Aaron Biblow & Triston Goodwin - The Video Flywheel Strategy for YouTube

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, Joe.

Hey.

We're recording.

I know.

Your mic's on. I'm hot. You're hot. Your mic's hot.

Oh, man. Dude, my head is whirling around like flywheeling around.

Your head is swirling like a flywheel.

Yeah. Wonder why.

We just wrapped up a. I don't know how long that was, but I felt like it was just like an intensive on YouTube. Organic and a little bit of paid.

A little bit of paid. Little bit of paid.

But it's like YouTube funnels. It's essentially what they were.

Oh, yeah. No, this is essentially like a little master class in a, I guess, up and coming YouTube strategy that. I mean, these guys are the first person we've ever heard actually talk about this concept. And it works for both organic YouTube and.

Advertising.

Paid out.

There you go. That's what I'm looking for.

Advertising.

You can tell our brains are fried right now, but it happens.

We knew, we knew it would happen.

It happens every podcast day.

But yeah, you're right, it's a combo of everything. And it's a little known strategy that is working kind of freakishly well. They give a lot of numbers inside of here and like even a guy selling bricks a half a million just using this strategy and I think a handful of months and then he's got.

YouTube videos that, you know, are getting 250,000 downloads a month or views a month right now.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, they're doing some really, really kind of ninja stuffs with the YouTubes.

Yeah.

And I mean, again, Joe and I, every time we've ever had a guest where we've talked to them about YouTube, we've made the comment we know we need to be doing more with YouTube and I don't know why we haven't done it yet. Well, luckily Joe's actually been optimizing YouTube over the last couple months. So check out our YouTube channel because it's amazing with all of the work that Joe's put into it. Don't forget this is getting released in July. I got some time, you got some time to make our YouTube channel look really good, hopefully while the. Joe's been working on our YouTube account and it looks amazing. So check it out.

No pressure, Joe. All right.

Pressure.

I like that. I like the. Challenge accepted. Yeah, it. I mean, this is cool. So actually who we're talking to today, because we didn't even talk about the name of the guest I think we're too excited about. The actual strategy is Tristan Goodwin and Aaron Biblo. And it's a duo. And we're like, oh, we don't get a lot of duos on podcasts like us. Because already, like, when we guest on podcast, people are like, oh, my God, there's two of you in two different locations. So it'll. You'll. You'll hear that on the podcast. That's why you'll be like, oh, oh, there's two different people too. And you hear like, Tristan is the tech guy that really gets his head deep in a lot of the actual, like, application of it, the technicalities. And then you have Aaron, who's more of the, I would say, the psychology customer journey.

Yeah.

The high level sort of strategy of the big picture strategy of it all, where Tristan's the in the weeds building it all, really understands the tech behind it all. And so you'll hear that dynamic as they jump back and forth as we ask questions. You know, it'll become very clear who the. You know, who the right person for that question was.

Yeah. So it's. It's interesting. And in this whole episode, we definitely get into the weeds on a lot of stuff. And I would say that it's not always in the perfect order either, because we kind of jumped around just because of the nature of what this is. Like, it's called the video flywheel. So it's like a circular thing.

Yeah.

I'm gonna actually try to get Matt to, like, sketch out his interpretation of it, which he did on the whiteboard.

I did. But it's too ugly to share right now.

Yeah, well, you have a few months. You have till July or whatever it is. So. So saying that, of course we took notes for you because you're going to probably need them. But you'll get the picture listening to this. Definitely the specifics. There's a lot of them, especially Tristan, when he just, like, lined out. Here are all the optimizations you could do with your stuff right now.

And here's all the tools that I recommend.

Right. Yeah. You're going to want some notes on those.

Yeah.

So that's why we took them for you with our writers. And. And they are free if you act fast. If you go to hustleandflowchart.com comp. C O M P. Yep. M P. That is C O, M.

P. C O M P. Just that.

Yes. I thought I said the M. A little weird. Oh, okay. So that's where you get the notes. They'll be free for a little bit if you're too late, then they go into this vault that Matt is working on. We have it in.

It's in my corner over here.

Drilling it into the floor with. There's, like, guards everywhere. It's crazy.

Ye.

They're digital files, so I put them on a USB flash drive, and I put the flash drive in the vault every night.

Hey, cryptocurrency could be stolen. It's been stolen from me. See, you got to secure that stuff down.

Too soon.

It is. It's not too soon anymore. It's fine. Yeah. So get the notes. It's free if you act fast. If you go to hustleandfluidchart.com comp and yeah, we'll do our best to give you the Flywheel in action. And actually totally almost missed. This is Tristan and Aaron's site. They actually made a little offer for us. It's a little freebie. You'll definitely want to get it because it's going to help you as well. It's VideoFlywheel IO Evergreen.

Yes.

Linked in the show notes, as always. Yes.

So go to hustleandflowchart.com comp for them notes and go to videoflywheel ioevergreen. See for their cool stuff and goodies and companions and what they're giving away as a companion for this episode.

Yeah. So get your free swag, go into those links, and then dive into the episode.

Let's go talk to Tristan Goodwin and Aaron Biblo of Video Flywheel.

Hey, Tristan, Aaron, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having us. We're excited to be here.

Hi.

Hey. You guys are at. I think this is might have be the first podcast we've had where two guests are at separate locations. No, we had one prior to this.

Yes.

I don't remember who I was just thinking. Yeah, because it's kind of a different format that we're used to. So there's four of us on this whole thing. It's pretty cool.

We were kind of talking for a long time prior to this about just YouTube and all the potential here and thought it was. There's, like, so much overlap from the previous topics we've had on this show about driving traffic. And we're like, we haven't really touched YouTube much personally. And, you know, Brad Costanzo, mutual buddy of ours, pretty much, like, nerded out after he hopped off the phone with you guys. He's like, oh, my God, they need to be on your show. Like, now have them on.

Yeah, no, I legitimately remember that after Brad had you two on his podcast, he called Joe, I think, gave Joe the whole rundown of your YouTube strategy, and Joe was kind of blown away and then proceeded to get off the phone with Joe, call me, talk to me for another hour about the YouTube strategy.

And.

And so next thing you know, we're like, we got to get these guys on the podcast, and here we are.

Yeah.

So sounds like he was fangirling a little bit.

I think so.

