MBA1287 Starting a YouTube Channel in a Competitive Market +Free Ride Friday!

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All right, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show to questions answered every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to start a YouTube channel in a competitive market. It's hard as it is today to start a successful YouTube channel. YouTube has become very crowded. It's not the early days anymore and it's even harder if you're in a competitive market like fashion or business advice or Tech. There's so many large established channels in competitive markets right now. What if you're brand new? How do you get started? How do you have a chance to grow and form your own niche and most of all get a return on investment of the time and effort and money you're going to spend on building this YouTube channel. YouTube is one heck of a marketing source if you do it right. We get into all that in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to begin by just stating the obvious. Starting a successful YouTube channel today is quite challenging. It's hard. It's much harder than it was four or five years ago. Over 300 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every minute. And over 5 billion videos are watched every day on YouTube. So there is viewership. People are on YouTube, people are watching videos. How do you get those eyeballs to your videos, to your channel? Well, first of all, the way you get the Most out of YouTube today is a whole lot different than it was a few years ago. Unless you're in the entertainment business or you're a comedian where you can have mass appeal, your goal should not be having, you know, 5 million subscribers, 10 million subscribers, and millions upon millions of views on videos. What you want to do here is focus on quantity and not quality. This is your best chance at making YouTube a great source of marketing for you. You're gonna wanna niche down as much as possible if you're in a competitive market. For example, if you're in the business space, you're a business coach, you give business lessons, you could create business courses, whatever it is, you're competing with so many people in general, and then you're also competing with a lot of business centric videos on YouTube. So in order for you to have a competitive shot at actually getting the right audience and really making it worth your while, you're gonna have to niche down. Now, a lot of people don't like to do. They feel like they niche down, they're narrowing down their audience and their audience is going to be smaller and they think small audience is bad. But no, it's okay to have a small audience if that audience really resonates with your content and converts into customers. That's why you're doing this right, is to convert people into customers after building trust with them by giving them great value. With your videos, if you're speaking directly to a smaller group of people and you're really hitting home, they're really going to be like, wow, I Got to listen and I got to watch every single video that this channel produces. I'm going to subscribe and I'm going to make sure I consume every video they have. Let me give you a good example. Dan Martell, friend of the show, friend of ours and business coach. Now, Dan specializes in helping SaaS businesses, software as a service. So he's really niched down how he helps people. He doesn't help every business. He doesn't help brick and mortar business. It doesn't help all online businesses. He's not really interested in e commerce businesses or even software businesses that are not as a service. Now, even though that Dan doesn't have millions of subscribers, he has a little over 32,000 subscribers as of today, which is a lot, by the way. 32,000 subscribers is a lot. It's hard to get 32,000 subscribers on YouTube. And relative to his niche, that's incredible because there's around 30 to 40,000 SaaS companies out there. So in his niche, he's absolutely dominating in the SaaS niche. Now, I would guess if Dan's YouTube channel was not as niche, it wasn't just for software as a service. We just talked general business advice. He wouldn't be dominating because he's competing with so many other channels for no reason. Now this is his specialty. Now you'll see that his videos are really powerful, really concise. There's not some crazy production value, but it is very good production value and it's really value driven. He's really trying to help people out in each video. And some videos he's got like hundreds of thousands of plays or views and some will have like 5 or 10,000. So even in his niche, some topics will resonate with others more and some won't. And that's totally okay. That's part of the formula of building a channel on YouTube. So my first piece of advice is a niche down. Dan Martel's channel is a good example. You may want to check it out. If you niche down, you're really going to have a better return on investment. It's going to be worth your while. And I've heard so many people find out about Dan Martell's programs and services and products and things like that through his YouTube channel. So good example. The next thing you really should focus on is getting the fundamentals right when it comes to YouTube. Now, there are two parts of YouTube fundamentals that you really need to focus on. Number one is the technical aspects of SEO search engine optimization on YouTube as well as the Video aspects, the technical aspects of creating a great video. There are two resources I want to give you for these two parts. The first one, when it comes to SEO, highly recommend you check out backlinko.com Brian Dean, in my opinion, is the expert when it comes to teaching not only SEO, but SEO for YouTube. And in fact, Brian Dean's YouTube channel is so good, his videos are brilliant. And for a dry topic like SEO, he makes his videos fun and he walks the walk. He's got almost a quarter million subscribers for a channel that's so niche and typically dry. So if you want to learn how to make sure that your videos get found, that you're doing the right thing when it comes to SEO, and you're doing the right thing in terms of posting your