The Power of Pillar Content and Discovery Ads for YouTube Virality

I had ignored YouTube. Didn't want to do it because of a lot of. Frankly, it's nice I let you go first. I'm like, am I willing to do that? Nah. You know, let Roland get the arrow stuck in his back. But what I didn't like about YouTube is that once you got on that hamster wheel, you could really never get off, or everything just stopped working. And I was like, that sounds like a job. Like, I don't. You know, I don't want that. And so. And it was the same with. With the other social profiles. It's like, well, if you really want to make it work organically, you know, you need to post two or three times a day. I didn't want to do that. And so it's why you and I have relied on. From personal branding. We've relied on this podcast, which is fine. Like us getting together and talking and riffing a couple times a week. No big deal. We're doing it anyway. Turn on a camera. That one's easy. That one's fun.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch with your hosts, Ryan Deiss and me, Roland Frazier.

Ryan, what is happening, man?

I'm excited. We've got our founders board meeting coming up next week, so getting prepped for that, probably by the time people hear this, we'll be on the other side of it. But it's always fun just to get in the same room with our clients, with other entrepreneurs, to get to share ideas. It's one of these times when we're sort of forced to say, what's all the cool stuff that we've done? Because that's kind of what our clients and members expect us to bring. And so it's fun looking back over the last 90 days and just finding. Plucking out the cool wins and so that we can go and share.

So it also kind of forces you to document the things like, oh, that was good, you know, before it just slips off into the thing that we did that we never do again.

Yeah. It's what people underestimate about the value of teaching and consulting and why we do it is it does make us better. It does make us sharper. When you have to explain what you're doing to somebody else and you have to really think out, okay, what did we do to do that? It's you.

You replicable, Right? How is it replicable and passable? Onable to somebody else's.

Yeah. And I think also the reason that we're good at what we do, not to pull a muscle Patting ourselves on the back. But because we operate in a portfolio model and we have a lot of different companies, if we have something that works at one of the businesses, another, you know, one of our portfolio companies would be like, how did that work? And we're like, yeah, crap. We do want to figure out how to replicate this across these different organizations. Whereas if you just stay in your own little bubble and you stay in your own little world, it's good, you can optimize around it, but you don't necessarily duplicate it across other organizations or other departments. So yeah, so that's fun.

Look at this segue. This is really good. Watch this. Speaking of replicable things that are working that we're showing other people how to do, don't you have some great success that you've just had taking your YouTube channel from a couple thousand to 20ish thousand folks?

Yeah, this has been, this has been fun and didn't actually intend for that setup, but you're right, that worked out really well. The I don't know about you, I mean, well, you have consistently taken a different approach to social than I have and we've talked about this on other episodes, so we don't necessarily need to rehash it. But it's not that I'm anti any type of social, you know, or anti getting out there, anti being a personal brand. You and I share the similar philosophy in that we don't want our businesses to be built around us. We don't want to build to be the business. But we also acknowledge that there is value to being the face of a brand, to being the spokesperson for your brand. And because of that, there's value to having a personal brand because you can point it at a number of different entities. You're your own media, so we're on the same page there. The difference historically has been you were more willing to do it than I was because I just freaking hate it. And you also, I know it's not your favoritest thing in the world, but you were just more willing to do it. And so I know a couple years.

Ago like evolutions of it.

