Brian G. Johnson — Starting A Profitable YouTube Channel From Scratch

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf. Joe.

Hey, what is up, everybody? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Yo. Oh. Presented by evergreenprofits.com literally 30 seconds ago.

Joe said, I'm gonna make sure I say, presented by evergreenprofits.com I pointed at Joe and he missed it.

I thought it was my name. Is what? You know, I was like, oh, no, it's a company name.

That's right. Yeah. So the whole inflow chart presented by.

Evergreen Profits, and the reason we're saying that is because a lot of people don't realize that those are the same people. So we're the same people. It's just we were dumb and named our podcast something different. So anyway, it's all good.

Anyway. All right, so on today's Hustle and Flowchart podcast, brought to you by Evergreen Profits, we're talking to Brian G. Johnson. This dude is a YouTube just ninja. He was actually on one of my older podcasts, and I interviewed him back when he was really big into the SEO world and teaching SEO. Well, he took that knowledge and he applied it to YouTube stuff. And when we talked to Dan Brook a few weeks ago about YouTube, Dan actually said, you gotta get Brian on the podcast. Brian just kicks butt with YouTube. So we brought Brian back onto the show and we picked his brain about YouTube.

So, pretty much, yeah, we talked a lot about YouTube. So I'm not gonna even say what's stuff in YouTube. So just listen along. If you're interested in YouTube, if you.

Want to start from scratch with YouTube, we're going to show you how to start from scratch and build something up. Really, really cool.

Get it.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Brian. Great to have you on the show. This is actually the second time I've had the pleasure of interviewing you. We chatted once before with me, you and Josh Bartlett over on beyond the Hype. So it's good to have you back and be chatting with you again.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Matt, for having me. I'm excited to share about YouTube and video. It's really exciting. It's fascinating. So lot to talk about today.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, in 2018, Joe and I kind of said, this was actually after a conversation with Dan Brock. We had him on the podcast, we talked about YouTube, and after talking to him, we said, okay, we really need to put some focus on YouTube this year. We have done nothing in YouTube. I mean, YouTube has essentially been a video repository for Us, we make videos and we go, okay, let's throw them on YouTube. Nobody ever sees them except for the people we give the links to.

And.

And that's really been our experience with YouTube so far. So it's going to be a big focus of ours this year. So that's why we're so excited about this conversation and seeing what we can learn from you on the topic. But before we do, let's kind of go back a little bit and chat about how you got into YouTube and what you're doing now in the video world. What were you doing before this? And kind of take us through that story of how you transitioned into doing what you're doing now.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we hooked up, Matt, when I was releasing my book Trust Funnel. So I'm kind of a lifer at this online marketing thing as far as the lifeline goes. I think around 2000 is when people started getting into it. Maybe like 98 or something. I was full time in 2002, 2003, and basically after about 10, 12, 13 years, I wrote a book based on my experience with SEO and affiliate marketing and. And really just living the dream of being able to leverage online marketing to work for yourself. So I wrote Trust Funnel and that did really well. Like, the marketing buzz I got online was serious. A lot of people shared the heck out of it. I did a great job, and that's how we met. You kind of saw that, and I did that. And then there's the dreaded, well, now what the heck do I do? I did the book, I made money, I got the coaching deals, the book came, did what it was supposed to do, and I was busy with work. But at the same time, I always have a need to continue to create as a digital entrepreneur, like what we're doing right now with this podcast. And that really led me to video marketing and YouTube.

Yeah. I'm curious, what were you doing before? So that was YouTube seen as, like a promotional tool that you just wanted to kind of grasp to.

So it's funny, what I was doing was exactly what everybody does until they get serious with YouTube. Like, some people never get serious, right? And that is. I liked video. I did video. I never really focused on it, but I could, like, throw together an okay video on my phone or an imovie or something like that, and I would just host it on YouTube. It's like it's the land of where the videos go so they can get on your website.

Exactly.

And I did that whole thing. And like I said, I'd Launched my book trust funnel, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I kind of noticed people had said, you know, you're kind of heavy on video. You like video? And I thought I'd never really focused on YouTube. And yet I've got this background with SEO. I've ranked hundreds and hundreds of websites. I've drove millions of views, generated millions of dollars through SEO, and that's what really led me into YouTube.

Got it. Yeah. No, that's interesting because that's pretty much where we're at now. Yeah. For the last, what, close to 15 years or so of just being online doing stuff, we've just treated YouTube as, hey, let's upload it there. We'll embed it maybe on our website, too. We'll tell our email list about it. But in terms of SEO and ranking, it's just a total luck thing. Oh, yeah.

I mean, if you go on my YouTube channel now and go back to the beginning, there's like, videos of me just, like, throwing the ball around for my dog. Because it was back in the day where I'm like, ooh, I got this Kodak Zi8 or what was it, the zoom Flip cam. Flip cam. That's what it was. I had one of those cameras, and I just wanted to make videos for the sake of making videos and put them on YouTube, but I really had no sort of intention behind it. And still a lot of those videos are still on YouTube today. Like, it's just. It's literally been a repository. So, you know, what would you say to somebody who has used YouTube in that way? Would you recommend, you know, scrap it, let's start over, start a new YouTube channel and kind of start fresh? Or would you say, you know, work with what you got? You probably have a few existing subscribers, a few, you know, search terms that you're ranking for, and don't start from scratch. I mean, where would you take somebody who's in that scenario?

