How To Position Yourself and Grow Your Business with YouTube Featuring Evan Carmichael and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #439

We've had some. I was helping one Genius Network member who's in a 25k group and he's only got a couple hundred subscribers and he was, he's getting a five to six figure deal every month from his business. That's like revenue into his business, like almost an extra seven figures a year into his business off of a couple hundred subscribers. Because the people who are watching are his ideal clients. If you'd like to join world renowned.

Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com welcome everyone. Hopefully today's session will be a total game changer for you and it'll really help you even if you don't have your own YouTube channel. Evan has helped some of the most famous people on the planet basically to be the wind behind their sales when it comes to video and also to teach them all of the little methodologies and strategies that are needed. But Evan, yeah, please give the background on kind of how you got into doing this, including from your humble beginnings because most people would have given up and you didn't. And since so much of your brand is around believe, I think that's important too. So let's. If you could just kind of talk a little bit about yourself, that would be great.

The most awkward thing of all time for introvert, you know, Canadian. But yeah, Evan Carmichael. I'm a big believer that your purpose comes from your pain. That whatever you struggled with the most as a human is what you want to help other people. Because you struggled a lot and you have, you've come through it and your advice can change people's lives. And so I make videos on my own channel helping people believe in themselves more. And as a result I've helped a lot of other experts, thought leaders. Joe doesn't like the term thought leaders. I think he was result leaders. But people who have a message and have been through things to try to help serve on a wider scale. I think YouTube is the single most important marketing platform for most people in the 2022 environment. People are going to YouTube to learn now to search. It's massively become the education platform of choice for people. If you think about what you're an expert at, what, what problems you've had to overcome and where you struggled, what you could share with the world, that advice, where are they going to get it from where people aren't going to their school libraries anymore. Like where are they going to get it? They go to YouTube and they search and that's where you could show up and it could lead to lead generation for your business. It could lead to, you know, book deals and brand deals and speaking gigs and whatever it is that you're trying to sell. It starts with education, it starts with caring, starts with service and a group like this, if you're around Joe, you're a, you're a, you're a good person. That's what I've learned. If you're in Joe's network, if you like Joe, if you're here, you've got a really good heart and you're a giver and you care. And so I love all of, all of the genius. You know, anything Joe touches is usually full of amazing humans. And so how do you get that message out to the world to share? Well, Joe wanted me to share my journey. Yeah, 25 subscribers in year one. So I started April 2009 and then a hundred subscribers, subscribers and then three, 44. And, you know, took a while to get up anywhere we got, I guess, update April 2022. I don't. We're at three something right now. But it definitely took a long time to, to get going and to get any kind of traction and results. And a lot of this was me being just shy and introverted and, and not feeling good enough and not feeling like my voice mattered and not feeling like anybody would care. And all of those things that maybe you're facing right now in your career, your path. And it took me a long time to kind of overcome that. Plus, YouTube's also evolved, so it's a place where now people are going to learn, where when I started in 2009, sharing education, people thought I was crazy. I was not Nostradamus. I did not know that it would become this. I did not predict it. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And I'm a visual guy, so I'd much rather, much rather see things and just read about it in a book. So why YouTube? YouTube 1. Your content lives forever. So the content that you're making now In a, in six months and a year and two years and five years and 10 years is still getting you views, attention, traffic, interest, spreading your message out to the world. It's unlike every other social media platform. If you look at Instagram or Snap or TikTok, like the videos or the content that you make, nobody cares about it a week later. Whatever you Posted today on TikTok or Instagram, nobody cares about it in a week. And so you're constantly on this hamster wheel whereas YouTube, the videos from three years ago are still getting me views, the videos from five years ago are still getting me views, attention, business, and growing the message that I want to put out to the world. So if we're talking elf, if you're familiar