He is kind of a fan girl.

And we'll definitely send him this once it's alive. Hey, Brad, so where should we start? I mean, we. Yeah, we're already talking prior to this, and it'd be interesting to hear. You know, how do you guys get into this whole YouTube rabbit hole? Seems like. And you're doing some unique stuff around it, so kind of the origin stories of how you guys got to where you're at now.

So I think that Tristan actually has a better origin story for, like, why we went to YouTube in the first place. So I think it's a really good place to start. Tristan, why don't you go ahead with that?

Sure. So I used to work as a freelance translator way back in the day, like 10 years ago, and needed to find more work, and so I started doing YouTube videos. I started doing, like, tutorials for some of the different translation platforms that were out there. And I started collecting emails from people who are watching my videos. And not too long after that, I actually had about 650 translators working for me.

Wow.

Covered 19 and a half languages, depending on how you count Castilian. And I actually ended up closing that well. I went on a sabbatical back in 2015, and I just kind of want to get more into YouTube and more into SEO and kind of learn how to improve all this stuff. And I kind of never went back. So I've been doing SEO and specifically YouTube now full time for the last four years. Four and a half years.

I love it.

Rats. Yeah. And I'm sure a lot has changed in that whole span of time. If Google changes so often. I mean, is YouTube pretty much equivalent to that? More or less?

Oh, yeah. The last number I saw, they said there was 250 tests per year. Like, different little things that they change and tweak. And so the. The overall strategies have kind of been similar over the last few years, but, like, the way that we approach those strategies and now some little nuances to them, those. Those change almost every day.

So Gotcha. Now, how did you guys end up connecting to work together on this stuff?

So funny enough, Tristan and I have only actually met in person once and that was a year after we started working together. So just for everyone listening at home, I'm actually Canadian from Canada. Tristan's based down in Utah. We were connected by a mutual friend. In the coffee with Dan, group.

Randomly messaged me.

So I was in the middle of running my own agency for a little while and I just bought my partner out. I was trying to think of, I was trying to find someone else to work with who had the technical side because as you're going to find out a little bit later when it comes to dashboards and the AdWords manager. Don't let me touch it, please.

But anyways, got introduced to Tristan through a mutual friend and then subsequently made the horrible decision that I could run everything by myself.

Then pretty much burnt my agency into the ground. So after that was done, then was like, oh, hey Tristan, you still want to. Still want to talk about working together? And luckily he's a fantastic human being who doesn't hold a grudge and accepted you back. Exactly, exactly.

Very cool. Yeah, I mean it seems like it's a good timing for things YouTube like we were talking about. It's not. I feel like it's starting to be talked about more so as a place you should be on for your content and just rankings in general for Google and discoverability.

So it's perfectly timed that you guys are probably diving deep into this together.

Oh for sure.

Yeah.

Let's start about just the benefits of YouTube as a whole from your guys perspective where you see, you know, just kind of everything going in the future. What are the benefits of having a space there as opposed to just not doing anything in video at all, which most people do.

Why is YouTube better than not YouTube? Yeah.

So something you guys said earlier while we were not recording was that we've been wanting to do YouTube for like two or three years, but we just never got around to it.

Right. Hey, don't call us out. No, I'm just kidding.

But that's true. Yeah, that's true. And the thing is is that everyone says that and because of that it's one of the least competitive. Like YouTube is very competitive, but it's not as. Sorry. It's one of the least saturated places right now, especially for online marketing. And it's just like the cost for acquisition there is just so much lower. Like we're getting. Tristan, what's our record right now? I think There was a. One of our campaigns has a 99.97% reduct reduction on CPC.

Yep, 99.7.

Okay, that's pretty good.

So I feel like with YouTube, like the big sort of problem that most people have with YouTube is that you've got to go and create video content to go use YouTube. And I feel like that's probably been quite honestly mine and Joe's hurdle. We actually make a lot of video content, but we don't. We haven't, until recently, really focused on optimizing it for YouTube. But I think the reason most of the people listening probably aren't as active on YouTube as they could be is just probably that barrier to creating video content and feeling comfortable putting videos out there. So what kind of advice do you give to people when they're. They're kind of, kind of getting their feet wet with YouTube? What kind of content should they focus on? What's kind of the minimum viable thing they can do to start working on YouTube?

So regardless of the type of content you're going to make, which we'll talk about that in a little bit, but you'd think that video quality would be the most important thing. But it's actually audio. You can have video that's, you know, substandard. Maybe it's just a cell phone, like, for example, a la Tai Lopez just holding his phone out, you know, a foot in front of him, just taking a selfie video. But you do notice that his video or the audio coming from that video is pristine. So if you're gonna get started on YouTube, audio is significantly more important than video. And if you've ever seen a horrible cell phone video where the audio is just really, like, harsh or you can't really hear anything, you'll turn that off really quickly. But if the video is not that great, but you can hear everything, you'll still suffer through it.

Got it. I guess that's even more important if people are on their TVs now watching YouTube a lot of the time. So if you have a big old static or winds blowing through the iPhone microphone, it's going to piss a lot of people off. You probably won't retain them, but with decent audio, you'd probably be fine.

That's exactly it. And the thing, most people are going to YouTube, um, either to consume content just as like, how do I burn time? But we're also seeing a lot of YouTube use for how do I learn something? How do I do this thing? How do I solve this problem?

Yeah, yeah.

Such a great Platform, it kind of marries the, the whole content space with search.

Yeah, it's, it's, I think it's the number one search platform on the Internet for how to content because it's already the number two search platform on the Internet, period.

Right.

End of statement. But I think it's the number one platform for searching for tutorial type content. So that's really interesting. So you guys have sort of a unique method for doing these YouTube videos. You have a strategy that's kind of uniquely your own that you're out there spreading the word on, called the video flywheel. Let's just jump straight into this and kind of start breaking down what this is and how it works and the parts and pieces of it all.

So Tristan, I think you should probably mention the algorithm and what's going on with that.

Uh, oh, oh boy. Okay. So.

