YouTube is becoming MORE important

Read Time: 6 minutes

Welcome to BE THE EXPERT! In today’s issue:

• Why YouTube is becoming MORE important (and how to succeed)
• How Cleo Abram Dominated YouTube in 1 Year
• YouTube takes on TikTok with longer Shorts, templates, trends, and more

YouTube is becoming MORE important (and how to succeed)

I spent 8 hours over the last week immersed in YouTube research and best practices. What I learned was surprising.

My wife, son, and I were on vacation and we had several long drives so I had queued up a bunch of videos and podcasts to listen to.

A couple of key points stood out:

• YouTube has become a major growth engine for online businesses, both large and small, regardless of audience size.
• There is a LOT more to success on YouTube than just editing and uploading videos.
• It does NOT take a large team or budget to be successful if the right strategies and systems are used.

The focus time on this opened my eyes quite a bit and I’ll be making some significant changes to my content planning and building more tools into our programs to help.

Let’s dive in!

YouTube as a growth engine

We’ve all heard that people need to “know, like, and trust” you before they buy something from you, right?

But for new or small online businesses, no one knows, likes, or trusts us yet.

Traditionally, we’d use ads, webinars, video sales letters, etc. to accelerate that process, but in most niches, the audience is burned out as they are bombarded day and night with those.

Across many of the sources I listened to (Colin & Samir, Sean Cannel, Hormozi, Jay Clouse, Ravi Abuvala, Ali Abdaal, and more), they basically referred to YouTube as the “top of funnel.”

YouTube as the “top of funnel”

What they meant was that publishing good content consistently on YouTube was becoming the entry point for new people into their world.

It was also becoming a key middle-of-funnel location as well.

Why?

Because high-quality, high-value, free content is the fastest and most trusted way for someone to begin to know, like, and trust you.

These examples proved the Google research I covered in ​BTE53​, which they called the “messy middle,” where the buyer’s journey is not linear through a single funnel.

Between first contact and an eventual sale, people loop through a messy process of learning, researching, changing their mind, then eventually buying something.

Where do a majority of people go during that process? Yep, YouTube.

Especially for areas like most of us are in like coaching, consulting, courses, SaaS, etc.

Some of the folks I listened to had data to back it up, seeing the people had watched several videos or several hours of their content on YouTube during their buyer’s journey before joining one of their programs.

YouTube as a “sideways webinar”?

The really advanced folks designed their content strategy around that (as I have described in ​BTE29 – This content strategy is game-changing​) by aligning content to the buyer’s journey.

What that means is they plan a series of videos where one leads and links to the next that nurtures the viewer toward a goal.

I think Steve J Larson, one of Russel Brunson’s star students, called it a “sideways webinar”.

In a typical webinar, you’d have a personal story, an epiphany, and a new vehicle (your solution), and people would have objections to overcome about the vehicle, internal, and external objections.

The webinar would try to address all of that over an hour or two.

The NEW way is to create videos for each of those and arrange them sideways in a sequence or playlist on YouTube.

Certainly not as “salesy” as a webinar, the videos still provide a lot of value, but there is a purpose and an order to them as opposed to just randomly publishing them in your niche.

YouTube HIGHLY encourages serial/episodic content now (see the news section below) so this strategy fits right with that.

As an example, you’ve heard me talk about content pillars and also aligning to the buyer’s journey with content focused on ATTRACT, CONVERT, and ASCEND stages.

Content Funnels

What I’m going to start doing is creating “content funnels” for each pillar.

Here’s one quick example:

My Strategy Pillar (the others are Systems, Tools, and Team)

• For the ATTRACT stage, I’ll have 2 – 3 videos about myths, false beliefs, and getting started in online business.
• For the CONVERT stage I’ll have 2 – 3 videos with best practices, tutorials, etc. about how to choose the right strategy.
• For the ASCEND stage, I’ll have 2 – 3 videos with case studies, comparisons, etc.
• Within all of those will be a mix of personal stories, examples, and objection handling.
• Each will link to the next, be in a playlist, etc., and all will also have a link and path to my actual sales funnels.

This works because it is zero-pressure, meaning anyone watching and moving through the progression is doing so voluntarily and on their own time.

Since it is all on-demand, people can move as quickly or slowly as they want.

Since there is always a path to my sales funnels, anyone with an urgent need for my solutions can proceed through right away.

The final benefit I haven’t mentioned yet is that this strategy also helps LOWER your overall ad costs (if you run ads).

Why?

Because you are building a warm audience of people consuming all of your YouTube content. You can advertise to folks who already know, like, and trust you as opposed to a completely cold audience.

YouTube success takes more than just editing and uploading videos

This is the biggest area of change for me.

Across all influencers I listened to in my research, they spent a HUGE percentage of their time on planning and packaging of videos before ever recording anything.

Almost a quarter(!) of the total time spent creating a video was purely thinking about the title, hook, and thumbnail.