So you know from trying let me release content every day which worked great, got me a million followers on Facebook to I'm going to just go all in and hire a full expensive team to create a schedule. And we're going to shoot every Monday and it's going to be this many things that we're going to do and it's going to get released to almost no effect. I mean like looking at I think we got up to, I don't know, maybe it was like million and a half minutes a month, you know, watched, which was, which felt good. But subscriber wise, like all of that had almost no effect. And that was when they were telling us really focus on shorts. And that's because YouTube was really promoting shorts. But in terms of shorts leading to subscribers. And then also why do we do this? It's not for the ego trip of watching the subscriber count or the views or the minutes. It's for money, you know, money. And it just wasn't, you know, and so, and it wasn't growing and you know, I think the most expensive we were spending 15 grand a month with outside people, plus maybe three or four grand a month in ad budget, plus let's say, let's be generous and say four or five thousand a month of time, you know, for our people. So let's say it was 300 grand a year, $25,000 a month. And I'm still, I think I, I think at 32,000 or something like that, viewers, I mean subscribers, which is nice, but the minute that we stop spending all the money with all the people, it dropped to, you know, like, I think now it's maybe 700,000 minutes a month watched, which is my, my personal KPIs. How, how many minutes of the content are people consuming? But, but certainly in terms of reach, to see, you know, you be able to jump from a couple thousand to 20, 20,000, you know, is insane. So I definitely would love to, to share that with everybody else and also, you know, put that into place on our channel.

Hey, Ryan Deiss here, co host of Business Lunch. And before we get to the show, I have an exciting invitation for you. My business partner and Business Lunch co host Roland Frazier and I are hosting a live in person event. And if you're a bootstrap business owner who wants to build a 10 million and even hundred million dollar business in the next three years, you need to be there. This event is called Get Scalable Live. And over the last four years it has transformed from a small gathering of entrepreneurs into the largest bootstrapped entrepreneurship conference in North America. Now I know what you might be thinking. You're probably thinking, Ryan, really? Another business event? Is that really what we need? But trust me, this isn't just any other event. You see, unlike most conferences, at Get Scalable Live, you'll have dedicated time to take action and actually work on your business instead of just in your business. Over three days, you'll work Shoulder to shoulder with like minded entrepreneurs to implement what you're learning and get valuable feedback that you're just not gonna be able to get during the normal day. Today you're gonna be immersed in fresh ideas, strategic insights, and you're gonna get the support and guidance that you need to actually reach your business goals. So this is your opportunity. This is your chance to step out of the day to day to eliminate the noise and finally work again on your business, not just in your business. And if you implement, I'm confident about this, if you implement just one or two key insights from any of our sessions into your business, you are bound to see a return on investment much higher than what we could ever charge for admission. And by the way, speaking of admission, right now business lunch listeners can save an additional 10% off of our already low early bird ticket pricing. So just head over to getscalablelive.com and use promo code LUNCH at checkout. Again, that's getscalablelive promo code LUNCH. It is truly amazing what can happen when you step out of the day to day and spend just a little bit of time surrounded by other powerful business owners. And since this opportunity only comes around once a year, you don't want to miss it. Again, the link is getscalablelive.com and don't forget to use promo code Lunch at Checkout to save up to 67% off the full 10 ticket price. That's all I got. I'll see you in Austin. All right, back to your regularly scheduled programming. Yeah. So cool. Let's talk about it because we have, I had ignored YouTube, didn't want to do it because of a lot of, frankly, it's nice I let you go first. So I'm like, am I willing to do that? Nah. You know, let Roland get the arrow stuck in his back. But what I didn't like about YouTube is that once you got on that hamster wheel, you could really never get off or everything just stopped working. And I was like, that, that sounds like a job. Like, I don't, you know, I don't want that. And so, and it was the same with, with the other social profiles. It's like, well, if you really want to make it work organically, you know, you need to post two or three times a day. Well, I didn't want to do that. And so it's why, you know, you and I have relied on from personal branding, we've relied on this podcast, which is fine, like us getting together and talking and riffing, you know, a Couple times a week, no big deal. We were doing it anyway. Turn on a camera. Like, not like, that one's easy, that one's fun.

We have millions of downloads, you know.

