting stuff like I've done today. Yeah, exactly. Like you touched on before you could, you know, a videographer could talk about the time where they forgot to plug in their mic and you know, it could be just a three second reel of them and it's got something about, you know, everyone knows that feeling of forgetting to plug in their microphone or just content along those lines where you can bring in like a funny little video or a funny little gif. It could be of someone else and, and it's just relatable to the people that you're trying to reach. Because every industry has got problems that frustrate you and that people get frustrated at. And if you can highlight those and talk about those people, relate to other people who share it.

That can work really, really well. It doesn't necessarily have to be cracking a joke or, or that it can just be relating to struggles that everyone goes through.

Love it. I can do that.

Yeah.

So before we look at YouTube, I just want to kind of talk to the listener or the, the viewer right now just to say, like what you do applies to individuals, personal brands, but also equally applies to companies in terms of building their presence. A good example might be a real estate company company where they've got thousands or hundreds of agents, brokers, they can be building their personal brands, which in turn actually elevates the brand. So let's say Harcourt's, Colliers, a Bailey's, a cbre. Whatever it is, it elevates the brand. So for the people listening, just know that this is not just for the individual. This also can help at an organizational level.

Yeah, definitely. Especially in those service based businesses. Because even though it might be a.

Real estate company that doesn't necessarily have a face to it, you can put a face behind the content. You can have people go on there and talk about it. You can have the real estate agents that work there come on and create a piece of content that, you know, like, you know, what are some common problems people, people struggle with when trying to sell their house or once they've sold their house or when they're looking for something. Like you can, you can have your agents come on and talk about that stuff and relate to people who are, who are going through a reasonably tough time. Like selling a house is a pretty stressful thing. So these real estate companies could have people go on there and then talk about that stuff, put a face to it, because at the end of the day, someone's gonna walk through those doors and talk to a real person and it's gonna be, yes, it might be Harcourt's or Bailey's or whoever it might be, but they're gonna come through those doors and talk to Mike, who is there, and it's gonna be a personal thing. So you can bring that online and put that into your content. As well.

I love it.

Yeah.

Josh, what we've learned about Instagram has been phenomenal and helpful. I want to look at YouTube and so I believe, you know, there's a lot more consumers than creators on YouTube, but I think we need to flip the script. I think there's a massive opportunity for people to grow personal brands and businesses, exposure, brand awareness on YouTube. It's the largest, I believe, search engine on the planet.

Yeah.

So let's chat a bit about that. So I've got a YouTube channel and obviously this will be. People might be watching it on that or they could be listening. But so we've been growing that slowly. A year ago, we had 6 or 700ish subscribers. Now we're probably, I don't know, at the time of recording, close to 9,000. And that's just been posting regularly, getting great guests on, asking people to share an episode with a friend. Just kind of organically growing, but not massive, not quick, but just steady and consistent. So what advice would you have for us around YouTube? And hopefully the person that's listening that either has a YouTube channel or is considering starting one, they can learn from this experience. What would your advice would you have for me and our team?

Yeah, So, I mean, YouTube just comes down to really, at its essence is click through rates and watch time. So, like getting people to click on your content and then getting people to watch it. And if you can get those two things right, which is very, very oversimplified, but if you can get those two right, the channel is going to do really, really, really well. If you can get people to want to click on your content and then they stick around and watch it because you're delivering on whatever you promised in the title and the thumbnail.