If anybody wants to really get into this and like see where a lot of this information comes from and like, you know, a lot of YouTube bureaus will kind of give the same advice. You know, they always talk about have a good thumbnail, have a good title, have, you know, all this other stuff. But they never really explained why YouTube actually accidentally released a white paper a couple years ago. It's called the Deep neural networks for YouTube recommendations. And it's an eight page PDF and it took about two days for me to read it. It's, it's pretty, there's a lot to chew on. But I definitely recommend that if anybody who really wants to get into this kind of stuff, at least read that paper. It's available free online. But basically what it boils down to is it says that YouTube has trained its AI and its recommendation systems. And in part also it's search recommend its search systems and everything to focus on increasing the average number of watch minutes per impression. So basically the way that breaks down, or put that into English is that every time somebody sees a video on YouTube, right. First I have a whole system that it uses to actually determine what videos to actually put there. But basically that breaks down to a score. And that score is based off of whenever somebody sees more than half the thumbnail for one second, or whenever they see the title, then that video is then being judged, is being put through this different, through this process. And if somebody clicks on that video, then they watch the video for a certain amount of time, then they're watching that they want to see, they want people to watch as many minutes as possible. And so that's why they say, you know, have a good thumbnail, have A good title because that's the first step in this process. We want to increase this score as much as we can. And as people watch more of the video and as you get more clicks, then your score actually goes up. Excuse me. And the higher that score is, then the more often the video is going to be recommended and the higher it's going to be in those recommendations. Now when you have negative impact going into those videos. So if somebody sees thumbnail, but they don't click on it, YouTube's going to see that too. And so they're not going to recommend it as much. Now the other thing that happens is that YouTube has kind of grouped all of us into different clusters. So you have clusters of channels which are just channels that have similar content. You have viewer clusters who are just people who watch, you know, similar kinds of videos, similar demographics, and they watch all that. And so if they see that a lot of people from this particular group is watching and engaging with this video, they're going to show that video to the rest of the people in that group. And so you can start to grow your viewer base and can start grow or growing your reach organically very quickly and very, I don't want to say easily, but very effectively.

Right?

So for example, we have one video where it's. The channel had 230 subscribers and they had one channel or one video that was performing fairly well. And so what we did is we basically set up this, this system, this flywheel, right? And so that video went from.

It was random video, so it uploads viewers and everything. Within a year it hit a million views. As of right now, which is just like a year and a half since upload, it's actually sitting at two and a half million views. And that's all 100% organic. It's all 100% coming from this recommendation system. And basically just because we gave YouTube what it wanted, we had a really good click through rate. People watched the video for 3 minutes and 43 seconds, which was a high enough percentage that YouTube thought it was significant enough to start promoting it. And the video right now is still getting about 250,000 views a month. And that's free traffic. And so this particular video is kind of fun. It's for a friend of mine. He had just lost his job and he just found out that his wife was pregnant. And he's like, I need a job like now. So we put this video together and just in the beginning of the video it says, hey, I'm a, I'm a developer I, I'm a programmer and I'm looking for work and if anybody needs anything, just shoot me an email. And so he had, you know, two and a half million people see this video. Basically his little, you know, I'm available, come hire me. And he ended up getting a job within three or four weeks. And now he actually owns his own business, you know, just because of the traffic that we're able to generate from doing this. And you know, there's a lot of ways that that can be applied. I mean, this is talking, this is specifically for a video game. It's a five year old video game anyways. But you can do the same thing for course material. You can do the same thing for pretty much anything that people are interested in watching. You know, there's, there's traffic out there for it.

Got it.

Cool. Yeah. Now that, that, that's interesting. And then there's. It sounds like, or, you know, looking, we've kind of looked at some notes and stuff. You have like, you guys are like probably the most prepared podcast guest ever, which is really cool. But it looks like it's a very like, strategic way. Even with, I guess, levels of different types of videos. You have like three different layers, more or less. And the idea, it seems like, is that you're creating content in formats where they're kind of linked together.

It's like a video funnel. It almost feels like there' kind of a top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, where you're specifically trying to get different videos in front of people based on where they are kind of in the user's life cycle.

Yeah, exactly. And you know what's really cool about that is it does two different things. First is we're actually, you know, moving somebody through a sales funnel, which is great because then they're going to be more likely to, you know, to give us money. But at the same time, we're feeding into that algorithm, we're giving it exactly what it wants. Because now we have somebody who's watching a video and they're watching it all the way through, and then they watch another video. And if there's going to be an ad break between those two videos, YouTube makes money. It's like, oh, we like it when this happens. And then they watch another video and there might be another ad. And so YouTube gets even happier and so they start promoting that content even more. And you know, you're giving the robots exactly what they want and in exchange they give you more of what you want, which is targeted views.

Yeah.

Now does this strategy, does it only work if your YouTube account is ad enabled or does it, does it matter in YouTube's eyes?

It doesn't matter because one of the things that they want most, like I said, is just people being on the platform and seeing stuff. Because a lot of times the YouTube ads that we see are gonna be like the pre roll ads or something like that, but you also have display ads, you have ads on the sides of the screen and underneath and then the cards. And so they have lots of ways of making money from a channel, even if it's not monetized, even it's a brand new channel. I mean, like I said, the example with the 2 1/2 million views that had 250 subscribers when we started, 230 subscribers. It wasn't monetized. It is now, but at the time it wasn't. They weren't making any money off of it.

Gotcha. Okay, well let's break down kind of the elements of this. So I kind of hinted that there's multiple levels of the funnel. Can we break each level down in the funnel and what kind of content needs to go into each section?

For sure. We like to work backwards. The reason for that is because you need to know where you're going in order to I guess put the journey together to get there. First thing we do is we start looking at what the offer is. Typically this system that we've rolled out will work for just about any, whether it's you can do e common and product based stuff. But it works really well with services and also with consultants, coaches and course creators. Anyone that has sort of an underlying system or framework or something like that that we can use to educate someone. And then ultimately when you put that framework in front of someone, hopefully they're going to say, hey, I want that for myself. And then giving them the right exit point and the invitation to explore further. So we start from, with the end in mind in that conversion goal. So then we'll create.

We'Ll figure out exactly what offer it is we're going to promote. And the nice thing about this is that since it's a, since it's a sales funnel in itself, we're actually using this right now. Our record for the client that has the highest or the most expensive offer. We're using the flywheel right now to promote a $10,000 offer.

Straight from YouTube. So no tripwire, no upsell, no get on my list and then do this other thing. It's just like book a call, pay.

$10,000 geez, that's impressive. Okay.