Right, exactly. And it's worked. And so what, I just came at it from the perspective of, okay, I'm not going to do it if I don't want to do it because I don't have to do it. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs get in that, especially if you're, you're a CEO first, you're a business owner first, you're not a creator, you're not a YouTuber. Right. Your job is not to go and do that. Your job is to run a company. So I started from the thing of if I'm going to do this, I want to do it on my terms. And so what I said is I want to be able to produce, not have to produce any more than about a video a week. And on the weeks when I don't want to do it, I'm just not going to do it. And so I don't want to be a show creator where people are expecting that there's going to be a new show every single week. And instead I wanted to treat YouTube more like a binge factory. So when somebody comes across the content, they can jump in, they can begin consuming the content. But all of the content is designed to go to one particular place with the goal, and this is important, of leads. How many leads do we generate from YouTube? That was like the only metric that I wanted to focus on and that I wanted to optimize and leads at an acceptable rate. And we are now generating not just 20,000 some odd subscribers, but we are now getting thousands and thousands of qualified leads a month at just a little more than three bucks per lead, total spend. All in on that. It's one of the lowest cost per lead channels that we have. And here's the best part, dude, the cost is actually going down. There is a paid element to this strategy that I'll get into, but the paid is there to prop up the organic. And as the organic starts to tick up, you're kind of, the algorithm takes over and the cost per lead actually starts to go down. So that's kind of the. After that's what we did, I'll get into how we did it. The first thing that I wanted to have was one piece of pillar content, like one video to rule them all. If somebody was only going to watch one video, what would that one video be? And I believe that all businesses have this. If you're a CEO who does keynote presentations, you've already probably have created this. If you use webinars in your marketing, probably your best performing webinar is that if you've written a white paper or a manifesto, there's probably some type of pillar content out there that you know in the back of your mind, okay, if somebody sees this, they're pretty much going to be ready to buy the thing that, that I want to buy. Like, they're going to get excited, they're going to get the picture. Like, this is that one thing that I most want to want to give to people. So I said, I want to start with that. Now, here's the thing. Everybody had told me that if you're going to do YouTube, it either needs to be a short or it needs to be 10 to 20 minutes because, you know, attention span, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was kind of like, screw it, I don't freaking care. It's going to be as long as it needs to be. So my pillar content video on my YouTube channel is 121 minutes long. 121 minutes long. Because again, I really just don't, you know, I wasn't worried about that. It's not necessarily the first video that people are going to watch, but I wanted all of the other videos to point back to that one. So that's where it began when I relaunched the, the my channel. That was the first video that got, that got plopped onto there. Anything you want me to. Any questions about kind of like the pillar content piece?

Maybe did you think about, like, how did you decide what the content was going to be for the pillar content?

The question that I asked is, what is the one piece of content that I wished every single person saw before they engaged with us from a sales perspective? And I literally asked the sales team, hey, what is that thing when you ask. Because our salespeople ask everybody, hey, how did you hear about us? That's one of the most common, like, you know, openers. If, if you're talking to somebody from a sales perspective and if you have, if you don't have a sales team talking to people and you're more a direct, you know, direct consumer model, more of an E commerce. You can ask them after they buy and say, how did you hear about us? Right. Was there a piece of content? Was there something that you saw? And so I asked him that, what is the, what's the one thing that, that you, that when you hear people say, your ears, you know, start twitch in and because, you know, you're like, ooh, yeah, this person. They're 90% of the way there. I just need to not screw this up. And what they said was, yeah, Ryan, when somebody hears you deliver the Get Scalable keynote at a talk, like, so if I go and give a talk and they mentioned that they saw you in a talk, they like, I know that's good. Or you were on this podcast, and on this podcast, you essentially talked about all the same things that are. That are in your keynote or when people come from. Like when people sign up. After watching this webinar that I was doing, then we knew, well, there was a problem with all of that content. It was all gated. In other words, there was no easy way for somebody to go and watch that content either they had to have been at the event I was speaking at, which most of the people on our list and most people come in contact with brand aren't. Or they had to have happened to listen to this podcast that I was on, where the podcast host happened to need to ask me just the right questions, where I would essentially deliver my keynote in Q and A form, which doesn't happen all that often. Or they needed to register for this particular webinar that. Wait for it. I was only doing about once a quarter. So I realized, like, the one piece of content, and I think this is true for a lot of businesses, that one piece of content that you wish that everybody saw is hidden behind a wall somewhere. It's tucked away. You only break it out a couple times a year. So I was like, I'm just going to take this. I'm going to record it in YouTube format. I didn't want to just put a recording. I think that would have been okay. I didn't want to just put a recording of the talk on YouTube. I didn't want to put a recording of the webinar. I actually turned it into a report form and I, you know, and I put that, you know, recorded version of that. That report on YouTube. But that was a question I asked, what's the one piece of content I wish everybody saw? I knew if they saw, they'd be 80, 90% of the way down the pipeline. Makes sense. Yeah. So once I had that, the other thing that I did is I wanted to have a very clear through line to. To the lead. So I was like, okay, I've got this, this big pillar content. What is the most logical gated version of this content? Like, what is something that I can say right off the bat, hey, you should go and download this. And so it could be some type of tool related to what I'm sharing. In this case, it just, hey, I'm going to be going through in this video. I'm going to be going through this report. If you want access to the report that I'm going through right now, click over here to get it. And they would just opt in to get the exact same case study report that I was quite literally reading in the video. Like, if you go and watch the video, it's on my YouTube channel, Ryan Dice Official. You'll see. I am literally just reading the report on a loom video. There is nothing fancy, nothing sexy about it. We recently created a new version of it that has a little bit of editing. I don't think it changed it that much. I think it's just fine.