It'S going to perform well. And I guess the other thing to think about with YouTube is you've got search traffic and you've got sort of suggested traffic, which is two different things. And the way you optimize the videos will be slightly different. So One thing that YouTube has that other platforms don't have is that search function. So you can create a video that might be, you know, how to do something that people. It might not take off in the YouTube algorithm, might not get recommended on everyone's feeds, but when someone searches like, how do I do this? Your video pops up, they click on it, they watch it, and you can get traffic from that for years and years to come. Like, you could turn around tomorrow and film a video about how to do something or how to overcome something. And then people search for that and they get consistently watch it over and over and over. And so that's probably a really good tip for people, is to create searchable videos that people are looking for. So think about like, what are people searching for in your niche? What are people struggling with? Because that gives you a really guaranteed source of traffic. You don't have to sort of rely on the YouTube algorithm pushing your video out there, which it definitely can, but it's, it's probably a little bit harder to get on top of. But if you can create those searchable videos that people can look up, it can be basic, basic things. It can be how to create an Instagram account, how to create your YouTube channel, it can be how to create a thumbnail for YouTube, how to write a title. You can look at all these different things that you can dive into that are really just specific. Could be just some five minute videos someone searches for, that really, really powerful for service based businesses. Like we used the example of an accountant before. Think of how many little things an accountant could come on and talk about that could be a five minute video. And that people are going to search for, find their video, learn it, and then get that they trust that person a lot. And then all of a sudden it's like they're not going to watch that five minute video and then file their tax returns themselves. They're still going to want an accountant. And that's where they come to people. So it's probably for yourself, like create more searchable videos that people are going to be searching for. So think about like, what do people look for in your niche? What are people consistently searching for? And then when it comes to getting pushed in this sort of suggested feed, it really is just really dialing in on titles, thumbnails and then just delivering a good video. Because that's something else that people don't really think about when it comes to click through rates. As they think about the individual video of like, can I make a good title? Can I make a good thumbnail? But equally, if the video you made the week before people watched and loved, they're going to be more likely to click on it. Because if the video they watched the week before was an amazing video that they learned heaps from the video post, this week might not have the most amazing thumbnail, might not have the most amazing title, but because of that relationship with you, they're going to click on it because they're like this guy posts good stuff might not be perfectly packaged up, but.

It'S going to people are going to click on it and watch it. So more searchable stuff. Really dial in on titles and thumbnails. And I noticed one thing that you do well is the. Well, you've done a lot of things well, but the repurposing of the content I really like. So taking like an hour long podcast I saw you've got a bunch of three, four, five minute clips that you've taken from it, which helps you grow, but it also just gets you a lot more content for the same sort of spend on equipment, time, etc.

100. Thank you. And yeah, I guess for us we're using tubebuddy, so that's like giving us some help in terms of titling and what other people are searching for. So I guess I've got two different components to what we do. One is we get great guests like you and world leaders and athletes on the show. And then the other component each week is I will share a solo cast which is essentially me in the studio talking about self improvement, self mastery, personal development, high performance.

Yeah.

So two different things. Can they coexist harmoniously on the one channel?

If you're speaking to the same person, then yes. If you're speaking to different people, then I would have separate channels.

So, you know, like one example of this I've seen recently is there's a guy that I follow that does lots of fitness stuff. He's built a massive audience of like millions of people on Instagram and a big audience on YouTube talking about fitness stuff. But he's also a business owner because he's got a business on the back of that. And so he's created a second channel that's talking specifically about business and marketing. And so he's got his fitness channel and then his like business and marketing channel because it's different people that he's talking to. Because if a video about how to grow your email list shows up to people that are interested in fitness, no matter how good that video is, people aren't going to click on it, people aren't going to watch it. And through your click through rates, your watch time is terrible and it's just not going to work. So if you're trying to reach different people, then separate channels. If you're trying to reach the same person and you're just giving them a different format of content, then I would keep it on the same. Same one. We've actually had a client that does this recently where they've got a sort of financial education podcast and they're doing their weekly episodes. But then they've come in and they've started doing some like 5 to 10 minute videos that they've just shot. Like a solo cast like you're talking about, and they've got it on the same channel because they're speaking to the same person. Yeah.

So I feel like ours is the same person, what I talk about and the guests that I have on. It's all quite intertwined. That might change eventually. But right now, same people.

Exactly. So I would have it on the same channel because the benefit of that is someone comes and watch your solo cast, it's 10 minutes, they really like it, they get a lot out of it and then they see a hour long podcast recommended beside it and they go and click on that and then you get that session time really up. So people might come in for this video, watch another, and then just watch more and more and more. So I would, I would have it on the same channel in your situation.

I believe like in terms of growth, we have to have some obsession metrics, things that we're measuring each week. And so for me, what I'm hearing from you is click through and duration of watch time.

Yeah.

And is that a percentage? Let's say I have a one minute video, three minute video let's say and someone watches a minute and a half of that. So let's say 50% versus an hour video and someone watches a minute and a half of that. So does YouTube go percentage wise like hey, the one minute or three minute video, the person watched it for 50% of the time versus the one hour video and oh, they only watched it for a minute and a half would do you know, anything around their algorithms on that?