And the reason we're doing that is that we've built up enough familiarity that you feel like you know the person by the time you get to that, that phone call with them at the end. And so the structure, so what we do is we start with the Flywheel itself first, which is that underlying framework or system. So we'll break that down into at least six videos.

And this is almost like think of it as a choose your own adventure story webinar.

And the reason we went with that kind of route is because a lot of people are using paid ads right now to drive to some sort of webinar. And the challenge with webinars right now is that when you get on one, your guard goes up. You know you're going to be sold something at the end. If you didn't pay to join the webinar, you're going to be presented with an offer. So that was the first challenge. The second challenge is that I just don't have time to watch a one or two or three hour webinar. And then you also have the scheduling issues and all that sort of stuff. So getting people to consume that kind of content is challenging. So in order to put things in front of people, we'll break down almost this webinar sequence into 6, 10, 15 videos, where each topic is divided into its separate video and then they're all linked together. So each video will start off with, hey, you just came from this other video where we talked about this. In this video we're going to teach you how to do this, which builds on that last concept. Then you have your content and at the very end it says, okay, perfect, we just learned this in this video. In the next video, we're going to take that to 10x and make sure you click that right here. So it's kind of putting that hook in on both ends and we generate this momentum. And that's where the name, the video flywheel comes from.

Got it. Okay. So that's the content where it's like the meat of whatever it is that's just going to get them the. It's the value you're putting out before any kind of offer.

So you're basically keeping them on YouTube this entire time. You're also keeping them on your YouTube channel specifically. And I'm assuming that you know this Flywheel concept, that they watch this first video and then they click over and watch the second video and then the third and. And it kind of builds up like this almost momentum in YouTube's eyes, where they're like, okay, these guys are invested in this YouTube account. Let's show these people more of these people's YouTube videos. I mean, I'm kind of, I think I'm kind of jumping ahead and guessing what, where you're going, but go for it.

Yeah, that's entirely it. So what ends up happening is that Instead of watching one 15 minute video.

We actually will break that down into, sorry, three, three five minute videos. And that has a couple of different consequences. A, it shows that you're making a, you're making the choice to continue to the next video. And that's what YouTube likes to see. And let's say that you stop watching that and go watch something else. YouTube liked what was happening while you were on our channel, so it's still going to push you those videos on the home screen and on recommended videos on the sidebar.

Because it wants to keep getting that session time so we can get that even without a subscription or any sort of interaction. So that's the first thing. But then from a buying perspective.

So this might be a controversial topic. If anyone on the channel is familiar with a book called the Game by Neil Strauss, it's kind of a deep dive into the world of pickup artistry.

Yeah. Familiar with it? Yeah.

Perfect. So they talk about this concept of micro dates and they say that a guy will be more successful.

If they. So a guy will be more successful if they take a girl to three separate spots on the same date and have three micro dates as opposed to just spending all of that time at one spot. And it makes it seem like you've, like you've known the person longer, you've spent more time with them and it creates more memories. So it's the same. We use the same sort of thing on YouTube where you're getting these almost micro exposures and every time you click to the next video, you're building that. Yes. Ladder as opposed to just sitting through 15, 20 minutes an hour worth of content.

Right. That makes sense. It's multiple touch points, different locations, maybe different, different topics for sure. Would you suggest, and I don't want to dive super deep into like formats, but like, would you suggest a client or someone doing this to record like at one time, like one day, all their content? Or would you suggest like different environments, different locations to kind of piggyback on what you just referenced there?

In a perfect world, you can. So honestly, it just more so matters that the content's there. In a perfect world, having some things change can definitely Help build that extra novelty. That being said, I would never have a client delay their shooting just to go to multiple locations. Yeah.

So you could just batch record if you really wanted to, which was ideal.

Is there any reason somebody couldn't actually just take a webinar that they're already using and split that up into like, you know, find some logical stopping points, but split that up into five or six videos and spread it across YouTube.

So that's actually one of the first questions we ask when we start working with someone. Do you have a webinar for your service? I want to see that first because typically we're able to build the flywheel out of the webinar, especially if that webinar was already converting. Why recreate new content if it was already generating sales? We're just going to throw some. Some gas on the fire. Right, gotcha. So we can definitely. But the thing is, is that the typical webinar, especially if there's slides and stuff like that, doesn't work on YouTube. So it's the same information, just in a different consumable format.

Right. You would have to probably put a talking head or different scenes, imagery, maybe, maybe some words on screen instead of just straight up slides.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay. But that's cool because if the content's made, especially if it's converting and there's a gap in the market on YouTube, well, pretty good opportunity.

Yeah.

So, okay, so that's. So that's the middle section you said, right? Six video flywheel. Okay, so where do you go after that section?

So after we do that, we figure out strategic endpoints and what we want to do is we want to drive traffic to the offer. However, something that Tristan may go into a little bit later is that YouTube doesn't like it when you don't stay on the platform. So if there's a video that directs someone to leave YouTube, that video will be penalized. However, that is a local video. There's a local penalty just to the video. What we've done is we've created this concept of the sacrificial exit video. So we isolate that penalty.

I was just curious, in the flywheel middle section, just to clarify, the link outs, does that mean the hyperlinks in the description or is it any call outs that you're doing or everything above?

Literally anything that will direct someone off of platform.

Got it. So that's probably the first thing. Just like remove all call to actions off of YouTube.

So even if it's like an audio call to action and you just say it audibly on the podcast go to this site is because people are watching that video and then leaving YouTube. I would imagine even just a audible call to action could still penalize you. Right?

Correct. Correct. Anything that doesn't have them view another video and stay on platform.

Gotcha.

Got it. Okay, cool. See, that's where we screw up in our current strategy. That's okay. All right, cool. Just wanted to clarify that.

Believe it or not.

Big YouTube people are still doing that. Like some of the. Tristan, I'm sure you're. I guess we don't want to name any names, but there are some big guys in the industry who have YouTube channels teaching people how to optimize for YouTube. And then every second video, they're sending someone back to their website. That being said, they do have a large captive audience already. And if you're subscribed, like, YouTube is still going to show you their content, but YouTube's not going to go out of their way to show you someone else's or like, discoverability. Show someone else that doesn't know about. Yeah, exactly. It's going to kill your discoverability.

That makes sense. Okay.