Great question. Common question. I think it really depends on where the channel is going to evolve to, what it's going to evolve to become, and what's on the channel now. If there's an alignment there, then that's absolutely fine. In other words, maybe you've got 30 or 40 videos on marketing, affiliate marketing, maybe, like how to do a podcast, if you're going to continue in that vein of content. And there might be some weird ones, like, we've all got those kind of weird videos, like our home life, and I don't know how they end up There, but they do. You can unlist those and at that point you can kind of sculpt and shape your YouTube channel to really feature the videos you want people to see. Now, if you're going to go in a completely new direction, then I think it makes sense to start a new channel. And one of the things since I feel like we're going to start heading more into, like, how do we really do this? It's super important to be really clear and really congruent with who you want to serve, what you're going to offer and what you're going to do. So that's really what you want to think about as you move forward. So really making that distinction with what do I have now? Where am I going? That's a great way to start really building up a channel with some authority.

Got it now. So you don't think that YouTube sort of categorizes channels as like, okay, this is just a repository channel, let's not pay attention to it. Because I know, you know, Google is obviously a very algorithmic based company that is kind of trying to keep its finger on the pulse of what's going on on, you know, various platforms. And when we talked to Dan Brock, he sort of hinted at the fact that maybe YouTube classifies channels like that as repository channels and not as content channels. And you may have a harder time ranking that. Have you ever heard anything along those lines or have any thoughts on that kind of thing?

Well, I think at the end of the day is if you want to do well on YouTube, it's absolutely critical that you optimize your videos for YouTube, which nobody does that until they're serious about YouTube. Because, like, we've all talked about the weird family videos we've uploaded to YouTube. There's no thinking about, you know, like, how do I optimize this to grow my business? So if you're just kind of like storing stuff, then you're not going to really build a following. But when you start to do that, that's when the algorithm is going to take note. For example, like so many marketers, you've seen these channels. It's like promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, and the whole, the whole objective, the marketer. And now this isn't a bad thing. It's not bad at all. But if you do want to leverage YouTube for what it can do, this won't work. You can't, you can't constantly be publishing videos with the goal of getting someone to click a link on YouTube to go to a landing page, an opt in page, a sales page. Because basically what YouTube wants is to keep people on the platform, just like we all want. Like I want people on my website, I want them on my channel or my podcast. I want them listening, watching and so on.

Got it. That leads us to a perfect time to talk about. Let's hear about your goals with YouTube. So your, your vision and how you use YouTube, you know, with kind of the purpose behind it. And then some ways we can optimize that to, you know, make the most out of it.

Well, one of the things that I saw when I started, like I said, I was in this transition period, like, well, what the heck do I do with my life now? Like, I'm a grown up, I have to do grown up things. And, and I had written the book and I thought, well, you know, people keep saying I am good at video or I've got potential and they just keep mentioning video and I haven't done that. So I started to dig in and really look at YouTube for what it is. And I started noticing stuff about YouTube that you don't get on Google or maybe not on a podcast, but there's probably some of it. So let me explain a little in more detail, like brand deals. I bet you get brand deals on podcasts, but I think that's a unique avenue where it happens all the time on YouTube. In fact, do you guys know or use TubeBuddy? Have you heard of TubeBuddy?

I've heard of it, don't much about it.

Yeah. So TubeBuddy is a tremendous tool that I bought myself and I really like. It's a browser plugin for Chrome or Firefox. It helps you to manage your channel. It helps you to make and manage thumbnails a lot faster. It helps you to identify opportunity with SEO and keywords and whatnot. So I was using this tool and then they contacted me to stream on their channel and they wanted to pay me. So like those kind of opportunities started coming a lot and I saw that that was something that happened on YouTube, like these brand deals. And I also noticed that, you know, YouTube has got this partner platform program where you can earn ad money. And I kind of like had this vision that there would be other ways to monetize within YouTube, which there is. I've made thousands of dollars with Super Chat. So if you guys do any live streaming at all, so do I. Every single time I live stream, I make money. So it's like I do the same kind of live stream I would do on Facebook, but I get paid I also can do my affiliate marketing. So there was all these avenues that I saw in ways in which I could build up a channel, offer value, share ideas on how to leverage the platform, and in turn, I would have an opportunity to monetize the channel, monetize the audience, monetize the eyeballs, and watch time. And that's really why I wanted to jump into YouTube, because I saw this as kind of a unique opportunity. And one of the things that I think about today is, like, I really don't worry, just like Dan Brock did. I'm going to ask you, did Dan Brock mention anything about, like, feeling like he doesn't need to worry about traffic? Like, he's more in control of his traffic today, 100%.

He was. He was basically saying, it's the most consistent traffic. It's very predictable, you know, and he's not doing any paid ads either. You know, it's all organic.