That stuff always changes a bit. And to be honest, even if you had someone that worked at YouTube, they probably couldn't tell you exactly on that stuff because a lot of it is machine learning. And I don't know the details of that stuff, but a lot of it is changing day to day and. But the thing is they're not, they're not necessarily comparing those two. They usually look at similar length pieces of content. Even when you're in your analytics on YouTube, like it'll show you your attention graph relative to other videos, but it's only comparing them to similar lengths. So if you post an hour long video versus a three minute video, it's not, it's not even going to really compare the two because they're just completely different. It might compare all of your 3 minute videos to each other and then say, hey, this One's got the best retention rates, the best engagement. Let's show that to more people who want to consume a three minute video. And then of your hour long ones, it's going to look at that as well.

But just in general, like instead of, I guess, obsessing too much over the finer details, it's like, how can you make each video on its own? Like look at where people clicked off the video. So if you've got a three minute video and people watching it for a minute and a half, look at like what happened at 90 seconds. Why did someone click off? Is there a big drop at some point? Like where do people stop watching? And then just bear that in mind next time you got to shoot content. So if you have a big drop off at the start and then it's sort of consistent after that, your hook probably wasn't great. There was probably something that it just wasn't an interesting start to the video. And so heaps of people clicked off or you had this really good title, this really good thumbnail, but then you open the video and it's not really talking about the same thing. And so people were excited to click on it. It's not that they've left. And so you've got to think about next video. Like how can you make it better at the start to keep people watching? Maybe people watch lots at the start and then drop off at the end. If you've got a three minute video, some people will sort of give all of the content in the first two and a half minutes and then the last 30 seconds they're sort of like, oh, thanks for watching, go get my ebook, go subscribe, go comment, let me know what you thought. And they've just got this long slow outro. People who are watching that video know that everything's finished at the two and a half minute mark. They click off and you're gonna see this big drop off. And so getting rid of that last 30 seconds and maybe a minute into the video be like, hey, I've got an ebook. Check it out below. Little two second call to action. And then when you end the video, it's just abrupt, it's just, you know, you finish your content, you're done with it.

Especially on short form content, like content that's like a YouTube short because then people will rewatch the start of it. If you just ended abruptly, there's another view. Exactly. And that's why you can see some videos will have like 150% watch time because people start re watching the start of it again.

I do that with other people's content. I often will watch it multiple times going, God, that was cool, I want to watch that again. Or I'll say, caroline, come and watch this.

Yeah, that's interesting. But people are harsh when they're scrolling content. And so as soon as you get to the point where you know the video is finished, then they're just like, you know, come check this out or that out or thanks for watching. People are just going to be like, scroll, especially on that stuff. They'll just be like, scroll, scroll, scroll.

Like should we ever ask for a subscribe in short or long form content? Is it like kind of too much of an ask?

I personally don't do it or some, I mean I have it at times, but I don't really push it as something that you should focus on. And I had someone explain it to me with if you're going to push for engagement, you're better off to ask for people to comment or engage in that way. Because someone can only subscribe or follow you once. And so if someone watches a hundred videos of yours and then the first one you say go subscribe, they subscribe. The next 99 times you say that are pointless because they, they can't subscribe twice or three times. But if you say like, you know, what did you think about this? Let me know they can comment on all 100 videos and so they can engage a hundred times instead of once. And so little things like that. I personally wouldn't ask people to subscribe or ask people to follow a because of that, but B, because if you just create really good stuff, people are going to want to follow and subscribe anyway and asking them to it. So it probably won't make a big difference on it. Asking someone to engage in the comments will potentially spur someone on to do that. But I don't think I've ever had someone tell me to follow or subscribe and then I've turned around and be like, oh, I didn't think about that. More often than not you see a really good piece of content and you're like, I want to see more of this, you're going to follow it.

And I've done that a number of times, even recently, like, God, that's amazing content. I need to follow this.

Yeah, exactly.

And what we've been doing is testing thumbnails titles descriptions on YouTube and one thing we've found disturbingly is that negative thumbnail titles tend to get way more click through than positive. Like when it's a little Bit catastrophizing or a little bit sensational. And I don't like it, I hate it because I'm not that kind of person generally, like, yeah, don't do the controversial thing, but, well, we want people to click the video and get started. But then again we need to be measuring as you're saying. Yeah, they might have clicked the video, but when are they dropping off?

Yeah, and that's, I mean you'll probably know more about the details of people being more focused on negative emotions and positive emotions with, with your work and understanding that. But people are always more inclined to click on the negative than the positive. And people are always more inclined to try and avoid loss than to pursue gain. And it's always been that way. You can look through newspapers of the last hundred years and look at all the headlines. It's never like how good things are going, it's always about the negatives. Even when things are going well. It's like, you know, people might write a thing about the property market doing really well, but they spin it of like, you know, when's it going to stop, when's it going to drop off? People aren't going to be able to afford it. Like everyone's always trying to spin the negative because people are always going to click on it.