All right, so what's this, this sort of sacrificial, like, isolated video that you're talking about?

So in the actual flywheel video, where it makes sense to introduce someone, or rather invite someone to work with you, we'll say, hey, if you want to learn more about how we can work together, how you can or how you can implement the thing that we just talked about in this video in your own business, click this video here. We can talk a little bit more about that. And then there's a hard link, usually in a card that will go to our sacrificial exit video. And then on that video, then we have the actual offer, a quick description of what's going on, what you're going to see on the next page, and then a link out to that offer. Now, because they're leaving YouTube from that video, that video will get penalized, but the actual flywheel itself remains intact.

Got it.

And so can you make multiple different flywheels and just kind of all have them all feed to that final video? Is that kind of the idea?

So, best strategy, you actually want to have a separate exit video for each exit just because you don't want there to be like a jarring, like, disconnect between where they just came from and then the offer. So usually I'll coach a client to say, hey, so you just. You just saw this video and you probably want to Know how to use that in your own business. What we can do is book this call on it, we'll go through all of these things and then at the end, if things are a fit, we can talk about working together more or something like that. But making sure to connect the exit video to the flywheel video that they just came from.

Gotcha.

Because it's going to have a higher conversion rate.

Right, right. It's customer journey thing.

Exactly.

Okay, so then, so then how. So then what about the third piece about the entering into this thing initially?

So I think that that's definitely a Tristan thing because he is the guru on. Actually, some of the stuff that Tristan ranks for is absolutely nuts.

Yeah, this is, I'm curious about this. This is the only strategy that I think we've been focused on. Just like try to be discovered on YouTube for these keywords. But other than that, it's like our strategy has been push them to our website afterwards.

I don't even know if we've ever linked two videos between each other ever.

I am currently, because Vidiq, little tool is using, was saying, throw some cards up there.

Oh, gotcha.

So that's the only reason why. But you guys tell us how we really should be doing this.

All right. So I mean, I guess we're really just talking about YouTube SEO.

Yeah.

And that's, I think, the secret to it. And it's not a fun secret, it's not a sexy secret. It's not one of those things where I go, oh yeah, you know, I just need to go buy this tool. It's doing really good keyword research and doing really good competition analysis and just looking to see what your audience is looking for. Like what are those top level questions and making good quality content that answers those questions and then optimizing the video so that way it actually shows up. Now it's really similar to what we're talking about with the recommendation systems. So, you know, when you have a higher click through rate, when we have a higher watch time, then we're able to rank a little bit higher. And you know, there are black hat ways to go in and manipulate these things. But you know, at the end of the day, you don't get paid for, you know, bot traffic, so it's not really worth it. The other cool thing is when we're talking about the recommendation systems, we can actually target specific videos that we want to be recommended on. Again using Vidiq is a really, really great tool for that because then you can see when you search for a keyword, you can see what all the most common keywords are. You can see how often they're using specific keywords in their titles and their descriptions. You can then go through and tweak your own video. So that way it will show up as a recommendation on other videos. And basically you're. I don't want to say that you're stealing traffic, but you're definitely borrowing traffic from other videos that are already performing well in, you know, your category and that have the same audience that you're trying to reach. So that's. That's really cool. And like I said, that's one of the things that a lot of people just don't do. Like, they don't want to do it. And I mean, that's. That's understandable. I mean, not a lot of people really enjoy sitting and filtering Excel sheets all day long.

Well, I'll speak to your point. I am not typically the one to hop in and do tech stuff, but for some reason, I'm fascinated with YouTube optimizations, which is weird. So in Vidiq, I think we just had the free version of Vidiq for now. And yeah, I've explored so much. You just look at a competitor and you're like, I want this keyword. Okay. This thing exposes pretty much all their tags and all this stuff that they then it tells you optimizations, and it's very simple to follow along. Kind of like what you're talking about here.

Yeah, Vidiq really is a great tool for that kind of stuff. Another one that's worth looking at is going to be TubeBuddy, and then there's one that's just coming out. I think it's still in closed beta, but it's called morningfame, so definitely take a look at that one, too.

Okay, perfect.

Cool. Now, with the video that you're talking about here, is this the first video in the Flywheel, or is this kind of a video that sort of precedes the prior the Flywheel?

So this is more of a what we call an intro video, and the purpose of it is to bridge the gap between someone's existing flywheel and a different entry Point on YouTube. So whether that's a search that someone's done. So, for example, for a one of our clients, they. They actually work with coaches as well, and their system is how to present your high ticket offer and actually close sales from it, as opposed to, you know, not having a successful course launch. And one of the things that we're going to be making a video on with them is does my course cost too much? And that's, that's a search term that we've seen some traffic for. So making the video for that search term and then linking that to the pricing video in your flywheel.

Got it. So you're looking for super common search terms at the very top.

Exactly. It's our job to kind of get into, get inside of the client, of their client's mind and then figure out how they're going to interpret their problems into what they're going to type in the YouTube search bar.

Gotcha. Now, with these entrance videos, do these all have their own flywheels attached or can you have multiple entrance videos feeding a single flywheel?

So if you have that one core service, you're probably only going to have the one flywheel for it. So what we want to do is target all sorts of different potential problems that the customer's client will have and then direct them to the specific video in the flywheel that will help solve their problem the best. And then the nice thing is that because it's in a flywheel, they come into a video where they say, in the previous video, we talked about this. So they know that they're contextually inside of a video sequence and we give them the option to go either backwards or forwards. And it's think of it as kind of like one of those hop on, hop off bus tours. You get on where you need to and you get off when you decide you want to work with them. It's all structured in a big circle so that someone that comes in near the end doesn't just reach the last stop and then they say, rides over.

Bye.

Right, Gotcha.

Okay.

Gotcha. Okay, so that makes sense. So the flywheel is kind of this continuous thing that just is always going, but with the, the exit points, you know, that will point to these exit videos. And yeah, the entrance are just pointing to, I guess, anything relevant from there.

So just into the flywheel and then once they're on the flywheel, eventually.

Nice.

You know, every four videos or so say, hey, if you want to learn more about how to work together, we can do that.