Yeah. Yeah. So. So there you go. So that was one of the things that I really saw, is this is a way where I can focus on creating content. I am a content creator. I'm a great marketer. I've sold millions of dollars with affiliate stuff. But what I love to do is, like, make stuff, like make a video, make a blog post, write a book. And I thought, this is a way where I can take that and then build up a channel and then leverage the channel to make money. And it's working exactly according to plan. I mentioned how I get paid with a tubebuddy to stream. Well, I got a message from them the other day, and they say, we'd love for you to show up to VidCon. It's in California in June, and it will pay for your hotel. We're going to pay for your flight and wear the tubebuddy T shirt and maybe stop by the booth and just hang out with people for a bit. And I thought, well, yes, okay, so it's all working out really well. And it's just about really understanding how to develop a strategy that makes that happen. And that's why I was mentioning it's kind of the opposite what I do and what Dan Brock does as to what a lot of affiliate marketers do where the entire goal of their video is to take a visitor from YouTube to a landing page to make money. And that's really tough because you're basically sending people off YouTube all day long, and you want to do the opposite. Hmm.

Gotcha.

Okay, now I'm curious. You piqued my interest with the whole live chat thing. And how every time you do a live chat, you earn off of these super comments. How does that work? What even is a super comment?

Yeah, so Basically this is YouTube looking at how do they monetize their platform? And they just took a cue card from Twitch. So Twitch is a big streaming community, mostly gamers, but there's some other, like, streamers that will play music or recite poems or cook and whatnot. And Twitch had this neat ability where people can sponsor the channel for like three, four, five bucks per month. A lot of people really, they get their entertainment from these, these streams. And YouTube saw this and, and they've been rolling out their live streaming. So a year ago, you couldn't live stream on your phone. They were way behind, but they were working on it. You could livestream with like obs to your desktop. And what they did was they basically took some of the functionality that Twitch has been focused on. Whereas a user that's on the platform can literally say, I really like Brian's content or Dan Brock's content, click a button while they're live and say, like, here's $20. Thank you so much for everything you do. And like I said, pretty much, you know, at this point, it's not like I'm. I'm paying my mortgage, but I do live stream stream once a week on Fridays, and I usually make at least 100 bucks or so. So it's not, you know, it's pretty good.

It's. I mean, it's an extra way to monetize. You start compounding these different things that you can monetize on YouTube and, and it's great. And yeah, we noticed that you do have the ads on your YouTube videos as well. So that's another stream. Is that, how's that working? Are there any things that you'd recommend?

Yeah, you know, it's, it's. Well, here's, here's where it gets exciting, you see, because at. At the end of the day, anything that you really want to do online, you've got to build an audience. And that takes skill, it takes talent, it takes hard work, some good decisions. But the more of those you make, the more good decisions you make, the easier it becomes to grow the channel. And at this point right now, my channel is really starting to grow fast. Like, I'm increasing my subscriber rate right now by 45% each month.

Nice.

So literally, like two or three months ago, I was getting 12 or 1300 subscribers a month. In January, I did around 2,200 subscribers. And right now I think I'm close to 2,500 subscribers a month. So it's starting to really grow fast. And Dan Brock experienced this exact thing. He kind of went from, he was doing good, he was doing well, and then it started to explode. And I'm working my butt off to really publish videos that the viewing audience likes, because then YouTube really pushes them throughout the platform. And then all of a sudden, you go from making a few hundred bucks, a car payment with ads to making a house payment with ads, and you show up on a live stream and you don't have 40 people, you've got 150 people, which I'm starting to hit those numbers now. Not quite 150, but definitely 100, you know, 100 consistently over the last three or four weeks.

That's awesome.

So it's really about understanding that if you deliver the value to the audience and you take care of their needs, then they will reward you. They're gonna binge watch on your content, they're gonna come back again and again. And that puts you in a very unique category on YouTube. Probably, I don't know, 5, 10% of the channels really do that well, and YouTube promotes the heck out of them because, not because they're big channels, but because they're. They're holding the attention of the audience. And that's what YouTube wants because they show more ads.

So. Yeah, right, right.

Actually, I want to talk about one more monetization model that I noticed, and then we'll shift into kind of what you would recommend for somebody starting out on YouTube. But I noticed on YouTube that you had a link to your Patreon account. Can you kind of explain what Patreon is, how you make money with it? And then also I'm curious how it's doing for you as well.

Yeah. So Patreon and then the affiliate offer, I. We can talk about. Both of those are pretty interesting. So Patreon is an easy way to do a membership site. You don't pay anything. There's no software to figure out. You basically sign up and you've got a Patreon account. And then at that point, you literally add some different offers to your Patreon. And what happens is, for example, I have a monthly live stream where I go really into depth and I share case studies. It's more like behind the scenes creator sharing with other creators.

And that's going fantastic. I also, because of my marketing background, I thought, how can I hack this and add even more value? And I spent a number of days putting together A mini course. A YouTube mini course. So you can access.

18 video YouTube course. And that's my offer. So when you land on my Patreon page, it's like, hey, join my Patreon. It's 20 bucks a month. It's not going to break your bank account. I'll share the very strategies and tactics that are working for me right now to grow my channel. We'll hang out, you'll get this extra stuff I don't talk about on my channel. It's 20 bucks a month. It's like, skip a few Starbucks and you're good to go. Now that's done actually really well. And I was able to scale that another income source to I think about $1000. Within two months, I hit a high of 1300 bucks. And now I'm. I'm right around that same amount, I think a thousand bucks a month, which definitely it's not a lot, but all of these things, you know, a thousand here, 500 from ads here, another. Another couple hundred from super chats. Yeah. Affiliate promotions and so on. It really starts to add up for sure.

And now let's talk about the. The affiliate promotion you mentioned.