videos, the description, the titles, what you actually say in the videos, he's brilliant at this and you should check out his YouTube channel and backlinko.com now, when it comes to the production of your videos, now, no one's asking you to go to film school, but you need to have your fundamentals straight, especially if they're talking head videos. There's some really simple things you can do to up your game and increase the production value of your videos. Now, people are gonna take you a lot more seriously and you'll make a great first impression if your video quality is great and the quality of your production and what you actually deliver is great. So the resource I wanna pass on when it comes to that is check out Wistia.com's blog. Wistia.com has one of the best blogs when it comes to how to create great videos, how to create a DIY lighting kit, great tip editing, great tips on scripting equipment, can you shoot with an iPhone, your mic, all that kind of stuff is covered in their blog. Check it out, it's absolutely free. It's gold. These two things, nailing your SEO, making sure you're doing all the right things that other people are not doing, and nailing your production is going to differentiate you tremendously from all the noise along with niching down. When people find your channel, they're going to share it, they're going to love it, they're going to like it, they're going to subscribe. That's what you need to do. That's actually enough for you to really have a fighting chance, a very good chance of growing a really successful niche YouTube channel. Now, of course, this goes without saying, that what you actually say in these videos, what you actually offer is high quality and great Value and what people want. It's what people are searching for. But I'll leave that up to you because you are the expert in your niche in your topic. The final thing I want to talk about is in this topic. When growing your YouTube channel in a crowded market is that you really need to make sure you give yourself enough time. You have to have some patience to grow this channel. What I experienced and what I've heard from other Experts is that YouTube is one of those channels that take a long time, a lot longer than other channels like podcasting or blogging or creating a following on social media. All that kind of stuff may be faster to get started and start to get some traction, but YouTube has longevity, meaning that once you're established, once you actually start getting some traction, it may take six months, it may take a year even to start saying, oh, wow, I got a couple thousand subscribers. Now I'm getting some momentum. It's great. It may take that much time. So have the patience. Stay consistent. Most people just drop out and quit before they start getting traction, just before they get traction. So understand that it takes a bit of time to start growing. The good news is that at the start, you're gonna be putting out your worst work. That's the truth. When you're getting started, you're gonna put out the stuff that's unpolished in the beginning because you're producing work at a certain level and you're just not good yet. And that's totally fine. You need to start somewhere, right? But the good news is that not a lot of people will see that work at the start because they won't be your latest videos. It won't be the ones that you see first. So as you get better and start growing, they're gonna start seeing the best videos that you can produce. Totally. Okay. And you should be putting out work that's cringe worthy. A year from now, two years from now, if I listen to the first hundred episodes of this podcast, I struggle. It's hard because I feel like I'm such an amateur, right? But you have to start somewhere. And again, the good news is you're not huge yet, so you're not totally embarrassing yourself. And it's okay to put out cringeworthy work because you need to start.

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Guys, to wrap up today's lesson, when it comes to YouTube, when it comes to your channel and building a great marketing arm, you got a niche down. It's what works today. You got to make sure your SEO is up to snuff. You got to make sure your video quality and production is up to snuff. People's level of tolerance of bad quality video has really, really gotten very low. People won't tolerate a production that's less than professional. No one's asking you to invest thousands upon thousands of dollars. You can do this on the cheap and you can do it well. And this is where that blog I mentioned, the Wistia blog, that can help you out. They can really help you out with how to get set up on the cheap. Guys. That wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode's not over. It's free Ride Friday. I get to give away a lifetime membership to one of our listeners. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. Arif Rochelle. Arif Rochelle says very good. Five stars. I got a new favorite podcast. Short and sweet. Thanks, Arif Rochelle. Your mission is to email me at omar00mba.net so I can hook you up with the lifetime access to easy course, our $500 course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw for every Friday. Just listen on Friday and see if you won. It's that simple. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Whenever you create some sort of platform, whether it's a podcast or a video channel on YouTube, it's really helpful to have a production schedule. You want to be able to produce the content consistently. Even if you produce one piece of content once a week, it's going to make a huge difference. After your first year, you'll have 52 videos or for a blog, 52 blog posts. It's going to establish you as a serious player. People that are subscribed or following you, they're going to appreciate the consistency. They're going to see, wow, I got lots to consume and this person is taking this channel seriously. We like to use Google sheets for our production schedule here for the show. It's super simple to use, and it's absolutely free with Gmail. All right, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals, like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Eduardo.