Cool. So I'm going to try to recap this in my own words and you can, you can tell me where I'm, where I'm wrong or if I, if I'm getting the whole picture. So I'm going to start from kind of the top of the funnel. I know the way we explained it was you kind of build it from the bottom of the funnel and Then work backwards. But just for the, for my own mental trying to process it, I'm going to start from the top of the funnel. So basically you, you're trying to SEO commonly searched videos on YouTube that are in your niche and you're, you're making some videos that would be great, relevant videos for these search terms. And then when people watch those videos, you're telling them to watch the next video, which then pushes them into a flywheel, which is a sequence of five or six videos. And then this, these flywheel of videos. There's actually an exit point video that you can link to from these flywheel videos. And the exit point video is where you make your call to action to eventually go buy something.

Correct.

Gotcha. I think I got it all, but I know I left out a lot of nuances, but I'm just trying to get the big picture here.

That was good.

For sure.

For sure.

And that's like on the topic of entry videos, that's only one of the types of entry videos. The other types we want to try and get recommended traffic. So we'll try and target other influencers in the same industry that are maybe making videos and getting a lot of traffic to that our video that already exists and piggyback off of it. And then we'll also run ads as well just because the ad costs on YouTube are so ridiculously cheap.

So I was going to ask about that because I know that's not like the crux of what the magic of this thing is because it's organic traffic. But how do you use advertising for this?

Well, it's pretty darn cool. There's one main drawback that they have to keep in mind when you're using paid advertising on YouTube. That's that YouTube is in the game to make more money. And so if they see that you're buying ads, then they'll actually reduce your recommended reach. It lasts three or four weeks before your reach will go back to normal, but you will see a dip in views once you've done ads. So just to kind of let everybody know, if you see this happen, this is what's happening. It's not a big deal and it will go back to normal.

Got it.

Temporary. Yeah. But like what we really like to do is we'll send traffic to like those top level videos, right? And then kind of just organically feed people, or I guess it's not really organically, but feed people into these funnels using YouTube's paid traffic spend, you know, a penny per view and the views 30 seconds or an engagement or 50% of the video, whichever comes first. And we're able to just send people into these things all day long. Just to kind of give you guys an idea. An example of one of our clients. We sell bricks.

And like, you wouldn't think you'd sell a lot of bricks on YouTube, but so far this year.

May 16th. Yeah. Sold $550,000 worth of bricks.

Bricks meaning like building bricks.

Build a house out of.

Wow. Okay, those not like bricks of cocaine that are probably just kidding.

Those are easier to sell.

No, but that's amazing.

We can't run ads for those.

What?

But like, it, it actually got to the point where the client called and said, hey, we need you to stop running this. We need you to stop sending traffic into this because we are $350,000 backed up. Like, we need to get these other projects out before we can send out anymore. And what we're doing is we have ads targeting designers, construction companies, architects, and then we have, you know, let's just basically talk about, you know, some different design ideas or applications for a specific type of brick. It's a very specific kind of brick. And then we have the next video in that sequence would say, hey, if, you know, you want to learn more about the ecological benefits of this particular brick because it's an eco friendly brick, then, you know, check out this next video or what. The other cool thing that we can do is you can actually set up a custom audience in AdWords based off of people who have watched videos on your YouTube channel. So you can do all your retargeting stuff. And what's really cool about that is retargeting ads are a lot cheaper than just your standard.

PPC campaigns.

We're able to then retarget that exact same audience, show them the next video in that sequence, and then again, just kind of push them down this funnel. But we're doing it instead of using organic traffic. We can do it with paid traffic. The results from that have still been really, really positive. I still prefer organic just because it's long term, it lasts forever and, and it's free. But you know, for the actual cost and for just getting something out and quick and testing, like how well people respond to videos, how well a funnel performs. You know, you can do a quick campaign like this, three, four videos and then see how it performs. And that's kind of what we did, like I said, with the bricks. And we're talking about a little over half a million dollars worth of bricks sold in five Months.

Wow.

And that's with two months of a break. So three months.

That's super impressive. Now, just to clarify, I think you mentioned it, but I may have missed it. These are pre roll ads, right? These are the ones that run right at the beginning of other people's videos.

You can do that. And those are. Okay. My preferred is search placement. So you can show up at the top of the search. You can show up as a recommendation. And the difference between the two is that with the pre roll, I mean, you're kind of interrupting the person's, you know, whatever it is that they're watching on YouTube. Whereas with a search placement, then it's something they're actively looking for and they decide to click on that video and they decide to watch it. And so the engagements tend to be a lot higher. It's not as fast as doing a pre roll, just because with a pre roll, you know, tell it, tell the system, hey, I'll give you ten bucks. Give me a thousand views and put a thousand people into this, this funnel. So it's a little bit slower, but like I said, quality of the people on that list is then significantly higher. And it's also pretty handy for getting, like I said, other organic traffic. So if you have your ad at that top of the funnel and if you're targeting some point and people are responding to that video, then they're going to go and they're going to watch that next video because they choose to. And so then instead of spending a penny per view, now you're getting two views for a penny. So you're spending half a penny and it just grows from there.

Yeah. Now this is a little bit of an in the weeds question, but I'm curious, can you actually track conversions from the very first entry video all the way to a sale? Does that, will Google actually show that as a conversion from that initial video? Or how do you know the effectiveness of your ads from like a conversion standpoint?

You can. And the easiest way to do it is when you're setting up your conversion goals. Just set it to first click as far as attribution. Then that will say this first video that somebody watched, this is what they clicked on. They follow the entire sequence and then they land on the sales page and then they trigger the actual conversion pixel on the thank you page after purchasing. You can track every step of it. It's really cool.

Very cool, Very cool. Are there any other nuances or, you know, pieces, elements of this, this process that we're skipping over that we haven't touched on yet.

So I think, at least from my point and, like, I handle a lot of the technical stuff, I, I, my job is to sit here and look at the Excel sheets and, you know, the AdWords campaigns and everything all day long, keeping a really close eye on the campaigns. You can test different, you know, you can do AP split testing, you can do all kinds of different things with it, but really put the time into looking and seeing what performs well and what doesn't, because that will save you a lot of time and money in the long run. The other thing that's really cool when we're setting up these, like the retargeting and doing the ads and following up and everything, is we can reduce the cost per click for most of these keywords rather dramatically. So I actually just finished up a campaign. We were targeting SEO companies as a keyword. We're targeting SEO services, just the keyword SEO. And, you know, those aren't low competition keywords. And the average cost per click for this thing is about 25 bucks a pop. And so.