Yeah. So this is. This is kind of fun. And the key, I think, is how you do this in a way that you can actually do an affiliate promotion. You can send people off the site, so you can generate the affiliate commission, but you keep people on the video long enough to outrank all the other videos. And I literally just did this. So it's pretty cool. I a role with another YouTuber. In fact, I can hook you up if you'd like. His name is Nick Nimmin, a brilliant guy.

Yeah. Cool.

And we started coming up together at the same time, and we just kind of decided, you know, we're gonna form our own little gang.

It's a good thing.

We're just gonna kind of figure this out. And he came up with a really neat membership site that offers graphics and transitions and the kind of stuff that YouTubers would want for their editing. So I came up with a video around YouTube video editing tips and tricks. And I targeted those kind of keywords and I. And I really spent time on it. You know, it's. The edit probably took 10 hours. Like, who does that except a YouTuber? Nobody.

I scripted out the video. I had some B roll and I shared some fun ideas and the video did well. Like, my audience was like, wow, this was such a unique angle on video editing. In fact, I don't. It's simple and I can do this, no matter if I'm on a phone or this or that. So the audience responded. And then at the very end I mentioned like one of the things you can do is you can use these transitions, you can incorporate this kind of B roll, you can use this YouTube specific call to action for subscribers and, and you can get that at Nick's site. And sure enough, I've generated again, it's, you know, a hundred bucks here. I think I've made a handful of hundred dollar sales and probably 20 monthly recurring sales at 10 bucks a pops. But again, you got all of this stuff adding up and it's not hard to hit 100k a year. And you don't. It's not like we're talking about a million subscribers or even 100,000, which clearly, you know, I will get to 100,000. But I got the brand deals when my channel was 7,8000 subscribers and affiliate offers and.

Have this big approach to monetization. You can piece all of these things together where you still can grow a channel, you still can make money and you don't have to have that huge subscriber base.

I think that's what's nice about YouTube is it allows pretty much anyone, if they were dedicated, if they're interesting enough on video or at least confident enough to speak on a specific topic. Doesn't seem like it really takes that long to get a good, you know, some good opportunities coming your way. Different monetization, things starting to compound up. I mean like you said, it sounds like a killer lifestyle business for someone even just starting out who if they wished but for a business like just out of necessity for ourselves, you know, we want to start getting more traffic but for our company is to kind of revamp what we already have. So I'm kind of curious now going down that vein of what would you do to optimize a current channel or maybe if it's someone just starting out. What are maybe the keys? Like the top three things that you would do.

Yeah, it's funny, that's what you want to focus on. You really focus. And they're not so much things, they're phases. So anytime you talk about creating something, that thing will go through phases. The first phase is coming up with a strategy which unfortunately a lot of people don't do and they struggle. You can't create something that's memorable. You can't create something that stands out from the rest. If you don't take the time to figure out, generally speaking where you're going. You guys get it Marketers get it and they'll create that strategy. That's the first step. That's pretty, pretty easy for guys like us. The second step is really dealing with the technical hurdles that video possesses. Now what I like to do is I take people through a five step process where we identify the video has to have a look. Does that mean it's got to be fancy? No. Like if you've got bookshelves, you're good to go. That's very much a YouTube look. It looks really cool. You just have to know how to light it. So that would be the second. The second point in phase two is really looking at the five most important technical elements of video. So a look, which is the backdrop, the lighting, the audio, the video editing, and then the camera quality. When you focus on all of those things over a period of time, you increase the quality of the videos fast. What happens for a lot of people is they want to make videos for fun, they're busy, they don't really take the time to think about like, okay, these are the five most important things. What am I weakest in right now? Like that audio is crackly. Or the lighting was like, I had like the kind of Frankenstein shadows. I need to fix that. If you do that, you take what normally takes two years and you reduce that down to three weeks. And at that point you transition through phase two and then you go into phase three. And I like to think of that as you really take a good video, like technically it's good, and you focus on the delivery, on the message, on really understanding what the audience is going to respond to. And then it's only a matter of time and you publish a video that gains traction and the next one gains traction. So when you really think about these phases, from strategy to technical ability and then finally to really polishing and connecting with an audience, you can take again what might take a few years and condense it down into a few months.

It's all about consistency, I would imagine, with you.

Yeah, exactly. And that's. And what's really interesting about the consistency, Matt, is.

Early on, I believe it makes a lot of sense not to be too consistent because you suck.

The best way to unsuck yourself is to publish a lot of videos. Your lighting's off. So, okay, like have the audacity to publish anyway and just keep publishing because you're making a thumbnail, you're optimizing, you're looking at, you're doing all this stuff and you get better at everything, but you're focused on the Lighting. Then you get the lighting fixed. So you publish a lot in phase two, and then in phase three, you're like, okay, I'm a big boy now. I publish on Tuesday and Thursday. Welcome to my channel. It's about not just sharing your message, but amplifying your message. You create that value proposition and you stay consistent and you publish the best videos you can. And things get. They get pretty exciting.

Now, when it comes to the content you post, how willing are you to vary the content you post outside of your normal topics?

Yeah, I don't ever do that.

Never. So let's say you're really passionate about two niches. That's two YouTube channels.

Yeah.

Okay.

Like, look at Dan Brock. What does he cover?

He's all over the place, but different affiliate offers have their own channels. And.