It's tough, though, because if you've already uploaded it and have all the views, are you replacing the one that you uploaded?

Yeah, we lost. We lost those views. I mean, the original one still exists. And so that original video, I want to say, had like 10,000 something views and had some good, solid comments. But because it was so important and I see this being kind of the video that people are gonna. Gonna watch for, like, years, I was happy to. I was happy to do that. Like, what I didn't want to do, which is what my temptation would be, is I don't want to upload until it's perfect. Right. Because I know my perfectionistic tendency. So I just wanted to get something out there to see if it would work. But then once it was clear that it was working, it was like, I do want this to be better. So it's not ideal, but it was way better than making sure it was perfect because then it never would have happened. And it was, I think, better than leaving what I felt like was an imperfect version up there into perpetuity. So.

So you're taking the other one down and putting the new one up.

It's not. It's not taken down. It's just what. It's hidden, I guess. So you can still find it. Like, if you have the direct link, you can do it. But it's not. It's not the one that we're. No. That we're now sending and linking to. Got it. So we've got the ungated pillar content video in YouTube. That video now in the description in the pinned comment. So I went in there and pinned a comment. Hey, if. If you want the case study, go here and get it. And, and also you know, in the video itself, I'm saying, go here to get the report. So that's how we're turning views into leads and, you know, clear through line. I don't know the percentage of people who watch the video who then opt in for the report, but I know we're getting many, many thousands of leads a month. So it's, it's a good. It's a good percentage. Once I had that, I was like, okay, now what I want to have is other sort of sub videos that address just very specific standalone concepts in the pillar video. So the pillar video I'm breaking down. Here's our comprehensive $200 million operating system, right? One of those concepts of our operating system is the scorecard. And so I created a video on how we create CEO dashboards and company scorecards. Pretty simple video. That one was like 10 to 20 minutes. I forget exactly how long, but I say in there, hey, this is just one part of our operating system. If you want to get the rest of it, go back and watch the main video. So all of the sub videos, and my goal, I came up with a list of 10 sub videos that I was going to create, and I was going to just do one per week. So there you go. You got the main video. I got another two and a half months worth of videos that I know that I was just committed to doing. And if I only do those videos and it doesn't work, I was going to commit to that. The main video plus 10, and every single one of those videos was going to reference and link back in every way that I could back to the pillar content video. Then what we did, and this was the game changer. The videos that actually got some traction, like the videos that people were, you know, watching for months. I forget the exact metrics. I can, you know, I can get them to you, and I'll tell you what the exact metrics were and all of our founders board members. But basically, you can tell some videos hit and some videos don't. Like, if you just go and look at my most recent videos, that one video on scorecards got like over a hundred thousand views. Like, it jumped up to like 40, 50,000 views in the first, like, week with no bump in anything. It just went a little viral. I don't know why. I've done some other ones that that didn't. They got a few thousand views, right? And so the ones that get some traction, obviously they're worthy of amplification. And so whatever that means for you, the videos that get a Little bit of traction relative to your other ones. We buy discovery ads for those videos. So a discovery ad is where the video appears in somebody's feed. So it appears in their nav as like a recommended video. It's going to show up on their homepage and it's not the pre roll ad. You know what I'm saying? Does that make sense?