with Joe's terminology, if you're a hardcore member here, you know what ELF means. If you're new, welcome aboard. It's easy, lucrative and fun are the key tenants of a Joe Polish business. So part of that is getting leverage, you know, and YouTube is the ultimate leverage. The second thing is YouTube pays you. So unlike Instagram, you're getting paid to make content. And YouTube has thousands of people out there who are salespeople selling ads against your videos. And so while you're building your influence, while you're getting more reach for your message, you're also getting paid from the ads that run on your videos. So unlike Instagram, Facebook, most of the other platforms, if they have a monetization program, it's very poor. Where YouTube has by far the best one. So you're getting paid now to spread your message. And a good short term goal would be to have your YouTube revenue pay for your entire social media team. Where as you scale and grow, for some people, YouTube then becomes a seven figure business, an eight figure business, just off of the ad revenue from the videos that you're putting up. And because YouTube, your content lives forever, you also get paid forever. As long as the content is evergreen, the content is still valuable in 5 years, etc. The one thing that I want you to remember, if you're going to write down one thing, it's audience retention curve. Okay? There's a lot of jargon, a lot of data, a lot of stats, don't worry about that. But audience retention curve, this really, really, really matters, okay? And even if you don't have a YouTube channel yet, write it down. Because when you start YouTube in six months, you'll come back to this and like this will be the keyword that you have to know. The audience retention curve shows you what people like in your video and it shows you second by second where people are falling off. So there's a lot that you can. There's a lot of data on YouTube and I don't want to stress you out and overwhelm you. And I love it. Like I dive into the data and it gets me all excited and, and I talk about new tech. I want to show Joe and the team it's like all data, data, data, data. But you guys probably don't want to be full time YouTube data people. You know, you got a business to run. And so this is the most important thing to look at for every video. And it's free and it's built into YouTube automatically. Um, this is what it looks like. And I just went to YouTube or Google and typed in audience retention curve YouTube. But what you'll see is second by second where people are falling off in your video. So you can see in this video, at the beginning, they did not do a good job of holding people's retention. Right? We're like a minute 30 into this video and we've already lost, what do we want to call that, 60% of the people. So the beginning of this video is really bad. And it's not my subjective opinion of it being good or bad. The market is telling us this is not very good. And so we should fix that. Right? And then you can see here it starts to go up, which means that people are either fast forwarding through this part to go here or they're rewinding to watch this part again. But in this video, this part here is really good. This is where we're gaining people. And so that's where you can look at your video. It says a couple things. One, it makes you a better creator in that, okay, our intro was really bad and we got to stop doing it like this. And then we can learn from whatever's in here. But the secondary benefit of it, and this is where if you really embrace this, could change your entire business. This clip Here is what, 2 minutes to 3? 3 minutes, 4 minutes. Ish. This. This clip here of it doing really well. This is then what we cut to be our Instagram clip, our Twitter quote, our Instagram quote, Our TikTok video. Every other platform is short form. YouTube is long form. So the goal here would be we make long form YouTube content. We look at our data, we see which clips have done the best, and then we cut all that up to be on all the other platforms. So if you're sitting here struggling to. YouTube was just another platform. Oh my gosh. I'm trying to do Instagram and I'm trying to do Twitter and it's overwhelming. I have a business to run to. Cool. I'm with you. I understand. I agree. All you have to do is take YouTube long form content at the top. You get the data, find the best moments, and then you cut that to go to all the other platforms. So it allows you to be everywhere with only really doing work on one platform, which would be YouTube. So whether it's the fact that your content lives forever and you can grow your influence and customer brand forever. Whether it's the fact that YouTube pays you or whether it's the fact that you have the best data and you can use this so you can be on every platform. It's one of the most powerful reasons why YouTube, I think, should be your top marketing strategy for 2022. And with that being said, we got a little bit of context. Look at all these amazing, beautiful people. I love to dive into questions, channels, reviews, secret tech, wherever we want to, where we want to take things. Joe, what do you want to do?