Well, I mean, I don't know if he is all over the place, as.

Far as I know, at least.

Yeah, I feel like he does affiliate marketing.

Well, he does, but a lot of the stuff that he teaches is also. So he's got his main channel that everybody sort of sees him all the time on and that teaching affiliate marketing. But then he's got like 10 other channels that are in sub niches where he's making a different style of video in each of those other channels.

Yes, exactly. So when I think of Dan, I think of deadbeat super affiliate channel, and he's very focused to that niche.

Right, right. Yeah. No, it's interesting because he put the bug in our ear because we do affiliate marketing in addition to our podcast, in addition to our platform, which has just all sorts of written content on our blog and online. So, yeah, he was almost tempting us to pretty much shut down the channel because we have never focused on subscribers. That was an afterthought. We never thought of it as like another email list almost, which it seems like it can be. You know, it's pulling in people whenever you want to. So, you know, we're. We're basically in the process now of splitting out the different affiliate things, you know, videos that we record and make a specific channel on those. And, you know, with that.

Absolutely. That's. That's a great way to do it. And what's really neat is like, you can do both, right? You can absolutely create an affiliate channel or a marketing channel and create content to keep people on YouTube, but we have to make money. And the way we do that is usually with like an affiliate offer or our own offer, which means we need to get people to a landing page, and that's okay. I send people off YouTube all the time. I'm just aware of the need to also keep the watch time high, keep the average view duration high. And Dan does a great job of that too. He's got it down to a science. He understands the need to accomplish both.

Now, when it comes to the length of the video, is there something you shoot for?

A really, really great question. And the thing you want to think about is that the YouTube algorithm does an amazing job at measuring how well people are responding in a positive manner to your video, primarily with watch time metrics. But what's interesting is, like, it's not just. It's not watch time, it's average view duration, it's average percentage viewed. It's audience retention, which audience retention is so important that they feel the need to cut it up into two thing. It's like relative audience retention and absolute audience retention. And these are the things they tell us. And then if you read the geeky white papers, you read things about expected watch time per impression.

Oh, wow, okay.

And so what YouTube really does is they measure how users interact with a video. And generally speaking, the longer they watch, the better. Now, what you don't want to do is like, make long videos. Now, I've got a lot of my videos lately. They've been 10 minutes, they've been 13 minutes. But one of the things I think about is I'll work really hard to take what would take a normal human being 22 minutes to get across in video, and I'll condense that down to 14 minutes. Like, literally today I was editing sentences, and I was taking a sentence down that had 12 words, down to seven, and then I did it again and again. And basically I took my first minute, which I felt this next video I'm working on, the first minute was a little soft, and I brought it down to 42 seconds, which is in alignment with where I want to be. So what I try to do is to always honor the viewer. And what they want is the information as soon as possible. Don't tell me about your brand or why you're great or what you had for dinner. Just give me the information I want. And I try to take if it's a long subject or a short subject, and basically shorten it as much as possible. So by taking that again, 20 minute video and condensing it down to 12 or 13 minutes has really worked well for me.

And is that an editing thing like you said, or is that really kind of doing the practice and just delivering it when you're recording More succinct?

Yes, all of the above.

No, I know.

It's looking at the script and saying, okay, that sentence is 13 words. Can you get it down to seven words?

I can. Okay.

And you have to measure, like, is it worth my time? Well, in the first minute, probably. Because if you don't hook someone in the first minute, you're done. Sure. So then it's having a really crisp edit and clean. And it's also when you're filming, taking the time to say, you know, you just flubbed your lines there. And that's okay, because if you were an actor, no one expects you to nail every line all the time. So you do the line again. And this took practice. Like, you do feel like a crazy person and you're talking to this camera and there's lights on, but over time, you understand that here's where the secret sauce is. You want to know the truth, Matt?

Absolutely. I always do.

It scares me to share this with people. But the most important thing is how we come across on camera. And at the end of the day, a lot of people wouldn't tell people that, but I want to see people succeed. And at the end of the day, anybody, regardless of age or race or creed, can move forward. Experience or lack thereof, can move forward and get better. And when you say, look, I need to create a good video, it doesn't mean you need a $2,000 camera. It just means you need to be able to communicate clearly and concentely with your audience. And the more you practice that, the better you get. And it doesn't take years. You can get it. You can do good in a few weeks. You just have to say, like, be good on camera. And it is scary and whatnot, but, like, having a script not to read on camera but next to you is helpful, you know?

So what's your problem?

If you're afraid to be on camera, that's okay. Who cares? No problem. Do a voiceover, do screen capture, use B roll. You can create a powerful video. Heck, a lot of sales videos don't have the actual product creator in them. And they do great, right?

That's true. Yeah. So it sounds like you're a fan of totally scripting the entire video out. And then you're. Yeah. You said you keep the script next to you. You're not really using the teleprompter.

Well, I do. Here's the thing. So.

I'm really good at taking a few bullet points and creating a great video.

Right now I'm in this really weird place because my channel's really taking off, and I'm working super hard to publish really good videos, and it's paying off. So I'm kind of in this, like, almost leaning on perfectionism to a point, to a fault. But at the same time, 45% growth month to month is pretty substantial. So I'm willing to double down. But what I found is what you mentioned, Matt, is just by taking the time to understand what you want to communicate in the video before you step in front of the video, the camera is all you need to do.