Yep.

So it's not a pre roll clip that appears before somebody else's video. You're actually just making it easier for people to find the video. In other words, what you're doing is you're trumping the algorithm. Because our goal algorithmically is to show up on somebody's start screen. Our goal algorithmically is to show up on the. Watch this next. You know, in, in the sidebar. What a discovery ad does is it just puts your video there. It just makes sure that people actually happen to see that. But we're only doing that for the videos that already did get some basic traction. And, and early on I was, we were committed to doing it with like all those videos. But now what we have is it creates this like binge factory. So the people that find the one video, they wind up getting directed back to the pillar content video. But because we're also doing discovery ads for multiple videos now on somebody's start screen and in their one, they might have be three or four videos of me there to go and watch. And so they don't just watch one video, they're watching a video after a video, after a video. And the beautiful thing is you only pay for that first click if they go and then watch another video after that. You didn't pay for that. That's why I'm saying the lead cost actually goes down. This is what has allowed the subscriber growth to happen. And now it just becomes this sort of beautiful flywheel that occurs that now as I go and add a new video, we don't necessarily need to put as much spend behind it, but we're spending right now as a, as a percentage of the total ad budget. It's, you know, for scalable, I want to say it's less than, it's like 3%, 4% is what's going towards. It's thousands. So it's like, I think it's, I think we're only spending three or four thousand dollars right now. A month. Yeah. And it, and it started out as hundreds just when we saw the leads coming through and what they were like, let's crank it up. And so now anytime we, you went.

From Hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to just $3,000.

We went from hundreds of dollars a month to 3,000. I will have all of these exact. Yeah, I will have all of these exact numbers for you when we get to the meeting to, you know, it's.

Better this way because otherwise it was step one, spend a hundred thousand dollars a month for three months. Now, you know what doesn't work now? You spend 3,000amonth.

Yeah. So don't do that. Step one, spend hundreds a month. I want to say the budget of discovery ad for each video was like 50 or $100 was kind of all the way up and it might have been a couple hundred dollars for a bit like. Let's just make sure that somebody sees this. The beautiful thing is these are some of the cheapest ads that you can buy right now because they don't take people off platform. So YouTube loves these. Because all you're doing is saying, hey, watch my video right here in YouTube. You're not, there's not a call to action taking them off platform. You're simply just saying, go watch my video. So it's, I mean, I want to say the cost per click is like it's under 8 cents. It's like 7 point something cents. It's nuts, man. It is so incredibly cheap. But we only do it on the videos that got some traction. So we know they're pretty good, they're worthy of amplification. But now if it's good, we keep putting budget behind that video. If a new video comes, then that gets a little more budget. So the budget isn't growing by us putting more money into certain videos. The budget's growing because there's just more videos that are worthy of amplification. And so that's kind of this again, this big flywheel that just sort of feeds itself.

Love it.

So the last couple of weeks I haven't done a video because I was busy and I didn't. And you know what, subscriber growth is still happening and leads are still coming in because we're not purely dependent upon the. We're not, we're not purely dependent upon like the algorithm to make sure. And if we, you know, ever pause, then it goes away. And this is all being managed, you know, with our own in house ad team. So there's no like $15,000, you know, consultants and contractors doing this. I'm just knocking out a quick video. My goal right now is I go in, I record, I want to get to where I'm recording three videos a week. So that. Because it just doesn't take that long at this point, I can record. I can knock out three videos a week, two to four. And so the average is three. And if I do that at least twice a week, then I stay, you know, a couple of weeks ahead.