You know, like there's. Matthew actually has this question that I just kind of plucked out of here. If we're going to look at someone's YouTube channel, we should probably go to the top where whoever posted one first. But Matthew said, I don't have a YouTube channel yet, but I'm a subject matter expert in a technical industry. What is your advice regarding starting a YouTube channel when you don't have video editing experience? So the reason I wanted to bring up that question is, you know, just the, like, what if I don't know how to put together videos? How do we get this stuff done? So how would you respond to that, Evan?

I love it. It's fantastic. You do not need to worry about editing inside of thought leadership and education. So why am I going to hire you? I'm going to hire you because you're a technical subject matter expert and I'm searching on YouTube, how do I X? And then your video is going to show up. I'm coming to learn. I'm not going to subscribe to your channel because of the music that you've got or the, or the B roll or the fancy flowers that fly across the screen or whatever it is that you, you know, think you need to do. The most important thing is that you are an expert and getting that expertise. Your job is to make other people think the way that you think. So you think differently, right? That's why you're here. You wouldn't, you wouldn't follow Joe and be in this group if you fought like everybody else. So you're a weird duck. It's amazing. And your job is to teach other people to think like you think. Joe thinks differently about marketing. Joe thinks differently about addiction. And he's trying to get that message out to the world because if other people understood the way he thinks, they can make their lives better, their business better, their addiction recovery a lot better as well. You can shortcut people's path to solve a problem. That's what the video needs to be. It's you shortcutting the path to solving a problem. How well your, your camera is, you know, it doesn't matter. You're here to try to extract the knowledge from my brain and put it into yours. So the amount of editing you have, unless you, unless your business is editing, like that's the only caveat. If you are a video editor, your stuff better look fire, right? If you are a video editor and your stuff looks bad, it's kind of a problem because that's what I'm hiring you to do. But apart from that, if you're an expert, subject matter expert, all you have to do is teach me to think the way that you think. The better skill to learn is how to be a better presenter. So the first if we look at that audience retention curve. Remember I showed you guys on Google Images that first minute really, really matters to capture attention. And the better skill to learn is how do you start a video with an impactful statement, with something that you believe that other people don't believe so that other people who are watching will want to keep watching. Most people, what they do is this like, oh, I got to figure a video editing, okay. And I suck at this. This is. They spend 20 minutes recording the video and then four to five hours editing the video. Does that resonate with anybody here? It's kind of what you're, you're doing. And then you get so tired of spending five hours editing a 20 minute video, it's like this is too much work. Well, you're training the wrong skill. You're spending 20 minutes training the skill you want to be good at, which is conveying your thoughts clearly. And five hours training the skill you have zero interest in wanting to get better at. And so the, the ideal is to switch it to spend time practicing delivering a message to a camera to make the first minute of a video even better. And zero time editing it. You throw a thumbnail on, you know, you can cut maybe an or whatever at the back, but it honestly doesn't matter. It's not why people are watching your video.

It's like if you tried to make something so fancy that it just looked really professional. Now if you're Mr. Beast and you're doing these freaking, you know, grandiose sort of events, that's a whole nother level. But, but the thing is the way to get started is to get started. We had so much content and Rakim, who's Chelsea, I Think is also on with us. I have two people that work with me that are on my team that do video. I mean, they're very skilled in production and video. But we have all the little methodologies that Evan will go through as we have just made such a huge difference. And I was not paying any attention really to YouTube at all. When your thoughts can actually produce a result for somebody. And if you are in the world, whatever you're doing, whatever your category is for profit, nonprofit, therapy, business, marketing, whatever, you know, how to train a parrot, how to talk, I mean, whatever your thing is, if you have the ability to create a result for someone like my friend and one of our genius network members, Jason Fladlin, says, anything that you're selling, you want to put information in front of it, right? And so for many of you, that information is going to be in the form of a video. And how you put that information in front of your prospects, in front of the audience, put it out into the wild, has everything to do with it. And if you focus on being fancy and you focus on the technology versus the psychology, it's going to withhold you. I mean, it just, it just will. And so that's what I wanted to say.