About 10 days ago, I created a video. Did you hear about how YouTube updated the partner program?

I've heard some things about it. I know there was some people. I know there was a big issue with demonetization recently and stuff like that. I don't know if that's the same thing or not, but.

Yeah, exactly. So if you're a YouTuber and you're 17 years old, YouTube hates you. YouTube sucks, and they're out to get you, and they hate small channels. And what that means is like, the platform lost its mind for 48 hours. It was insanity. Like, YouTube hates us. I hate this platform. It's Jake Paul's fault, you know, and so I felt like it was my responsibility to address this. Like, you know, a lot of the people that watch me, that watch Dan Brock and Nick Nimmin, the people I roll with, you know, they want to hear our opinion. So I created. I came down to my office. I had a sheet of paper. I listed out 12 bullet points. I talked about the opportunity. I talked about the analogy of it's like it used to be a marathon, and now the marathon's got six hurdles. So it used to be hard, and now you have to jump six times. I mean, and that's kind of how it is. It's not like this end of the world apocalypse. But drama is a very real thing. And I was able to create a killer video with just the bullet points. But if I really want to hit it out of the park, I will go ahead and script out more of a video word for word. But I don't read it like you said.

Got it.

Now, I have a question about grabbing attention. And you mentioned earlier, you kind of got to grab them within the first few seconds of making the video. Do you have any tips or techniques you use to grab attention quickly? Because I know I've seen a lot of videos that follow this kind of formula where there's like a 20, maybe a 10 to 20 second intro where they tell you what you're about to learn, and then it goes to kind of like a little intro clip kind of thing, and then it goes into the content. What are your thoughts on making sure you grab the attention quickly so that people are sticking around?

The first thing I always do is I ask myself, what do people really want? Let me give you an example.

I did a video on YouTube tags. It was one of my first videos that did pretty darn well. It ranked in a really competitive space. It ranked for YouTube tags out of like 50 million or 40 million video results. I think right now, it's number three or something like that. And I asked myself, you know, what is it that viewers really want when they're searching for YouTube tags views? It's not about how to, like, tag your video. They don't care about that. They want views. So how I opened up the video was, you can absolutely drive more views when you understand how to leverage the power of relevancy with your YouTube tags. And on the screen, I'm literally pointing, and when I said the word views, like, you get the little success ding that went off. You see the text on the screen. So you see it, you hear it. I'm like, oh, that's what I want. And then from there, I did cut to the intro, which lots of ideas on that. Been doing all kinds of fun things with, like, really creating the information that I want to add to benefit me, to get the subscribers, but doing it in a way that is accessible to the audience. It's fresh, it's different. And then once I got into the content, I showed the proof. So it's a lot of. It's interesting. I take a lot of what I learned about marketing and copy and whatnot, and I apply it to my videos, and holy smokes, it works like gangbusters.

I mean, I can imagine that because you're just applying. We do the same exact thing. We apply marketing knowledge that most of us all know and put it in a slightly different niche or a different platform, and you just open yourself up to a whole new audience.

Yeah, exactly. And it's really fun. So, like, I did that again in one of my recent algorithm videos, and it's. It's really doing well. Like, in the last 48 hours, the video has driven 400 views, which the video has been out for two to three weeks now. So it's like, if it's driving 200 views a day, that's great. And it's getting pushed out into more and more videos across suggested. And in the first few seconds. It's like the thing I opened up with is what the audience wants, which is views. So I mentioned you can absolutely drive 6, 7, even 800 views per day with just one video. When you understand how to leverage suggested videos on YouTube. And I literally, as I'm saying that, you see me then you saw screen capture inside of analytics hovering over like the analytical bar and it's 600 views, 700 views. So just kind of aligning all these elements together and I tell you it's a lot of fun. It's science, it's art, it's creativity, and, and you get to make money, so it's pretty. And they send you to VidCon.

Just you talking about that video that you made and the intro you put on it actually piqued my interest on the topic of that video specifically. So when you actually look at the recommended videos on other videos and you try to make sure your videos get placed in those recommended videos as well, is that kind of the trick there?

So it's.

The video I mentioned. I had a target that I wanted to show up on and I did. I'm basically in the play next section. I'm on the top or number two video in the sidebar. You don't always get there. And again, it's based on what I mentioned earlier, those plethora of watch time metrics and it's really, can you hold people's attention past two minutes? If you can, congratulations, you're playing the bars. You're a pub band, you're playing the bars. If you can hold it for three and a half minutes, you're playing venues, 1500, 20, 500 seats, you can get five, six, seven minutes.

You're opening up for the Rolling Stones in the stadium. And if you can hit 10 minutes, then your rock star status world tour, it's just really learning how to structure this stuff in a manner that, that is fun, it's engaging.

And that's what makes it fun. You know, when I, when I'm talking about this, I'm thinking about how I started and. And I knew I had to be engaging and. And what I forgot was I already was. So it was, I tried, I tried and it was just way too much. It was too much humor, it was too quirky and it didn't work. But I figured that out, you know, and I dialed back and then now I'm at this point, this place where it's fun, it's quirky, there's some energy there, there's results there, and it just flows really Nicely. And that's, that's just doing it, you know, and applying and whatnot.