Love it. Do you Much as it's difficult, hundreds and hundreds of episodes now into the podcast, do you think that's going to be challenging to keep up on that schedule? YouTube definitely likes it. For you to do it for. For me, it's just, it got really old after, you know, a year for sure. Probably after about six months.

Yeah. The deal that I've made with myself is if I don't want to do it, I don't do it.

Okay. And as your goal, if you don't, then who cares?

Then, yeah, then I won't. And. And as long as we continue to buy ads for it. So as long as we continue to buy discovery ads, that is how you essentially say it's okay. Algorithm. We're still here. We got you. Right. We're juicing the algorithm with money. And YouTubers and creators aren't willing and able to do this. But if you're a business and you're treating this as a media, as a paid traffic channel, and your goal is leads, and you can track that back to. Well, we're getting this many, you know, leads. I mean, you know, for us, average client value in the first 90 days is $18,000. Yep. Currently, I don't know how to spend $18,000 a month on discovery ads to get this going.

Tracking. So can you say, let's say in the last 30 days you spent $3,000 and are you able to say this many leads came from YouTube and then they converted into this much revenue?

Yeah. Yes. And it's, it's. The last time we looked at it was about a 12x ROAS, which I do not expect to continue. I, I do think that the return on ad spend will go down a bit because what's happening is while lead cost is going down, lead quality also isn't as good because we're very deliberate when we're showing the discovery ads. I mean, I'm saying I want discovery ads to appear, you know, for people who are looking for, you know, the YouTube ad channel is through Google. So you can put in all your competitors. Right. You can put in people who are following different kinds of topics. The downside to organic, frankly, is it's everybody in the world. And so we're getting a lot of people who are in parts of the world that at scalable at least we don't serve. So we're now having to figure out because there's just this influx of leads that good news we didn't have to pay for. We paid very, very little for that. We don't really have the way, the ability to, you know, to, to serve. And so initially when it was just the discovery ads cost, the route, return on ad spend was incredibly high. We're seeing return on ad spend go down because the lead quality is going down. We didn't have the filtering mechanisms and stuff like that or the ability to monetize. But yeah, we can track all of it back and it's very, very clear on where they're coming from.

Yeah, that's great.

Very cool.

So you want to give a quick.

Summary of that for everybody? Just a tldr.

Yeah. So if you want to. If you're a business person, you're not a YouTuber and you're not a creator and you want to give YouTube a shot, don't think about it as, you know, you're producing a show one pillar content video. What's the one piece of content you wish everybody saw before they talked to anybody in your sales team? Get that done, upload that, make it the featured post, featured video on your channel. Then brainstorm 10 other videos that would relate and could be pointed back, you know, at that. Post those one a week, the ones that get some traction and it might be two, it might be three, it might be six. Put some discovery ad oomph behind it so that you can begin to juice the algorithm and just track your cost per lead that come from the gated version of the pillar content. And I think at this point, man, if I were to just stop and post no more videos, this content channel could just still live on. If I didn't do anything new, because it's all evergreen content, it'd be fine. It would just be a channel that just. That just lived, that just existed. Sort of like blog content that just ranks in social. So that's the basic idea. You don't have to. You're not a YouTuber, you're not a creator, you don't have to post all the time, but you do have to do what they're unwilling to do, which is to spend some advertising dollars. But again, we're running a business. What's new?

I like it. Awesome. Well, thank you and hopefully you guys enjoyed that. We would love to hear it. If you try it yourself and it works for you, let us know if it doesn't work, don't talk to us at all. If you find ways to do it better, enhance, optimize, anything like that, we're definitely all ears and would love to hear it. And if you found this valuable, please share this with other people so that more people can come to the podcast. Thank you guys and we'll see you next time on Business Lunch.

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