Let's talk about how do we structure video and what matters? And in going through this process, hopefully it's valuable for everybody in making your content work. Some of the things that really matter is we need to have a good click through rate on our thumbnails and titles and we need to have good audience retention. So the first minute, for most of you, the first minute is the thing that will matter the most. If you're teaching, if you're even halfway good at teaching what you're an expert at, then you will be able to hold people's attention. But that first minute really, really, really matters. The next part is do you have a thumbnail and title that will capture people's attention and make them want to click? And this is part of the secret tech that I'm working on. And maybe I'll just share one quick example with Joe because we're gonna, we're gonna dive in and do some fun stuff when I get to Arizona. But in looking at Joe's channel, this is where I love making data driven decisions. We've got this. So ILM meet up with Patty and Tublin and then this one here of Dan Sullivan of changing your game, just quickly sharing a little bit of statistics. This video is converting five times better than this video on the click through rate. They're getting Actually, this one is even getting more impressions. So YouTube's trying to promote this video that's trying to promote this video and get it out to the world. This video has less impressions, but five times as many views. And that's a function of the title and the thumbnail. So if I look at this thumbnail, like, do this every 90 days, assume when I don't know who Joe is. Like, this is. We're targeting people who don't know who we are. Right? We're not just targeting the people who already know us and love us. It's brand new people. So this thumbnail here, do this every 90 days. Like, ooh, wow, what is that thing that I need to do every 90 days versus ILM meetup with Dr. Patty Ann Tublin. Now you might love this. This is where like, hey, well let's give it a shot. But this one is getting five times as many clicks as this one. So what we would do then is say, okay, well we have to tweak this title and thumbnail to get more people clicking on our videos. And Joe, I'll share a lot more when we get there in Arizona. But, but the idea is if you're seeing videos that are underperforming, then an easy fix is to start looking at how do we tweak our thumbnails and titles to make them better. Now to the topic of how do we get people onto an email list. I'm a huge, huge, huge fan because you guys here are mostly probably not trying to be influencers. You got businesses to run. The whole point of doing this is to, yes, have an impact. But we're trying to convert people who watch your videos to then buy from us, refer us, get in our email list, et cetera. So, so my favorite way to do it is to have a lead magnet in the middle of your videos. So Joe's got his free book. And so then if you look in the description, Joe's free book. Com. So what we want to do is in the middle of our video, have some kind of call to action to get people onto our email list. And the easiest way is to give some kind of free bonus. It could be a video, it could be a free book, it could be a PDF. This doesn't have to be some crazy 400 page book, right? It could be a little tiny book, just something that's incredible value that relates to the topic. If you put this at the end, people will bounce. If you put it at the beginning, people will also bounce. But if you put it in the Middle people are already getting value from the video, and they want to keep getting value from the video. So they'll stick around and watch and people won't bounce and leave the video unless they're going to go sign up for your email list, which is much more valuable than just a view on the YouTube channel. And then ideally, at the end, we want to be linking people up to the next video. So beginning of the video should be something that's going to hook the person to watch. Middle of the video should be some kind of lead magnet to get their email address. And end of the video should be to get people to watch another video. YouTube's goal is to keep people on YouTube for as long as possible. So if you can get people to keep watching more videos, YouTube will reward you and showcase your videos more. So if I'm watching Joe Ben and Jason Vern, hopefully is the most relevant video to what we just. What these guys just talked about here to get people to go watch that video. Most people, when they're doing this structure, to do it the complete opposite. So the beginning of the video should be powerful statement, something to hook me in. How do most people start a video? Hey, guys, welcome back. It's me, Evan Carmichael. So excited to have you here. Happy Wednesday, man. Today, like, who cares? I'm out, right? If I don't know who you are, like, my mom would love that. But if somebody here is watching and you don't know who I am, you're not going to sit through that, right? Hi there. Welcome back. Welcome back. It's my first time here. I don't know who you are. What am I being welcomed back to? Right? So most people's intros are really poor. What you need to think about is if you are transferring your thoughts to somebody else, what do you believe that other people don't believe? Like, teach me something. An opinion that you've got that you believe that other people don't believe and lead with that. So it's like, what did he just say? Like, imagine a landing page. If you guys have built landing pages for your businesses, you have a headline and a sub headline. Would you ever have the headline be, hey, guys, welcome back. It's me, Evan. So glad that you're here. No, you can. You're gonna have a powerful opinion. You're gonna have a. Something that's gonna want to hook me in to watch the rest. Read the rest of the page, Same thing. If you can hook them for the first minute, they'll watch the rest. Most people then at the end of a video, what do they do? Thank you guys so much for watching. Appreciate you. Go like and subscribe and leave a comment. I have never asked anybody to subscribe to my channel. Never. And we've got 3 million Something subscribers on the channel. Why do you subscribe to somebody's channel? It's not because the person told you to. It's because you really like this person and you're watching more of their videos. So your goal is to get people to watch more videos and to like you and see you as the trusted authority. When you're using language at the end of a video that feels like the video is over. Thank you guys so much for watching. I'll see you soon or see you later. People will leave and bounce and go to another video. This is a really important concept. While it might be the end of you filming that video, it's the end of the video for you. Hopefully it's just the start of a journey for the audience. So for the viewer, hopefully it's the start of eight videos that they're about to watch with you. So as soon as you start saying thank you so much for watching, goodbye, appreciate you. You'll see your audience retention curve just tank. People are leaving, Goodbye. Like, I'm out, I'm off to the next thing instead. Like Joe's done here. If we have a video up on the channel that we want people to go see and then if Joe said go watch this video, not I'll see you later, but I'll see you there. And we're trying to get people to go watch the next video. If they click on this, YouTube's going to start rewarding us more. Say, oh, when they watch one Joe video, they watch three, they watch five, they watch eight. We should show more Joe Polish videos to people. So the call to action to get on your email list is in the middle. First minute, powerful opinion, hook me in. And ending is going to be go get them to go watch another video on the channel. It took me 350 videos until I wasn't completely embarrassed by my own stuff. I couldn't look back and watch it. It was like, oh my gosh, it's so what you notice. Every mistake, every flaw, every slur, every. It just, it was a. I was extremely self critical. I've kept all the videos up so you can go back and watch them if you want. People like going back and watching a journey kind of where I came from and then 700 videos until I inspired myself with a video where I watched it and like, you know what? Like, I'm starting to get this 700 videos later. So, yeah, it's been quite the journey. Honestly. I did all the classic mistakes like I did. I was trying to be too perfect. My first video, I was trying to memorize a script, and I suck at memorizing scripts. And so most of it was B roll. Cause I was too afraid of. Of saying the wrong word and I was too inconsistent on the content. And the answer honestly was just to tap back in the service that, hey, this isn't about me. It's about who I can help. And if one person watches this and can learn something and I'm helping, then it's worth continuing on doing. In the early days, I spent zero time on thumbnails and titles, and that is a big deal. One thing that's awesome about YouTube is you can, you can change it.