So it's a tricky one trying to balance it out because I know you want to put out good stuff. You can try and have like a negative hook to get people to watch and then deliver a positive message. So you can talk about, you know, you can, you can have a negative title but then, and you can address that at the start of the piece of content. But then you're like, hey, here's the situation. It's a negative situation. How can you do something about it? If you're talking about a health related problem, it's like you might have a negative title that's like, you know, all of these, you avoid doing this or you know, this disease is on the rise. And then when you get into the content, you can talk about like, how do you avoid this disease? How do you avoid these issues, these symptoms? How can you do a better job of it? And so you might draw people in with the negative and then deliver the positive. Because sadly, no matter how positive it is, if you're up against a video that's like the world's ending and then beside it, you're like, everything's good. Like, yeah, someone else has posted a video like the world's ending and then you're showing up as A recommended piece of content beside it. Everyone's going to click on the negative and so you almost need to find a way to use the negative and spin it into a positive.

We've got to play that game essentially. The algorithm game.

Exactly.

And just be happy and satisfied ethically and morally that hey, what we're doing is okay and we're not misleading.

Yeah.

Obviously if it's misleading, people will click off the video right after they've clicked onto it.

Yeah.

And our watch time will be horrific.

Yeah, exactly. But a lot of, I mean it's probably, you probably need to understand more about that. Typical business owners probably don't have to think too much about that because more often than not they're probably just going to be making simple search based pieces of content that people can look up. If they're a service based business, they might just be making short tutorials in their niche. Their audience is looking for people search it. It's got a good title, it's got a good thumbnail. They click on it, they deliver what they've said in the title and the thumbnail and that's about as simple as it, as it gets. They don't have to probably worry about gaming the algorithm too much. It's good to have a rough understanding of it but they don't need to go too aggressive with it. But yeah, for yourself it's, it's probably more so important to try and try and game things a little bit to get those results. But yeah, like you say, you don't want to, you don't want to mislead you more want to use the negative that is surrounded in that situation and then turn it into how you can do something positive about it.

Solution focus. I like it.

Yeah.

And in terms of video versus audio, we're seeing obviously a lot more video content.

Yeah.

Now compared to say six, seven years ago, the quality of that video content and the quality of that audio content, how important is that on YouTube?

So the audio is way more important than video quality on YouTube and social media in general. Like you can have. Not many people will put up with bad audio in a piece of content. If you're scrolling and the audio is muffled and bad, like you're probably not going to watch it, but you probably would watch something of someone just talking to their, their phone. But it's got really crisp, clear audio. And that's what we, we notice across any platform really is the audio matters a lot more. You still want to do a good job of both, of course, but you're Better off to focus on the audio first and then get the, the rest of it together. But you can get a mic, you can get a cheap mic to make your audio better for 50, $100 and have a iPhone setup as like a basic setup. You obviously want to improve it over time. But you can get decent audio, decent video.

Reasonably cheap.

That's cool. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm one of those weirdos that listens well, I go to YouTube, I jump in the car, I go to YouTube before I start driving, I find the video that I want to watch in brackets and I just listen to it. And I'm constantly using YouTube as a audio platform.

Yeah.

Is that a thing you're seeing? Is that quite normal?

Yeah, I think so. I do it a lot. I don't know what the statistics are on it, but I know I do that. I know it's reasonably common.

I think partially just because YouTube's recommendation system is so good, like the algorithm is so strong, they can show you stuff that you want to watch. The audio platforms, I mean, I don't use them enough really to know exactly, but they don't really recommend you content the same way. So you can subscribe to the podcast you like and you can listen to their weekly episodes, but you're not really going to get recommended good stuff that you haven't listened to or old stuff from them that you might want to listen to the same way that YouTube does.

Huge, powerful and in terms of collaboration, so an existing YouTube channel that's going great, that's maybe got 10 times the followers you've got or 100 times subscribers. Is there a way to collaborate? Is there a way to do that successfully where there's cross pollination and they send people your way that are your ideal customer?

You can do that. Yeah. You can create content together, you can collaborate together. It could be as simple as doing a podcast. You could have two people. One person might be in one industry. One person might be a real estate agent, the other person might be a mortgage broker. They could sit down and do a one off podcast together where they're talking through.