Another large portion was the overall “story” of the video (the flow, structure, etc.)

Only once all those were mapped out would they decide whether to even proceed with the video.

That is how important those elements are.

From there, most successful folks also completely script out their videos so they can be tight, focused, and follow their plan.

Contrast that to many of us (myself included) where I just take what I’ve written in one of these newsletters, record it on video, slap a generic thumbnail on it, and publish.

What stood out to me was how much time and effort was put into refining those upfront elements (thumbnail, title, hook)

This is why many of us don’t get views or results on our videos. People never actually get to the content because that “packaging” is poor.

This leads to the obvious question: HOW do we get better at these?

It does NOT take a large team or budget to be successful if the right strategies and systems are used

Seeing how the successful do it has inspired me to double down and REALLY systemize our video planning and production.

That means capturing the best practices and creating tools to help with each step of creating and consuming a successful YouTube video.

The items below are the order viewers consume YouTube content.

Our goal is to retain as many as we can and keep them from clicking away.

• Topic/Idea
• Thumbnail
• Title
• Hook
• Introduction
• Story
• Content
• Call to action
• Video description

If the topic (as expressed via the thumbnail and title) are interesting, they click away.

If the first 30 seconds (the hook) are boring or irrelevant, they click away.

If the introduction doesn’t keep them engaged, they click away.

You get the picture. At each step, we need to always consider how to keep them engaged.

I don’t know about you, but for me, none of that comes naturally.

So, for things that don’t come naturally, we need to implement systems to MAKE them happen.

I’m in the process of creating some prompts and tools for each item in the list above.

Basically a YouTube “co-pilot”. The goal is NOT to have the co-pilot try to create the whole video in one shot (this is what most are trying)

Instead, the goal is to have the co-pilot help REFINE and IMPROVE each element as we go through planning a video.

• Helping to improve the idea for the video
• Helping to write and evaluate dozens of titles
• Taking a draft of the script and helping to write dozens of hooks and introductions
• And so on for each of the elements above

The large influences and channels have a production team and lots of meetings to do this.

For us solopreneurs and smaller brands, we’ll simulate that with AI.

All of the above will be built into our Content Engine system where we have DIY, DWY, and DFY solutions.

The biggest takeaway from my research was that successful YouTube channels and creators were not magically successful; they were methodically successful.

They don’t just wake up, record, upload, and generate massive views.

They plan and refine, plan and refine, and repeat until they have high odds of success. THEN they record, edit, upload, etc.

They also don’t need large teams. Some channels all the way up to 1 – 2 million subscribers had 3 – 4 person teams only. The creator, a designer, an editor, and eventually a producer/creative director type.

That’s similar to what we provide in our DFY content engine program but on a fractional basis to make it more approachable to folks earlier in the journey.

Don’t forget about repurposing…

It absolutely takes time and investment to build a great YouTube channel.

But we can get a much higher ROI on our efforts by ALSO repurposing all of the content as far and wide as possible.

I’ve covered that in detail in ​BTE36 – How To Start Your Content Engine​ so I won’t go into that here but suffice it to say that investing in great long-form video content is the best way to generate MASSIVE amounts of short-form content…

Take Action

First, decide if it is time to focus on building a YouTube channel for your business or personal brand (in almost all cases I’d say yes)

If you already have a channel like I do, decide if it’s time to double down and start growing it the right way.

Second, as always, success comes down to the right strategy, systems, tools, and team. Consider your budget and determine whether DIY, DWY, DFY options would be a fit.

Third, ​book a call with me​ to map out your YouTube strategy and how to execute it.

Saturday Sunday Spotlight 💡

Content Spotlight:​

How Cleo Abram Dominated YouTube in 1 Year​ – Colin and Samir

This interview kicked off my deep dive into YouTube after hearing how Cleo planned, developed, and grew her channel so quickly.

Tool Spotlight:​

Expert Business ACCELERATE – This is the suite of tools we use to establish and run a content engine AND where members of our programs run theirs.

The ​Start Your Content Engine​ program INCLUDES the ACCELERATE Suite:

• Plan and Manage Your Content Engine
• Host a YouTube Channel, Podcast, and Blog
• Record and Edit All Of Your Content
• Repurpose Your Content Into All Formats
• Schedule and Publish All Of Your Social Media Posts
• Integrated Live Tech Support 24×7

News Spotlight:​

​YouTube takes on TikTok with longer Shorts, templates, trends, and more​ – TechCrunch

YouTube on Thursday announced a series of updates for its short-form video product, YouTube Shorts. These include the ability for creators to upload videos up to three minutes in length. The company says it’s also updating the Shorts player, introducing templates, and adding a new Shorts trends page on mobile devices.

This will be interesting… I’m glad Shorts will be able to be a little longer. Across our clients we publish hundreds of shorts a week and it’s often difficult to get a complete thought or story from longer form video down to 60 sec. So now we’ll have some more leeway…