I got this thing set up, and I, you know, it's just kind of doing it as experiment. I just kind of want to see what would happen. And so I ran it to my own audience from my own YouTube channel where I have a retargeting list of between 5 and 10 million people. And I actually managed to get my cost per clicks down from like, an average of $25 to 1.2 cents.

And, yeah, it was pretty cool. And what's really neat about it is also with the way these funnels are set up. And I think this is really the magic behind it, is somebody watches that first video, right? They see your pretty face, they hear your voice, and they go, okay, I recognize this person now. And they start kind of building almost a little bit of a relationship. And so when they watch a couple of videos and they're happy, right? Then if they go to Google and they search for that keyword that you're related to, and if you're retargeting that keyword because that person's on your custom audience list, you show up as an ad for that person. You spend a fraction of what you normally spend on that click. But then when the person gets to that landing page, they see you again. Because if you have put another video on that page, like, oh, I remember this guy. This is the guy who was talking about this. Or he had all the Pokemon crap in the back of his, you know, his videos. That's what people complain about. In all my videos.

Matt's too.

Yeah, I remember this guy. I have a relationship kind of with this guy. I trust this guy because I've already seen the other content that he's put out. He's already helped me in the past. And so conversion rates are then significantly higher because they have that relationship already. So when we're talking about the, this SEO campaign that we just did, we were selling just really simple backlinking services, right? Just simple gigs. We're spending about $5 a day in ads and we were getting about $500 back, you know, per day. And within, I think I let it run for like two weeks, right. So we had 15, 23 clicks that we're able to generate for this, for this particular campaign, we spent, or we would have spent $41,250 on those clicks and we spent $62.37.

And like when you can reduce your cost per acquisition and you know that dramatically, that makes it significantly easier to compete in pretty much any other field that you could possibly imagine, any other category. So you can do this kind of stuff for E commerce, you can do this kind of stuff for services, you can do this for all kinds of really neat stuff. And you don't have to have a huge channel. It's just a question of putting the content together in a way that's going to talk or speak to the needs of the person who's watching the video. Setting up the videos in a way that it helps the person move through that process until they're ready to actually buy and then being there when they're ready to make the product purchase. So at least from, from my point, you know, that's, I think those are kind of the two biggest things is taking advantage of the retargeting lists and then also taking the advantage of the benefit that you have by looking at and speaking to your potential client, you know, in video.

Right.

And you know, like Aaron mentioned at the beginning, it doesn't have to be a super fancy video. I mean, some of my best performing videos were three minute live streams where I'm in my pajamas.

The most important thing is the message of what it is that you're sharing. Then all the technical stuff really just supports that.

We can't out optimize bad content at the end of the day.

Well, that's actually what I was going to ask is. Well, it sounds like you probably don't want to optimize the stuff that's already there. You'd have to pretty much start from scratch with this strategy in mind, which would probably be the most effective, correct?

Yeah, you definitely need to have. So it's kind of. It's almost like we want to create this Netflix effect of binging everything. It's a lot easier to, like, when you have this entire content sequence in mind when you're building it. It's easy to put those hooks in and then at the end, reel them into the next video. With existing content, it's definitely possible to optimize it and to kind of include it to a degree, but it's way more effective with new videos.

Gotcha.

Yeah. Interesting. Well, when someone starts off. So I know you guys do a lot of this stuff. Like, how's. I guess what's the best next step for someone to try this? Is it to, you know, like, the video format? Is it to get that down in kind of a script flow? Do you have. Do you have kind of a go to framework for that that people can kind of kind of have in mind when trying to do this?

So I think we actually have a best practices document that we put together.

Nice.

We can include that for you guys on a landing page somewhere.

Okay. Yeah. And would that be at the. I know we were talking about a link for the show.

Yeah.

So, yeah, you can actually. You'll be able to find that document along with some other goodies that we're putting together for your audience, specifically, just as a thanks for having us on here.

Cool.

So you can find that at Video Flywheel IO. Evergreen.

Awesome. Yeah. And we'll link that in the show notes. And hopefully maybe Matt can draw out what his flywheel looks like. I was actually trying to. As Matt was describing, I was actually trying to draw. I was like, visually, this would be kind of interesting to see how it's all meshed together. I'm sure you guys have something like that, maybe internally.

Yeah.

Cool. Matt, anything to wrap this thing up here?

No, I mean, we're kind of at the top of the hour here. If you guys had any other, like.

Cool.

I know before we hit record, you guys were talking about some, you know, some other case studies. I know you talked about the brick company that you're. A few minutes ago. Was there any other kind of cool case studies that you can share of people who have implemented this really effectively or clients that you've implemented this really effectively for?

So I guess we can definitely chat about. So one of our clients, he heard Brad's podcast and was like, holy crap, how do I get this for myself? But maybe is there a way for Me to test this on a smaller scale. And we do have a smaller offering just to kind of get someone started and get their feet wet.

Upon launching that sequence, he actually broke even on his investment with us within 24 hours. And that was only on his because he wanted to have a tripwire sale that, like, it was a challenge. Actually, it was going to be. He's a coach, and he wanted to take some people through a morning routine challenge. And on signups for the challenge, it was a $20 signup. He broke even, and that's not including any upsell on the back end. So he came and he's like, hey, I want a revenue neutral funnel. Currently, he's got like, 489% return on ad spend for that.

A little better than neutral.

Exactly.

Wow. And that was all organic traffic, or is that a combo of some ads in there too?

That was specifically ads only.

Ads only. Okay, interesting. So that's. That's pretty cool. I guess that makes sense. If you can get it back in 24 hours, it's like, all right, let's test this thing fast.

Exactly. And that's kind of one of the benefits of paid strategy or the paid strategy is that, right, you can turn it on and get immediate feedback. Now, that being said, it's kind of that, like, from the SEO world, I'm sure you guys have heard this before with the owning the keyword versus renting it.

Right?

But always renting is a significantly lower investment than owning it. And it's always good to test things before you start building everything out.

Gotcha. Yeah. Now, when it comes to organic changes on there, are there any big.

I guess, any key things? If we're just optimizing videos as a whole, and this goes back to kind of like that top level, I'm just thinking, like, what are the key elements of a YouTube video that you should optimize? I know there's a ton of options like these tools like Vidiq will tell you, but some best practices. Just as a very easy, quick thing that people can try out, maybe some.