I have videos on here that have been viewed like, less than a couple hundred times that have converted people into Genius network members at $25,000 sales. So, you know, don't, don't confuse. Like, you have to have a giant audience or a bazillion views in order to, you know, have a very profitable, you know, YouTube channel.

It really depends on what your goals are. And whenever I'm connecting with somebody about their channels, like, what do you. What are your goals? What are you trying to do? Because if Joe just wanted to be an influencer, and Joe just wanted to grow as big a channel as possible and get a million subscribers, and that's his goal, cool. Then we need more of these kinds of videos because that's what's blowing up and that's what the Internet cares about. But if Joe says, no, I want to grow Genius Network and I want to here's my real business. Cool. Then it changes the content strategy. We've had some. I was helping one Genius Network member who's in a 25k group, and he's only got a couple hundred subscribers, and he's getting a five to six figure deal every month from his business. That's like revenue into his business. Like almost an extra seven figures a year into his business off of a couple hundred subscribers. Because the people who are watching are his ideal clients. So it's less about, like, do you want customers or do you want subscribers? And of course you want both. You know, that's the answer. Great, but which is more important? Would you rather sell more in your business or would you rather have more subscribers? And there's no right or wrong. You tell me what you want, and it changes the strategy. Most of the time when I'm talking to entrepreneurs or groups like this, I want to grow my business. YouTube is not my main thing. I want to use it as a vehicle to grow my company as opposed to, I only want to be a YouTube influencer. So the way to think about that then is whatever you want to make money doing, show me the process of you doing it. So I don't know if you have coaches in the house, consultants in the house. You could pop it in the chat if you are. If you're a coach or a consultant, the best video that you can make is actually not talking head videos direct to camera. It's coaching videos. What do you want to sell? Do you want to sell speaking services or coaching services? I want to sell coaching services. Perfect. Your video should be you coaching people. And some people will not want it to be public, right? Like, oh, I don't want it just to be on YouTube. Cool. Don't do it for those people. If people will go on Jerry Springer and share what they share, some people will come on your show and talk about their life or their business, Right? And so it's a lot easier to make those kinds of videos. A lot of Joe's videos are interviews. You know, you don't usually see a Joe. Okay, I'm Joe Polish, and Here are my seven tips to marketing. 1, 2, 3. Right? It's Joe's genius. Not that he couldn't do that, but Joe's genius is extract. Like, if you guys watch his interviews, he's one of the best listeners because his best question usually isn't the first question. It's like the second or third or fourth question because he's actually listening to what they're saying and pulling on the thread where most people won't do that. And so that's part of Joe's genius. And so that's what the content should be about. It's not about the Joe Show. And that's what he's also built. If anybody wants to be Genius Network or is in Genius Network, it's. It's not the Joe. Joe wasn't even here for the past year. And. And it was an amazing experience.

Probably even better than I wasn't around for the last year.

Not because he wasn't here, but it's like, it's not the Joe show. It's. It's the team. It's his awesome team at Genius. It's the members collectively, right? And so Joe's just this great facilitator and so that's what a lot of the content should be about. But whatever you want to make money doing, whatever feels more fun to actually do, that's the content that you should be doing. As opposed. We feel like we need to make videos like whoever, like Gary does it, or like Grant does it, or like Oprah does it, or like whoever does it. Well, what are you trying to sell? And then show me you doing it, and that becomes the video.

I want to actually ask Sam. I know a lot of people have hesitancy to start with stuff, and I'd love to have Sam, so you're a psychiatrist. What the hell is this fear or hesitancy? Including the hesitancy that you had when you first started? Because now you've got a massive following and you have a really great YouTube channel, and you just put out some of the most thoughtful content. My goal is that we help everyone here take what Evan is talking about and utilize it in the best ways. And I know all the techniques and methodologies that he's sharing anyone could do. He's not describing anything here that anyone listening cannot do. The big question is, what holds people back from doing it? And I'd love to have you speak to that, even from your own experience.