How people can buy their first home. And you've got the real estate person talking from that perspective, you've got the mortgage broker talking from that perspective. And they could collaborate and post it on the their channels each, or they could post a segment each and you can collaborate that way, which can work well. And you can do that on other platforms, platforms too. So that's a good way to collaborate. You can, you can do yeah, the interview style works just the best really. Because if you have someone else come up on your, if you do, if you came on and did a video on my YouTube channel, people would click on it thinking it's me or they would see it show up expecting it to be me and they just wouldn't click on it the same.

And so it just wouldn't perform well. I've even done videos where I've sort of tried to have like Mark Zuckerberg or like the CEO of Instagram, like in the thumbnail. And I've even noticed that that doesn't really perform as well as putting myself in there. People want to see me there. And it's probably the same with a lot of business owners. So you can bring people on as like an expert, but probably not like a dedicated video where someone else just jumps in there.

That's fascinating. And in terms of the person who's going right now, I'm not doing YouTube, I'm not doing Instagram, I'm going to stick to LinkedIn for that person. What's your advice to them in terms of how much potential opportunity and money even that they're leaving on the table by not joining Instagram and on YouTube?

I mean, I would say that if you're not doing YouTube, especially for service based businesses, you're missing out on so much because someone can look at your stuff on LinkedIn and they, they get to see what you write and they get to see your odd thing there. Someone can find you on YouTube, they can find one video of yours and then they can go and binge three hours of your content. And like I said, I keep using the service based business example. If you're a service based business owner and someone's just watched three hours of you giving advice on your industry, like who are they going to work with? Are they going to work with you or are they going to go to some random person on Google that they don't know and they don't trust and they don't know anything about and work with them. Especially for something that might be higher priced or more personalized. Whether it's, yeah, something like accounting, whether it's something like personal training, whether it's whatever the service might be like.

They'Re going to go with the person they know like and trust. And it's so much easier to do that through YouTube where a, you're on video but B, your content just keeps getting recommended to them. So LinkedIn is definitely strong. I don't do enough on LinkedIn. My advice would more often than not be figure out how you can repurpose your content so you can make it easy to go on other platforms. So if you're already spending 30 minutes a day to put out a piece of content on LinkedIn, figure out how you can repurpose it into your Instagram, onto your Facebook. Even Facebook's really powerful and a lot of people don't use it. Same with YouTube. If you're just creating YouTube videos, go post it on Instagram, post it on TikTok, put it on Facebook, put it on LinkedIn. If you spend an hour to film a piece of content, it's going to take you 10 minutes to then throw it on those four other platforms. And so it's like for 15% more time, you've now got four times as many platforms that you're on. So that's probably the really, really big one that hopefully people can take away from this is you don't necessarily have to dedicate yourself to another platform, but learn how to repurpose your stuff.

YouTube, I'd say comes above just about anything, to be honest, because it has.

A search engine functionality. Right. It's powerful.

Yeah. And just that ability to binge content. If someone can binge your content, it's just going to build so much more of a relationship with them. The same with podcasts. Someone finds a good podcast and they can binge it on their every day they drive to work, they listen to a podcast and then they know like and trust. You don't really get that on LinkedIn or Instagram or TikTok or any of that stuff. You get some of it, but definitely not to the same degree where someone might sit down and watch 10 of your videos that are 10 minutes long. And the relationship that builds is just crazy.

Yeah, it's really powerful. And look, I know that you're very selective with the people, the clients that you take on. You're probably oversubscribed right now in terms of you've got a wait list. But if someone did want to work with you, you know, who do you like working with in terms of what they do?

Typically it is businesses or personal brands that are creating education based content. So I, I like working with that, whether it's a personal trainer, whether it's a.

You know, you can be an expert on anything. You can be talking about finances, you can talk about health, putting out content around that that's also got a business on the back end. Because I don't want to just be working with someone that's just trying to get as many followers and likes as possible but also you want to drive real change for their for their business as well. So that's typically the people that we work with that have got a solid business and then creating educational content that helps people and we help them get it out across all platforms, do a good job of it, make it look good, the right content, the right ideas, all of that to build it organically and help them really grow their business.

I love it and I think when we're looking at growth we need to work with experts. You truly are an expert, particularly these two platforms and I'm going to put all of your details for people to go and follow and connect in the show notes. I want to say a huge thank you for joining me today.

Awesome thanks for having me and hopefully people got some good stuff out of it.

Cheers man. The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz.