Tips For Increasing The Visibility Of Your Podcast On YouTube With Fran Asaro

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone out there in the livestream world. We are on our coaching call and feed your brand episode recording for mid September here, and I am so excited because we have a coaching crasher today. And I love a coaching crasher because it means I'm off the hook of having to be the expert. But it also means that I have somebody who I can ask all my burning questions about the things that I want to know about. And today we're focused on YouTube. So I'm going to get our episode started because as you know, if you've ever followed us or ever watched our livestreams before or are attending here, we have our community in zoom where they can ask actual questions of our guest and of Tom and I, or you can do it on the live stream and we can try to follow up with you. Not that there's anything wrong with that because you're getting the information live. However, we just can't monitor all the questions everywhere and we save the questions for our community. So if you'd like to join us and find out more about that, you can go to potatoes.com and do an inquiry. But what we're going to do is we always record our podcast live and show people how we do it. Because this is a great way to keep podcasting. When you have community that you're serving, go live on your podcast and make sure you show up every single week. Because the hardest part, and Fran, our guest today, is going to tell you that one of the hardest things is being consistent and constant with everything that you do is one of the primary rules of everything, SEO, everything, YouTube, everything podcasting is to show up consistent and constant. And this is one way we do this here at Productize and we show you how to do that. So I'm going to go live with feature brand. And normally, if you've ever watched Feed your brand or listen to Feed your Brand, you've seen that. I'm normally with my partner, Tom Hazard, but because we have the coaching crasher today, Fran Asaro is going to join me. So let's get started.

Welcome to Feed.

You'd Brand.

I'm Tracy Hazzard and our coaching crasher today is Fran Asaro from Thrive Anyway and Senior Tuber. And I adore Fran. She is my YouTube guru, everything expert on YouTube, the person I go to when I have questions, the person who helped me optimize my channel. And we're going to talk about some of those things today.

So.

So I'm so excited to have Fran on with me. Fran is the president of Thrive Anyway and the founder of the Senior Tuber community where she mentors people to become YouTube creators. While her focus is on mature individuals, Senior Tuber. She happily works with people of all ages and promises not to check your ID as a lifetime entrepreneur. She started her first business at 21 and a partner in an auto repair shop. She also has experience as a top producing realtor for 25 years. And she has a life and business coaching company where she virtually partners others seeking support, guidance and resources in building their business. So Fran has experience in all kinds of industries and that I think is really key here and I wanted to highlight that in her bio because it makes a difference when you're trying to support people who are coaching authors, speakers, people are building their businesses. It's a different model than being a straight influencer on YouTube. And that's where Fran is key and why she's so matched to what we do here at Potterties that I have been so eager to get her into our community. And Fran and I are working together for about five months now, like, so it's taken us a while, but her love of entrepreneurship and content really also makes a difference here in what she does. And I love her community and we're going to talk some more about her community. But mostly what I want you to understand also is that Fran is a YouTube partner. That means she has top level information straight from YouTube and she specializes in teaching us how to optimize and monetize our YouTube channels, allowing us to reach a larger audience and build a loyal following, which is what we want for our podcast as well. The other alignment and the part that I'm going to start with here as I bring Fran on is that one of the things we are giant proponents of here at Potatoise and and feed your brand is making sure that we optimize our listings. We optimize all the technical things that go on behind the scenes because if we want to be seen, heard, found and rewarded, the only way to do that is to make sure we're playing the game the way it's set up. And YouTube has a whole bunch of rules and a whole bunch of best practices and a whole bunch of things that are going on. And that optimization is the key. So that's where I'm going to start. Fran, thank you for joining us today. We're so excited to have you. And I want to know how you got interested in YouTube.

Well, first of all, thank you for being here. I adore you too. It's a good match that I'm here because it's like Christmas for me to come here and be on your show. So thank you so much. And how I started, gosh, my first YouTube channel started in 2009 and that one sitting dormant. And then my next one, which is live now, started in 2011. And I was a content creator, always loving it. I had done some research on it. I was not successful at it, but I was having a blast. Okay. I was posting and posting and posting and loving what I was posting, but I didn't know what I didn't know. Right. So for many years, I failed. And I thought it was just not going to be for me. I was just going to have to keep doing what I was doing, my coaching. But my dream was to be a content creator where I was earning an income, I was building a business from it. And I'm happy to say that right now I'm in a position where this new content, creating YouTube and senior tuber is the foundation of my business, which I absolutely love and I love. Other people really have a Foundation with YouTube. So it becomes the soul of your business and everything you do from there gets fed from there. So now I'm extremely passionate because I'm just sharing my love and I get to watch other people flourish. So it's been really great.

Well, let's start with the optimization side because this is the part that people don't think about. They think their channel. It's like, oh, I signed up, I have a YouTube channel. But there's so much more to that. And you showed me the layers and layers of YouTube. So there's channel optimization and there's video optimization. But let's start with this channel, one that most people ignore, right?

So I don't know if who out there runs their own website, but it's sort of like putting SEO on your website and you think, oh, that's too complicated. I'm just going to have a website and just hope that somebody comes to see it and maybe a couple of people do. Well, YouTube sort of runs the same way. It's not as complicated as far as I'm concerned it's like a new language at first, but when you learn it, it just becomes second nature. That's with the video. But when you're doing the channel optimization, it's almost like a set and forget. If you spent a little bit of time setting your channel optimization, people will find you. They'll know where you are. If you're looking up artists in your area, you'll show up if you have it optimized correctly and it does half the work for you by doing that. So having your channel itself optimized is probably the foundational thing. And then learning how to optimize your videos comes next.

So we do the same thing in podcasting, we and most of the optimization runs around a failure to put a full length description, which is the same thing that I found in the YouTube channel. Failure to use things like teaser videos and do them properly. Right. What other things are some of the prime optimization things that most people overlook or this is what I also found. It may not have been available when you set your channel up way back when and is now available and different.

That's a big point because many of us YouTube changes, they change because of the audience, because of the time. So yeah, you learned 10 years ago probably isn't the same. So are you asking me which is the primary things for channel or for video optimization?

For channel. Let's talk channel. Let's start with what are some of the prime things that people miss and people don't do and don't set up properly?

Absolutely. Put in your intro video. So when somebody comes to your channel for the first time, you are there with a video that is less than five minutes long, preferably less than three, welcoming them and tell them why they're there. So you don't need to tell them your name or anything about you right at first you want to speak to them. If you are a mature person looking to start or grow a YouTube channel, if you and you don't know how to do it and you need some help, then you're in the right place. It would be that kind of an introduction. Subscribe, listen for our podcast and then they know what they're doing, either like you or they don't and they click or they don't to subscribe. The next thing would be there's a secondary video. When they do subscribe, when they come back now you welcome them back. What do you want them to know now? That they're a regular and you want to welcome them there. Also tagging your channel is vital. So if you are a channel for podcasters, let's say, then you want to be making sure your tag says podcast for podcasters. Right. And this way podcasters will find you and they'll know. And there's 500 characters that you could put in tags. So once you learn the art of tagging, then you'll find out what people are searching for. And there are many ways you could just go to Google and see what people are searching for about your business. But there are a lot of tools out there and that's pretty much where I would start with. There are others as well.

Yeah. The description, the thinking about how it looks. Right. The about me and how it looks at the top, what your banner is. Too often we have it, I think over branded for us. And that's what I discovered was so much repetitiveness between your profile photo, the banner and other things. Just creating that sort of looking at it as a holistic thing rather than each in isolation.

Exactly. Consider every place that you can enter data to be real estate. And do you need to have the same thing? Do you need to have the same image? Do you need to have the same name or the same links? You want everything to be a story. So if they're looking at your banner, then you want that to bring them down to the title, do you want them to bring that down to the about you page? And you just want it to easily flow so that people learn more about you.

So that's wonderful. You see why now I have brought Fran in because there's so much that you just don't know that you don't know about YouTube. And another area is so optimization for videos. Now there's some things that you do that are set and forget as well. Like you could set a tagging system and some of those tags are set and forget and you just optimize and do a few new ones for each new video. But there's a lot that's different for each one and they each need to be optimized.

Correct. And there is a feature through YouTube called an Upload default, which is like setting a template. So if you're using the same topic all the time, then every time you will upload a video everything gets auto populated and you don't have to add the tags or the description, but like you said, you can add to it based on the different video. Now the most important things you want to do is be found. No matter how good your content is, if they're not finding you, that's a problem. So tagging is very important. But if you have provided, you've tagged well and they're scrolling through podcast for podcasters, right. And you want them to find you, then you want to make sure when they see you that they're seeing a fantastic thumbnail. That is the first and foremost leg into what are they going to see it. It's got to be contrasting colors. A person in your thumbnail that's either making an expression or being animated. And very bold, clear, short, three to four words maximum. That's just going to entice them to look at the title, which is the second most important thing to getting people to click. And so once your thumbnail gives some sort of a teaser, then they'll go over to the title, then they'll click. And that's what we're trying to do. Because many people say nobody's going over. Nobody's going over to your video. They don't even know about your content. You're not doing anything wrong except for that first foot that you want to put in.

I love this. Now, so much of this is something that we don't like to talk about because it's just too techy. It makes a lot of people's eyes roll. And that's algorithms. And the YouTube algorithm is somewhat of a mystery to some people, quite hackable for others. What are some things that we should know about the YouTube algorithm?

Yeah, so for me, SEO and algorithms, even though I've learned about them over the years, it was always like, I don't even have the bandwidth to understand it. So here's what I want to say. Simplified. And it does change with YouTube. Their algorithms change year after year. But right now, what YouTube is trying to do is see who is looking at your videos so that they know they can keep people on their channel and that their advertisers are going to be happy. That's really it in a nutshell. Are you giving stuff that is interesting enough that people want to see that they're engaged with? And then you get Brownie points with YouTube based on your giving them what they want to keep people on their channel. But here's the fun thing is we all have algorithms for our channel. So what YouTube's doing to make money is exactly what you want to do to make money on your channel. You want to keep people on your channel. So, yeah, YouTube, you want some on their platform, but you want them to stay on your channel. And there are these ways that if somebody comes and sees one of your videos, if you have your channel optimized Enough, they're going to stay there sometimes for hours, but they'll definitely be fans if they see certain things unfold. And we can do that with playlists, end screens and cards. So there are plenty of ways to keep people on your channel.

Well, let's talk a little bit about that. So this is one of the things that most people don't understand. You do need a thousand subscribers to your channel to unlock some of these extra promo tools that are available. Some of them are available now, but many of them aren't. And so to maximize your ability, you do need to get a thousand subscribers. So I want to start there before we talk about end screens, info cards and some of these tools. But what are some of your recommended ways to get to a thousand subscribers quickly?

The very first thing I would recommend now is Shorts. YouTube Shorts is like a buy one, get one free for your local supermarket. People want to get people to your channel and then they fall in love with you and they subscribe.

And YouTube wants that for us too. Right. It's part of what they want you to go from shorts into the long video. So they want to encourage that.

Right. And now there's even another brand new feature that you can have a segue into your long or short videos. From the short that you do put in, there'll be a clickable link right in your short telling them where you want them to go from there. So that's.

This is the way to drive podcast traffic.

Everyone got a podcast. Chances are somebody comes to you for the first time, they're not going to invest an hour. They know nothing about you. But if they've just seen five of your shorts, they're definitely going to want to, if they're interested, they're going to want to know more and they're going to click. So like I said, it's not going to bring in a lot of money, pennies or dollars a month, depending on how many shorts you put up there. But it's going to bring you people and subscribers. It's going to bring you viewers and subscribers. And that's what we're trying to do. And so shorts would be the quickest way. People are growing their channel so fast and it's new. Shorts are new, basically new in this area. And it's really kicking butt out there. It's doing great.

What are other ways that they could get a thousand subscribers?

Being consistent, like you said, if you have a podcast out there, tell people what they can expect from you and do that. So if you say it's weekly or. And letting them know that you're out there, fine tuning your audience. All right. You want your audience to see themselves in there. So basically, if you're setting up your channel right, if you set up your videos right, and they know they belong there, then they're either going to stay or share with somebody else. So that's a very important thing as well.

You know, that's really interesting. I think I'm. It's really great that you said that, because we see the same thing in podcasting. When you niche down tightly into an area, you grow your subscriber base faster. It doesn't mean you can't do it the other way. But it is harder when it's the All About Me show or the all about my business channel. Right. It takes a lot longer for someone to trust you than it does. If I'm interested in 3D printing, like we found that really quickly. Right. I'm interested in bingeable content. That's what my binge factor actually outgrew. And it grew faster to a thousand subscribers than potatoes did.

Wow. And, you know, if you really have a lot of things you want to put out there, you can have up to 100 YouTube channels for every Google account. So if you're yearning to get everything that's inside of you out, just open up another channel. But don't confuse your audience. Which is why I failed. You know, I put everything from meditation to my coaching to reviews, and people would subscribe, but they weren't mine. They weren't my loyal followers because they subscribed to that piece. And then all of a sudden I confused them when all of a sudden I put an audiobook on there, you know, so you want to make sure you keep it very consistent to your.

Brand once you get a thousand subscribers and unlocks some extra tools and some extra things. And some of those are end screens, info cards. Can you demystify some of these promo tools? But at the end of the day, they do what you said, which is try to drive traffic to other things within. YouTube does better than driving traffic outside of it.

Yes. So cards, you can have up to five cards in every video. And cards are that little. And you'll start noticing some of the things I'm saying now that you're hearing about them. But you may not have noticed before, there's a little exclamation point, little black box in the upper right hand corner of a video as you're watching it. Those are people who have spent time putting things they want you to do. Next. And they might even say, if you want to go to my next video, click here. And then you could strategically place where you want people to go to next. And you can have up to five of those, including links, playlists, regular videos. So you can have an array of things throughout your video however you want to place it. Now, end screens are the last 20 seconds of your video. So at the end of your video, you want to make sure you're not covering up anything. Like if you have any call to actions, but you have videos that'll boxes that'll show your next video what you want them to do next. And guess what? If you don't do it, YouTube's going to show them what to do next. So you want to tell them what to do.

And it might be not in your channel, so it might not be one of your videos, so you might as well do it yourself.

Exactly. So if you learn how to do an end screen, you can have up to four. One should be your subscribe button. And then the others could be the rest of the three for videos or just one. It depends on what you want them to do next. And then you have a choice. You'll go into your playlist. You can have a box that says, see this playlist. It'll show your whole podcast if you want. They don't have to worry about it just being one. So that's really cool. And playlists and podcast lists are very important if you learn how to use them correctly. For instance, if you go to your podcast link in your YouTube channel and you click on that, pull up the podcast you want to share from and click on the video you want to share that has a different link than if you went to an individual version of that video. When you click on that, it'll now show all your podcasts to the right column where if you didn't do that link, you'll see what YouTube wants your people to take and do next. So that is a very.

I want to clarify that for everyone listening out there. What Fran is saying is that instead of just going to the video in your studio, the YouTube studio, going to the video side in the back end and sharing the video, go to the playlist, pick the video and share that link is going to make a huge difference because it's now sharing the. The playlist and the video at the same time. And lucky us podcasters, us podcasters have a registered tab with our podcast playlist that's separate. And so when we do that, it's now going to show all your Episodes, all your videos that are related to that podcast playlist. Yes.

And you're talking about having a thousand subscribers to become a YouTube partner, but you also need to have 4,000 watch hours in order to be a YouTube partner partner. And that sounds like a lot, but it equates to about 333 watch time hours per month. If somebody hits your podcast and then it keeps continually playing all your other podcasts because they're binge watching you. Because now that he know you're going to reach those amount of hours in no time and then becoming a YouTube partner doesn't become so far away.

That's right. And that's how you tip over into monetization. And remember that we talked about this in another episode of which I'm now pointing up to this upper corner, to the info card that will be there that is going to have the episode on which we taught you how to convert your playlist, your podcast to a YouTube playlist, to a podcast playlist on YouTube. We did that. So when you do that though, you're creating an ability for all of those things to be viewed and watched. And keeping people binging is the number one way. They not only help you monetize your YouTube, but they will help you monetize your podcast eventually as well, because they're going to come from your podcast when they binge on you and want to subscribe to your community and want to subscribe to your courses and want to buy your stuff.

Right.

So this is all a strategy. If we can keep them on YouTube but keep them within your stuff on YouTube, we're better off. And that's what Fran has been so great at pointing out here today.

That's like the YouTube algorithms that you're having your own algorithms. That's how you do it. You play the game. Exactly.

Now what about comments, likes, community engagement and those kinds of things? How much does that help you?

It's funny, I just wrote an article for my LinkedIn newsletter. I'm following it up with a video, how to support your favorite YouTube creators. Because when you know how to do it, you'll ask your own people to do it. And when they know how to support you, a lot of people who are just viewers, they don't know how to support you. But when people say subscribe or like or comment or share or whatever you put there or buy my products, that's how they support you for putting out free content for them. Right.

They want to give back.

Yes. There's also a thanks button if you have A certain amount of. I think it's a thousand subscribers that people could thank you during your live events or each individual video. They can click on it and pay you just for having a great video, but they won't know it exists if you don't tell them. And if they love you, they're going to want to help you. So a comment is going to show YouTube engagement. They're saying that, okay, they're putting out enough content that people are commenting back or they're liking it, that must be good. Or they're sharing it. That's good. Or they're watching it all the way through. This is a big one. If somebody starts your video and doesn't stay with it to the end, it's showing YouTube that your content is losing people towards a certain point, which your analytics will show. So you want to teach people to watch your video all the way through. You don't have to strap them down and force them to watch if they don't want to. But if they know that, that's good. Like my friend, he watches a few minutes of it. He didn't realize, he just leave the room. I don't care what you do, just leave it on. It's not like you just don't want to watch the whole thing. So teach people how to support you.

I love that those are so important. And you have a community. You have a group of people that get together and talk and you share all these information with us. Tell us a little bit about your community, Fran, and how you nurture that community.

First of all, thank you. I'm a new podcaster, so that's huge. Because of you, I became a podcaster. I am not a live podcaster yet, but I will. And I also, I'm in the works of starting a YouTube membership. Instead of taking it off platform, I'm going to do it there. It is a lot more money that you have to pay, but it's certainly worth it when people will have a join button right there instead of having to take them off platform. For people that feel that there's value in that and so they just join. You have different platform levels and everything. And then I have two other communities. I have a Facebook community, senior tuber community, and I also have a weekly live called the Senior Tuber Creator Group, and that's for a few dollars a month. It's a paid group, but we brainstorm. Like, somebody just put up their very first video. And now we're going to process it tomorrow on our call, all of us as a team, we're going to help them optimize their channel because it's their very first one and it's a great video but nobody's seeing it. We have to help her get it out there. So we go through what's current for us. We work on each other's issues and we celebrate each other and it's really great. So I'd say those are the communities I'm working with now.

And there's a couple of other things that you do and that we're offering to the Potterties client community as well as all of you listening to feed you'd brand out there. Fran will do an optimization review for you. She did one for me. It was this incredible report. It's amazing. It takes a lot of time and energy and I think she's not charging enough. I'm just going to be straight with you on that. So you might as well take advantage of it and connect through to Fran and what is in this optimization report. Fran, give us a top level.

Yeah. When you say there's a lot in there, I want to apologize in advance. I put a lot of stuff in there because I want you to have the Bible. Okay. It's not all that you need today. You don't have to memorize it. But in that same situation, I have outlined all the benefits of the best practices, the optimizational best practices. And I go through your channel and I tell you what you have or haven't done yet and how you can do it. You don't get scored. Nobody's going to beat you up. Just suggestions on how to optimize both your channel and one video. And then you could do what you want with it. You could take your time to implement it, or you can get on a call. It includes one call with me so we could go through it together or you can take your time and optimize it on your own. But it really does help when you learn it. I want to say that most people give me the deer in the headlights look when they have this call like we're having right now or they get my optimization report. So I'm getting used to it now and I'm not offended if you say this is too much. I'm going to explode. Because next week normally happens is people call me and say, I just noticed that other channel. You know, they don't have any tags and they call and tell me on other people. And then somebody called me one time, one of my clients, and said I can only get my channel up to an SEO of 30. And I said, okay, sit with me for five minutes and let's see what we could do. And in five minutes, giving her three different simple things like tags and title and I forget what the other thing was. And we had it up to 90 within a few minutes. And she get to see it real time. So it was very exciting. If you now Shannon, I told her about how to look up keywords and she said she has spent many a night, middle to all night long looking up keywords. She got addicted to it.