You decide to push yourself. And I think the thing that stopped me was I was a perfectionist. I wanted to do things perfectly. The thing is, what's perfect to me is impossible to create, and it will take so much time. And people don't care about what you create in terms of the quality of the video. It's the content they're after. They don't care about the background as much as they care about what you're going to say. Is it going to change your. And I was in my head at the beginning. I was caught up in the idea of, no, no, it has to be perfect. The other thing is, we don't know what people want until we give them something to see their feedback. And that allows us to basically shift things. And. And that was something I needed to teach myself. But that was after you basically pushed me off the edge. That was like my skydive moment in the podcast on Genius Network. And since then, because in order to get better at something. And here's the thing, in order to get better at something, you need to start doing it. You're only ready when you start, not before you start. And so to get better on Instagram Live, I had to do more Instagram Live. There's no way around it. And it's interesting because people Want to. People want to succeed without failing. And that's an interesting problem that a lot of people have, because failure is the gateway to success or the stepping stone to success. So you want to see, I want to succeed without failing. That's not going to happen. So people resist failure, but they want success. So they're caught up in this mental loop of their own design that they didn't even realize that they created. And so one thing to mention about learning here again ties into that, which is that one of the greatest barriers that we have as human beings is our resistance to the temporary incompetence. In any situation, if you want to learn something new, there's something. If there's something you're learning for the first time, you are going to be incompetent trying to do it. Well, when you don't know what you're doing or you don't know how you're doing it and you're not good at it because it's the first time, you're basically stopping yourself from progressing. You can't get better at something until you do it. So the idea is to learn to accept the temporary incompetence. And I'm highlighting that because incompetence is temporary, it's only permanent when you allow it to stop you.

Most of the personal development and self help people, not all, but many of them, YouTube channels, Instagram, podcast, it's their own form of therapy. I mean, they're just talking about stuff they want to get better at. Like you see Tim Ferriss, you see any of the people that are interviewing all these, you know, that's their own form of therapy. I mean, they're just trying to figure stuff out. And so part of doing a YouTube channel is not just to build and grow your own business, but it's like you get better at stuff like that. Like anything else, you want to be a black belt, you got to do the reps. So as we go through all this stuff, you want to be a good marketer, you got to do the reps, you got to put stuff out there. And so we'll, you know, we will teach you as best we can kind of what to do, the techniques, the method. But it's entirely up to you to have the mindset that I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure out how to make this work. The seeds of your future accomplishments, like, lie in the obstacles that seem to stand in your way. And if you learn how to navigate through that, oh my God. I mean, you know, there's, there's so much that. That you can do.

It's not production quality. People are not following the same for production quality. It's quality of thought. Because this message means something, because he's speaking to your soul and helping you become a better human. And so it doesn't matter what it looks like, as long as I can hear the message, right? I mean, if the audio sucks and I can't hear it, that's going to be a problem. But YouTube, how you get the most leverage is out of stuff. Something that in five years is still going to be relevant.

Part of your strategy here is if the whole focus is like, how do I immediately convert it into money? That may limit you because it's, yeah, you want money. Yeah, you want your business to work. And especially if you're in a situation where, you know, I mean, you literally have to make money. That's, you know, you may focus on, yeah, we got to convert and we got to sell, and YouTube is only one piece here.

But the.

The thing is that when you're just trying to get people to give you money, people can smell it. Money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation. So the point I'm trying to make is how do you make your advertising so darn valuable that, I mean, what people are learning here we could easily charge for, and we do. We're doing this for free. No one here is being, you know, no one has to pay. There's no paywall to come through and watch this. We're putting stuff out. And I've been doing this for years. And as a result of it, I've had people that have given me money because they're like, my God, if the free stuff that you're doing is so valuable, what I can't imagine what it'd be like to pay you or. I've already made enough money with your podcast that I've listened to. Like, I feel guilty not joining your group. That's the feeling I want. I want people to feel like, wow, this just like the thing that you said, Evan. Like, we don't ask people to subscribe. They subscribe because they like. I mean, that's a. That's such an important point. And you wouldn't have 3 million subscribers if you were. Your call to action was the only thing that got them to be a subscriber. They became subscribers because they like what.

You put out there.

And so I wanted to just mention that as we talk about monetization, because one of the biggest issues that I have with some marketers is every freaking thing that they do is about trying to convert somebody to buy something. You know, they give away a book for free and then it puts them into an upsell thing which yeah, could make a lot of money. But like everything's a frickin pitch and the book that they're delivering is a piece of shit book. So if you're gonna give out a free book, make sure it's a good book. Like you know, when someone signs up for Joe's freebook.com you're not immediately hit with 14 upsells. I mean we send people a book, if they want the physical version, we'll mail it to them for shipping and handling. But we don't do like some people that give away free books. It's just a battering ram of sales pitches. Because I personally think in the short term that may get you money, but in the long term you don't bond with people that way.

Basically the format and structure for how do you turn like your thought leader ideas into, into clients, Whatever you want to do, show me the process. So you say, well most people aren't going to, they'll just take the free information and run well, they pay for the access. Like they're not paying just for the information, they're paying for the access to you and the customization of the information. Just by being a good person and putting out a ton of value, you're going to get a lot of people who want to hire you. So I would make that the primary goal. Make it about getting clients for your business by providing a lot of value and education, not making it a sales pitch. Most people are shy or introvert or are afraid to get on camera, afraid to make it look good. So what they do is coaching or, or serving. So if you, if I had a, you know any of your clients who are struggling to get in front of the camera, it's a lot easier when you're actually helping somebody that the fear becomes like talking direct to camera by yourself and there's nobody in front of you. But for most people, if you're in this group, you actually care about your customers, right? Otherwise you wouldn't be here. So in caring about the customers before they buy, you're not just going to sell anything to anybody, right? You don't just see your next car or your next purse or whatever. As the person's walking into your, your place, you're like, I want to help this person. And that's how we lead. So how do you help them? Well, you have to make an informed decision. So you got to educate them. And so it starts with asking questions and educating. And so that those could all be videos because most of the common questions people have could be turned into sessions where those are videos on your channel. But the problem is when you get to nobody in front of you, when you have a customer in front of you, it's really easy. When there's nobody in front of you, it's really hard. Even if it's the same question. So often the answer is get somebody in front of you, do it with somebody else. For most of you, if you have 20 people who are following you, a hundred people who are following you, all of those people could be potential guests for a show where you're then coaching and helping them and just answering questions. And for the most part, when we see somebody actually have a problem, a challenge that we know we can help them with, we light up. It's like we're here to serve. We want to help, we want to take what all the frustrations and struggles that we went through and help them shortcut their path. And so I would much rather see the person. And it is scary and it is hard. And just if you think back to what is your message? The biggest growth category is the one to three hour category. Right now on YouTube, people are watching, they are going, so if you can go longer, don't cut it off. People are going to learn and there's nowhere else to get it. Again, they're not going to their, you know, high school libraries to go find this information. At the top is YouTube videos making 10 plus minute videos. I say 10 minutes because that's your bare minimum. People ask me, how long should a video be? At least 10 minutes for thought leadership. I'll caveat this with I, I'm my expertise. My zone of genius is thought leadership education. I'm not like the slime guy or the Star wars trailer or like I'm not as good at that stuff. Versus thought leadership, education, entrepreneurship. So 10 minute plus videos at the top. If you can go longer, go longer. You know, if you have more information to share, do it. I also put Instagram Live. If you're going to be doing live streams that you can then convert to YouTube videos, what do you like doing? These are all different options of videos that you could make. So thought leadership is you just talking to camera. And some people love that. They're the expert, they're the speaker, they want to see themselves talk. Perfect, do that. Coaching is another option. We've talked quite a little bit now about coaching, helping people. Mentoring is if you're going to have somebody who's on your team or somebody who you're coaching consistently now. It's. It's an ongoing relationship as opposed to just a one off interviews is when you have guests come on. We looked at Sam's channel, looked at Joe's channel. Q and A's are people are asking you like submitting questions for you to answer on camera. Biz Dev is one we haven't talked a lot about, but you guys could definitely use to help grow your business. Think about partners for your company. Like if this person knew who I was, that would make a big deal for me. And it's less about. Michael's very excited about this. Says it's less about how many views a video gets. It's more about now they're going to ask me about me, right? Like if you do a great interview with somebody, if Michael says, hey Evan, I'd love to have you on my show. Can you come on talk to maybe I don't know who Michael is yet. And now, now I'm much more willing to. People are more willing to come on a show than have a biz Dev sales call, right? So people who you want to get to know better, you invite them on your show. We're going to have a great time. I have a great time with Michael. What am I going to say next? Michael, what do you do, man? What's your business all about? Now? I'm naturally curious about Michael and his business because we had this conversation and it's less about how well that video does on YouTube and much more about building that relationship with the guests that you're trying to have on. So if there are people who could make a meaningful impact on your business, it doesn't matter as much how many views it gets. Try to invite them on as a guest of your show because it creates a relationship. And it's a lot easier to do that than if somebody out of the blue messaged you to say, hey, do you want to go out for coffee? It's probably a no, right? But come on my show. It's more likely to be yes. And then the last step is to document your process. Like whatever you're doing, whatever you're trying to do, what if you're trying to learn, do you show me the process of you doing it? So these are all options for videos that you could make that are 10 minutes plus, like whatever you lean in naturally, that's what you go off and do. Then you split it up to micro content for all the other platforms. The highlight moments from here now gives me content for every platform that I'm on. I don't have to make custom content for Instagram. I can just take the best moments from my YouTube videos and clip it for Instagram. Right? These all lead to lead magnet. So Joe's free book or whatever, Lead magnet to get on our email list, that comes from our YouTube channel. It also comes from all our micro content. We're guiding people to get on our email list so we can grow our business that leads to value emails. Get to know me. Who are you? What are you all about? What's your message? What's your mission? You can include some of your YouTube videos in an email sequence because just because they're on your YouTube channel doesn't mean that they know who you are yet and have watched the old videos. So you use those old videos, especially origin story stuff, as part of an email sequence. And then you can sell stuff because they know you like you, trust you, love you, right? And if you're selling coaching courses, memberships, books, product services, whatever it is that you've got, this becomes your thought leadership, success map. Somebody was asking about just the importance of SEO and the importance of consistency and design for thumbnails. You want people to instantly know what your video looks like. So I want to know what a Joe Polish video is. I want to know what Evan Carmichael video is. I want to know what a Sam video is. I want to know what a Michael video is like. People should instantly recognize your video, your brand, your style. This is more than just a YouTube strategy. This is a business strategy. Like, I should be able to recognize your logo and what you're all about and instantly know that it's your video. If I pull up Joe's channel, you know, there's a style to it. Most of them, right? We missed a couple video, but for the most part, there's a style. And I know that that's a Joe Polish video. Most of the views, this is really important. Most of the views that happen on YouTube do not come from search. So the goal is not to win at search. The only caveat of where you want to win at search is when you do not want subscribers. Most people want subscribers. Most people were trying to get people to come back. If you had, you know, if you're a plumber and you have like an how to unclog a toilet video, you're probably not getting subscribers to that channel. Probably, right? I mean, maybe. But the goal is not, you Know who's going to subscribe to how to unclog Toilet channel. Right. So it's very how to focused. We don't want subscribers. So search becomes the only game. But most of the views do not happen on search. It might start with search, but most of the views happen in suggested. We want to be showing up against our own videos and against other people's videos. So the SEO becomes much more about what videos are doing well in the space and how can we show up after them as opposed to how do I show up in search? Because most of the views will not happen in search. It's going to come from suggested and browsed.

Where does it rank on your to do list of importance? And usually because your to do list has too many non producing, irrelevant, overwhelming things. And so you know, the way that most people accomplish anything is a Take it seriously. You know, a good book from a friend of mine, I interviewed him years ago on this book. It's one of the books I've recommended more than probably almost any other book and I've read over a thousand books is the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. If you've not read that book, read it. It's fantastic. And it's about resistance. So we all have our forms of resistance. Take it. And he talks about, you know, an amateur versus a pro. So if you can put yourself in the pro mode, like, okay, I'm going to make this work. I'm now taking it very seriously and I'm going to do it. That means that you will get, you know, you will quit doing all the bullshit. You know, people like, I don't have it. People would always say to me, I don't have enough time to do these things.

And it's.

The question is, what are you so busy doing that you don't have the time to do the things that are going to make the most difference, you know. And so part of it is, and that means a lot of times you have to. You're not. To do list is more important than your to do list. It really is. And so the reason people don't have success in life, it's all the bullshit that consumes up all their time and doesn't allow them to go deep with anything. So they go shallow in a million different directions. And you know, but that's. That is ultimately your choice to do. And the best way to get started is to get started. And I'll frame it another way too. If you have someone really important to you, or a child or a spouse or a Best friend. And all of a sudden someone showed up and said, if you don't add 1,000 subscribers to your YouTube channel in the next week, and the only thing you can do is using the advice that Evan talked about today on the I Love Marketing meetup group that you didn't have to pay for. If you don't add an extra thousand subscribers, this person is going to die. You'll figure out how to get the thousand subscribers. You just will. And so part of it is, can you put yourself into that sort of pressure mindset without having a disaster? You know, given the choice of eating or starving, most people will not starve unless they literally have no other alternative, right? There are life situations that prevent people from wars or catastrophes or things from not being able to do do things. However, that's not most of life. You know, everyone here can kick ass and take names. Do a new video every day for a month. Just do a video, a single video. It could be 90 seconds. You could talk for an hour. Just do, do one every single day for a month. And I'll guarantee you if we had that conversation a month from today, you would be in a much different place. And out of everyone here, we'd be lucky if 1 out of 20 people ends up taking that advice and does it. But the ones that will, it'll make the biggest difference in the world. The point is, like, everyone has it in them. You just need to give yourself the permission and the mechanism and the reason to do it. So hopefully today, by listening to Evan, that will be the impetus. This will be the jumping off point for that. And I hope you found this really valuable.

There are very few marketing strategies for 2022. For the next year, we're going to come back and like, you're going to put all your effort into one thing. There's very few things that you could convince me would be more valuable in terms of getting a return on your time and energy than YouTube right now. And so for the 20 people who take action on it, I'm looking forward to seeing you in a year and seeing your progress and helping and just, you know, thank you, Joe, for holding the space.

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