I love it. Now, now I know you, you come from an SEO background. How much, how much sort of SEO preparation goes into creating content and videos, you know, for, for making tags and titles and your description. How much do you go and use some sort of tool, figure out what keywords you want to go after and then make sure those are in your tags, Title, description, all that kind of stuff. Is it that methodical or do you go and make the video you want to make and then figure out what kind of keywords to go rank for?

Yeah, really good point. And you always want to know the keywords you're targeting as well as the title of the video prior. Now, the truth of the matter is most people don't do that. They make the video and then they, some of them don't even think about any of that. They just like me and my dog on a Sunday or like I went to the zoo. But in our case, I really look at it and the reason why is, number one, we mentioned the word hook. So like, what is it that's going to compel people to click? So it's not just SEO, it's Gary Halbert, copywriting and compelling people to click. Because that increases the watch time because it's measured per impression. So you really need people to click. But it's also got to contain the keywords. So the more you really think about all these things and you come up with a title that's compelling, it does have the keywords. For example, one of the things I've been playing up with lately is Dirty Little Secrets. Like, I've got some videos, Dirty Little Secrets. In fact, the video I published yesterday.

In the thumbnail at the top, it says Dirty Secrets YouTube channel growth 2018. It's like dirty Secrets. And then I open up and I said, so in this video, I'm going to share how to grow your channel and I'm going to share some of the strategies and tactics that not a lot of people are talking about, but I am. And that was compelling. And again, what's interesting is you think about the congruency between the audience and the creator, what the audience wants, what the creator creates. And because I took the time to think about my messaging and the keywords and what I would target, and the hook was like, secret, I'm going to share, seldom shared secrets or dirty secrets. Then when I created that thumbnail and I created the hook, it all kind of works together to drive those Results. As far as the SEO I do use, I use TubeBuddy, which is an amazing tool. I also have been developing a wicked SEO tool that really takes all the knowledge that I've had with Google SEO. And then I started applying it to YouTube. And we've got a way to measure video results based on subscribers, views, likes. We've studied tens of thousands of videos through software and machine learning. And that tool is called morningfame. And it gives you an opportunity to really leverage relevancy, which is basically the easiest way to get views fast because watch time is important. It's the biggest thing. But you can't take relevancy out of the equation or you get all weird results. Like if someone's searching for how to groom my poodle, they've got to show poodle results. So the more you're able to select a keyword phrase that's not as competitive, the better you can do early on. And then as you move forward, you can target more competitive terms and so on.

Got it. Yeah, we'll have to check out that tool because we use the same or a different tool, but because we do a lot of SEO for our own blog, Matt kind of heads that up.

Yeah, we use like Ahrefs and Semrush and things like that. And I imagine those tools, you could still apply what you find in those to YouTube as well, to find good keywords to go after, I would imagine.

But kind of the thing you want to think about is you always want to be thinking about.

These are the top 20 videos that are ranking for these search terms. And what are the videos and the channels that publish those videos? How much authority does the channel have and does the individual video have? And one of the things I like to think about is a weak link. So I'm looking for a video with a small subscriber base that doesn't have a lot of views. And those two things combined together tell me that the watch time metrics are going to be low because. I know, because YouTube told me that statistically speaking, channels with less subscribers don't drive as much watch time because subscribers watch videos longer. So that's why you kind of have this competitive thing with bigger channels and whatnot. So when you really can break down the results and measure the authority of individual videos is when things get pretty exciting.

I like that. That's a great way to spot some opportunities out there, some gaps in the market you can just hop up there and fill. Obviously, you got to get some subscribers of your own first, but that'll come in time.

Honestly, you don't like I published. I mean, I had a few. But let me give you an example. I published a video when My channel was 24 days old. I probably had 500 subscribers. I bet you 300 didn't give a crap. They didn't. You know, Brian said, subscribe. You know, they're off on vacation. And I published a video that within about two weeks was driving 100, 200 views a day. That video today still drives that amount of views, and it's driven close to 100,000 views. Now I've got another video that's driven 250,000 views, and that video was published a week and a half later. So my channel was like 37 days old. So when you're able to leverage rel, like, let me break it down. Everybody was targeting how to edit on your phone or imovie editing on your phone or imovie editing on your iPad, but hardly any videos. And it's still true today. None of the videos that rank for imovie app tutorial, none of the videos contain the word app.

That is odd.

So I'm like, okay, I'm going to use app. And within a week, I was number two or three for iMovie App Tutorial in Search. Within two weeks, I was number one. By week three, I started getting pushed into suggested videos because there was that gap. So it's really understanding how to read the videos that are ranking in the top 20.

That's interesting. Yeah. That was actually going to be the next sort of last rabbit hole I wanted to dive down with you was once you start using YouTube, how do you get that initial traffic to your videos? How do you start getting that initial momentum? Obviously, people like us, we've got a mailing list and blog and other platforms that will help us jumpstart. But a lot of people are going to be listening to this, going, I don't have any way to jumpstart it yet. What you just said, I think, is that jumpstart.