Quick wins that somebody can get on a YouTube video or two.

Right.

First thing I would recommend very highly is that you optimize your channel. That's one of the things that's often neglected that just kind of helps, kind of helps tell Google and YouTube overall what the channel is actually about. And it gives you a little bit more authority for the specific categories that you're trying to rank in. The next thing would be to optimize your title and your description. So A lot of people forget their descriptions and they fill it with just tons of like social media links. Like I got one channel that I work with and their entire Description was just 27 links to different social media platforms. And so when we're talking about the, it's called a drop off penalty. When somebody actually leaves YouTube there's just drop off penalty everywhere. So that'd be something else. Thumbnails definitely spend a lot of time working on your thumbnails like we're talking about. With the click through rate being so important then.

You can't underestimate the importance of a good thumbnail and your titles when it comes to actually getting your keywords in there. Make sure you are using the keywords in the titles. Make sure you're using them within the first 200 words or characters.

Of your description. The other thing that a lot of people don't like doing just because it's boring is closed captioning for the videos. Because Google will listen to all that and they'll create an automatic closed caption for the video. But usually it's always wrong. And so probably the easiest way to do that is either to go in and edit the auto generated closed captions or you can send it off to another company. There's one called Rev, I think it's Rev.com Rev and I think it's like $2aminute or something like that. So it's really, really affordable and they'll give you back everything that you need.

And then the other big thing is your playlists because a playlist is just another way to optimize and group content. So you can add your same titles, your keywords to your playlist. You can add a keyword to the playlist description and then you can literally go in and manually link your video to other videos in the same category that are ranking for the keywords and you can get the playlist to rank for the keyword. Wow.

I've even seen it. It doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen. You can actually even get a playlist to rank in Google Search. It doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen. And so that's. Those would probably be the main things. And then the other thing is, you know, don't forget that YouTube videos can rank in Google. And so again you've got a thumbnail. Make sure the thumbnail is visually attractive. Keep in mind it's going to be tiny on the user screen. So a lot of times the designers make these really beautiful and intricate thumbnails. But when it's an inch and a half wide on the person's screen, it doesn't really work as well.

True.

Simple, clean. And remember, that's going to be showing up everywhere. And again, the more clicks that that video can get, the higher it's going to rank and the more people are going to see it organically.

Very cool. Now, speaking of tools, we mentioned a few tools throughout this episode. I know you talked about Vidiq and.

We threw some other ones around.

You just mentioned Rev.com so we've talked about a lot of tools. Are there any other tools that are in your sort of marketing tool stack? They don't necessarily have to be for YouTube, but with the stuff you guys are doing, you know, in the advertising, YouTube, SEO kind of world, are there any other tools that you, you guys really kind of live by?

So I spend a lot of time in Ahrefs A H R E F s dot com.

It does everything. It's very, very good for your normal website SEO, but for keyword research and for again, checking to see if another video is getting backlinks from anywhere. So it ranks higher in Google. You can kind of check all that stuff.

Trying to think if there's anything else for just keyword ideas, then. One of my favorite combinations is a Chrome plugin called Keywords Everywhere. And then there's a website.

I always feel kind of weird saying this, especially on podcasts. It's keywordshitter.com I like it. And it's awesome. So you give it like one keyword idea and then it will just go through and give you every possible variation or.

Keyword combination that it can find. And then with the Keywords Everywhere plugin will actually tell you how many searches there are for each of those keywords. And so it's just a really fast and easy way to get a list and they can go through that list and kind of check everything. The other thing, Vidiq has its own actual dashboard. So it has the Chrome plugin, but you can also log into the Vidiq dashboard and it has an SEO tool. Now, it's important to keep in mind that YouTube doesn't actually give us any search traffic numbers. And so anything that's giving you search traffic for, for YouTube, it's really just best guess. So it's important to keep that in mind. But Vidiq's system seems to be really, really good, at least to give you a general idea of how popular a keyword is and then also what kind of related keywords are out there. And how competitive the keyword is. And so that's another great place to kind of find ideas, especially for those top level videos.

Do you recommend the paid version of that one for all this or is the free version of.

Okay, you can get away with the free version for a lot of things. The mid tier paid version is only $10.

Oh, nice. Okay.

So hopefully you'll make your money back.

Got it. Yeah. I thought it was way higher than that. For some reason they changed.

There's a $50 plan, and that has a lot more goodies in it, and that's what I use and I love it. But you can use the $10 one for pretty much everything. Cool. Really, the big difference is the $51 has some extra stuff built into it, and it's really designed more for the agency side of things, whereas the mid tier one is for the serious individual or for the smaller agency type stuff.

Cool. Got it.

All right. That was amazing. I think I actually used the keywords everywhere tool. We had a buddy who is pretty heavy on YouTube for content, not like this kind of stuff, and he uses that in a combination with Vidiq. Very similar to what you said. So cool. Awesome, man. Thank you, guys.

Good list. And I'm personally going to start looking for reasons to bring up keyword shitter on podcasts.

It's a great tool. It's one of my favorites. So if you ever get a chance.

That's awesome, man. No, it's free and it's free. Even better. I didn't know that. I just want to see what it comes with.

I don't even know what it totally does yet because I haven't gone and used it, but I'm going to start announcing it on every podcast.

You know that keyword shitter over there?

We're sponsored by keyword shitter now, as far as I'm concerned.

So you just got to own it. That's all it takes. Tristan. Guys, this is cool. So, all right, so first of all, everyone should go check out VideoFlywheel IO Evergreen. We'll put it in the show notes. Any other location you want to send folks to dive deeper.

That's really about it. The homepage Video Flywheel IO has more information as well, but probably just the Evergreen.

Yeah, purple Evergreen. That'd be cool. Yeah, Go Evergreen. Go Evergreen. Awesome, guys. Yeah, there's a lot to it, so we're definitely going to take some notes. We always take notes for episodes. So it's like, this is a very tactical one. I think people would like those for. Thanks for your time. I know we went a little over and we'll reach out if we get some questions about YouTube because you guys sound like the go to duo.

Our pleasure.

All righty. We'll talk soon. Thanks.

Thanks.

Take care.

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