It can be a little bit of a black hole. Yes, absolutely. So Shannon Prosecutor, actually how Fran and I met. So I wanted to give her a shout out before we're done here. Shannon has a PR and publicity community that is just amazing. And we were both speakers at that and that's actually how we met. And I was just fascinated by our talk. When I take notes, that's a sign that this is somebody that I need to bring into our community. And so I got after Fran and it took us quite a few months to make it and get together. And I was overwhelmed by your report. And I don't get overwhelmed really easily because all of you know, I'm pretty techie. I'm pretty strategic about everything and I'm pretty up on what's going on. But there was so much detail in there that I needed to absorb it and think about strategically. How am I going to do this for my business? How am I going to do this? What do I want to do? And actually some of these things I decided not to implement right now because I'm about to revamp my whole channel and brand. And when I do it, I'm just going to implement all those changes, but I planned them in already, thanks to France. So this is something you're going to want to take advantage of. And look, I'm going to call it. I don't offer any affiliations, I don't offer any promos from other people unless I believe they're extremely valuable. And so if I haven't gone through it, I'm not going to recommend it to you. And Fran is one. She's not only someone that I recommend. You go and you do this because you will learn so much about your YouTube, about your videos, about your channel, about your brand and how you're presenting yourself out in the world. Going to learn so much that it's going to have strategic value to every part of your business, Your company, your coaching programs, everything is going to build off of this foundation of some things that she's going to point out to you and you're going to go, this is what I was missing. This is what is needed. And so that's why I brought Fran to you today.

So thank you. It's actually one of the reasons why I started the Senior Tuber Tracy, is because I took an academy and everything came in like a fire hose. And I realized now, because it's my age, I chose that age group. But a lot of people want to be given things at a spoonful instead of a fire hose. And even though I give a lot of material that is a little bit overwhelming, you have me that will slow down with you. Plus, you have it. It's in layman's terms. There's not a lot in my optimization report that you can't understand. It's just a lot. And we just take it a step at a time. So it's up to you if you want to learn your pace. That's what I try to encourage.

Well, Fran, thank you so much for being here. On Feed your Brand today we will have an update. I'm going to bring you back and we're going to talk about YouTube membership because we're both going to be experimenting with that side of things. Video defaults are definitely something we're going to be discussing in a future episode and we'll be referring to some of your information as we talk about our best video defaults. And what we found is we started to update those end screens and info cards. We've been testing those out, so there'll be shouts out to you in future. So these are all some of the things that are going to be coming in future months as I experiment and bring them in. I'm going to be showing you the effect of my audit, if you want to call it that, my optimization audit with Fran and my view of that and my review of it is made some changes fundamentally to the practice. And I believe that my YouTube shorts is still already off the charts. So we're going to have an update on that as well. So Fran is going to be mentioned here and she's going to be brought back again and again.

I would love it. Maybe eventually we'll get to how to monetize your channel. All the ways you can monetize your channel.

That's coming up.

That's the ultimate goal, right?

That's the ultimate goal, yeah, absolutely. As soon as we get into our monetization, tip over. And we expect that to happen this year, before the end of the year. And so we'll definitely be working on then. Now what do I need to do next? Right? Yes.

And we needed to have an audience because we've been having these conversations for months. It's nice to share it with the world now, right?

Absolutely. That's why we do our podcast, right?

Yes. I love it.

So we could share what we're working on in our partnership. So everyone, thank you so much for joining us here on feed. You'd brand if you were a part of the potatoes community. You'd be able to ask Fran questions personally and maybe even show her your YouTube channel because you'd be in our zoom community right now asking questions live. So that's where we're going to be headed. We're ending the livestream portion of the show here. Thank you so much for joining us. Tom and I will be back next week with another topic here on feed.

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