Yeah, it's totally that. Jumpstart. In fact, what's really interesting is you can actually get a pretty good visual representation as to how well the videos are optimized for a keyword. In any browser, you literally, you copy the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and then in a browser, you go to find, and then you go to find again, and you basically paste that into the find, and it will highlight the video title and the description if it contains the exact keyword phrase. So when you do that, if you See all the videos in the top 20 or a bunch of them are lighting up, they're all highlighted. It means that this is going to be competitive and all the creators are targeting the same term. And maybe I can think different and come up with another strategy. Like, it took me a while to figure this out. You know, I was like, hey, how to get, how to get. What's the keyword on YouTube? It's how to get more views on YouTube. Super competitive. We're talking like 300 million results. And after I failed horribly, I thought, well, let's try something new. And I targeted increase YouTube views. It went from 300, 200 million results to 8 million. So like we're talking 5% of the amount of videos and I rank. So it's really about looking for that opportunity and then leveraging that to get the subscriber base and then you can move on to world domination.

I love it. Domination. So one question, selfish question, since, you know, we're kind of doing a cleanup crew of our cleanup job of our YouTube channel, but it also holds some of our affiliate videos that are direct training per these products that we also sell. So it's branded as such. You know, it looks like completely different videos compared to the other ones that we post. Would you suggest or does Google or not Google but YouTube? Same guys. Do they penalize you if you upload the same video to another channel that you create? Create that's brand new branded for that? Should you unlist it?

Yeah, yeah. You know, here's kind of the rule that I play by and it seems to work well for me. If it seems like it could be shady, don't do it. If someone like, if it seems like it could be like funny and someone would say, I'm not sure, like, definitely that's something that YouTube frowns upon.

Right.

Because could you imagine like back in the day, I did it, right? Like I downloaded videos, I re uploaded them, I targeted new keyword phrases. And then after getting my butt handed to me numerous times by Google and de indexing, I'm just like, hey, I'm playing by the rules. And that's kind of how I roll forward.

Right. And more of the thought with what we're doing is existing videos that are on our current YouTube channel, moving them to a different YouTube channel because they're kind of off topic and then sort of either unlisting them or just flat out deleting them off the channel they're on right now.

Right, right.

That's true. So it's not like it's it's scammy or anything?

No, no, no. It's. It's literally a cleanup is the idea.

Essentially reorganizing.

You could definitely do that. Especially like if you kind of re edited and maybe added a bumper or something, then that would be a different file size and whatnot and I think you'd be fine.

Okay.

So, you know, honestly, what I usually try to do is I really focus.

When you start optimizing videos on YouTube and you're growing a channel, I try to focus on like doing just that and moving forward with the video structure and the template and just following a structured plan of attack so you are able to get those results and whatnot. A lot of times what I see is people have good videos, but you really got to create a video for YouTube in order to do well. And I think it's better to do that, like when you're ready to grow a channel to like, we're going to publish videos moving forward in the future based on a script. Now, the script could be bullet points. Like I've got scripts that were 16 words, but they kept me on point. You know, I've had scripts that are 2,000 words, but there is a structure to those scripts. There is the hook, there's the intro, there's the call to action, there's certain types of editing and so on. And I'm making it sound complex and it can be, but just starting off, keeping it simple, focusing on what's most important, you can do really well.

Yeah. And I imagine over time I know this has been true for us when it comes to blogging content and that sort of thing is that that formula, the intro, grab attention, tell them what you're going to tell them, you have your call to action, all that sort of flow that you put to your videos, it eventually just becomes a second nature thing where you're doing it without thinking about it. You're just so used to doing it.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't have to think about any of it now. In fact, we're on this call and I'm sharing examples of calls to action and intros and hooks because I've done it enough. And anything that you do repeatedly, you get better at.

Very cool.

Nice. Yeah.

So we do have a few questions that we like to ask everybody at the end of our calls and then we'll go ahead and wrap things up.

Just to let you know, I've literally got maybe three minutes.

Okay, cool. We only need two.

Okay.

You've got your book trust funnel and you've Got your book tube ritual. Do you have any other books that you recommend people read that you find yourself recommending a lot of?

Yeah, there's a bunch of them. So I've got How the world sees you sitting by Me. That's by Sally Hogshead. Amazing book. Primal Branding is another great book on how to really create a brand that stands out and separates you in the marketplace.

Those are a few of the books that I've really enjoyed quite a bit. What's another one I'm thinking of right now?

Essentialism. Have you guys heard of Essentialism?

Love it. I love that book.

You know, like, having focus and a mission that you're on. Like, I'm gonna do a podcast. It's gonna be an awesome podcast. I'm not gonna make episodes to make stuff. I'm gonna make really good episodes. And it doesn't always start off that way in the beginning, but over time with that focus, with the whole essentialism kind of theory, it's so powerful.

100% agree. We try to live it every day, but that's kind of difficult sometimes. So to wrap it up, where should people go to learn more about you? Check out your stuff and all that.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Matt, for having me. It's been a pleasure to reconnect. Thank you again. Brian G. Johnson, TV on YouTube. BriangJohnson, TV on the Web.

I'm not really lost, you know, I. I can try to find me and you'll probably just find me. So for Brian G. Johnson, I'll probably pop up somewhere. Yeah.

Brian g.johnson on YouTube. We did a search before jumping on and your videos loaded our screen, so pretty easy guy to find.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Very cool. Thanks so much for joining us and doing this. We learned a lot of great stuff and maybe, maybe we'll do a round three sometimes.

Awesome, my friend. Thank you for having me. It was nice to catch up.

Thanks, Brian.

Absolutely.

All right.

Thank you.

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You're awesome.