I'm gonna teach you to crack the code on YouTube which, by the way, I didn't learn to do myself, I learned from others two people in particular Uzair Karwala, SF Digital, out in the UK, my buddy and YouTube mentor, the reason this YouTube channel exists, thank you so much, forever grateful to you, And Evan Carmichael, and I've got a funny story about Evan. If I can weave it into this, I will. But let's just dive in. I think a YouTube channel is maybe one of the most powerful tools you can have from a marketing perspective. I actually think it's more powerful than podcast. People spend more on YouTube than. Any other website on the internet, on average, isn't that amazing? But it also makes a lot of sense, right? Like YouTube is meant for long form content, deep dives, retention, subscription, and people get really obsessive over YouTube. It's a really powerful medium. It's visual and audio, audible, audio based, It's sticky, and everybody uses it, dig into YouTube. But it's also tedious to manage. It's tedious. And if you want to be successful, the first tip is the hardest. And it might be repellent to you, by the way. You have to post everyday. You have to post every single day. YouTube loves consistency. As a matter of fact, you'll notice that you're going to start posting and you're not going to get any views, likes, comments, subscribes, or anything for 90 to 180 days, depending on the niche that you've chosen, but. If you can get past that timeline, YouTube starts to say, you know what? I think this person's serious. Let me start prioritizing their videos and actually referring them out to other people organically. And then you can start to see like, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck. I it just starts to climb slowly. Surely when we started, we had like 300 fake subscribers and we're at 26, 000 subscribers, which by the way is not a lot in the world of YouTube, but it's a lot given our niche. Right? Like we're not marketing, we're not digital marketing, we're not paid media, we're Google ads. And I'm starting to expand a little bit out of that, which is another strategy that we can talk about a little bit. You start super, super, super, super, super niche. So you can actually, A, provide value, let people know who you are, and then also capture people's attention. And then you slowly zoom out as you've established that niche. And you look at the other people who've done this. Look at Gary V. Gary V started talking about wine. And that's it. You want to talk about niche. Like, Gary Vee is famous because he was talking about wine, and then people liked him and his personality, and then he started to, expand. So post every single day. Now, that doesn't mean that you need to record every single day. I batch record. I usually record five to ten videos a week, generally in one sitting. I just sit here, and I've got all my slides open, and they're based off of Twitter threads that I've written, I power through them, which is, it's the easy thing to do to get into a cadence, and I'm, you know, kind of used to, I've got my, podcast voice on, and the camera's rolling, and it's just, it's easier to carve out, you know, an hour or two, and I can bang out a whole week's plus worth of videos in about an hour. You can do that same thing too, so if you can dedicate an hour a week, you can have a YouTube channel, but you have to post every single day. Every single day number two, you have to make sure to niche down niche niche. Who knows how it says nobody knows There's no consensus. I like niche But except when I rhyme it with riches riches are in the niches YouTube needs to know who you appeal to Google is a matching mechanism. It matches searchers with And the more niche you are, the more effective you're going to be. Alrick Heck, who has been on my channel a couple times, been on my podcast a few times. Really brilliant guy. Alrick, at 12 years old, started a YouTube channel teaching old people to use their iPhones. Great niche, right? Like, a lot of foresight there. Really brilliant guy. He was a millionaire before he was 18 years old. Pick a niche. and here's the thing. You don't have to live in that niche forever. I have a concept that I call the hourglass of niching. And the hourglass of niching says that you choose the niche and maybe it's a little broad to start if you're not sure. Where to go so like I owned a Google Ads agency my niche as far as Google Ads made all the sense in the world But you might say like hey, I want to launch YouTube channel I'm not entirely sure exactly what my niche is, but I do know that I want it to be in personal finance Okay, so I'm inside of personal finance I'm at the top of my hourglass and then I start to shoot videos and I've got videos on Budgeting and videos on side hustles and videos on crypto, God forbid. And then all of a sudden you're like, man, my side hustle videos are like taken off. I'm getting two, three, four times the number of views I'm going to start to narrow my niche and all of a sudden I'm side hustles and you know what so now you're, traveling down the hourglass and it's not just. side hustles. I noticed that I'm getting a lot of stay at home moms, like all my commenters, the messages that I'm getting really feels like there's like, you know what I mean? I'm speaking to the stay at home mom crowd. And so I narrowed down my niche even further. And so now it's like, I've got a YouTube channel about side hustles for stay at home moms in North America. Like that's a great, great, great niche. So now you're at the center of the hourglass where the hourglass tapers. And if you try to taper it any further, you realize like, Oh, that went too far. This is good. I'm narrow as I want to get. That's where maximum efficiency is found, from a niching down perspective. However, the issue that you run into is, you can't scale and maintain efficiency. So when you find maximum efficiency, you also notice that you actually kind of run out of the ability to grow. I'm there now with my YouTube channel, our growth rate plateaued at around 22, 000 subscribers. And then our subscriber rate started to slow because there's only so many people that want like dedicated Google ads content every single day, which is why I'm zooming out into broader business topics, right? I'm, I'm, I'm now starting to branch out. I would not have been able to do that at the beginning and achieve the same level of traction because there's so many people in the broad business topic space. But because I have my subscriber base of 25, 26, 000 people, I get the views and the clicks and the likes and the comments to allow me to compete with the other people that are in the mildly broader business space. And you'll notice that most of my content still speaks specifically to agencies, small business owners. So it's still kind of the same avatar. that says you taper down out of the hourglass of niching. So you start a little broad, you taper down, you find maximum efficiency and you maximize that efficiency, by the way, you don't broaden out right out of the gate, but you wait and decide like, okay. I think I've run out of runway here. gotten as much juice as I'm going to get out of this audience and I want to continue to grow. So I'm going to broad now to get that's the hourglass of niching. I hope that's helpful. I think I'm gonna make a whole separate video on this. I just actually wrote a note for myself. Isn't that fun when it happens live? Number three! You want your videos to be ten minutes or longer. This comes directly from Evan Carmichael. Who, by the way, is brilliant, brilliant. If you don't know Evan, you should go follow him. Super, super sharp guy. Tons of amazing interviews on his YouTube channel. the space of an hour, taught me, like, more than I ever, ever cared to know about YouTube. YouTube likes long form content. Which is interesting. Now, there's a difference between YouTube and YouTube Shorts, and you can use YouTube Shorts in order to drive towards your YouTube videos, but you want to have your videos 10 minutes or longer. Not all my videos end up being 10 minutes. I don't like to force it. I like to just shoot the video for as long as it needs to be with the understanding that maybe when I'm Ideating the ideas should be 10 minute ideas. So don't take a three minute idea and make it 10 minutes. Don't take a 45 minute idea and make it 10 minutes either. Right? The idea will take as long as it needs to get out onto the table. And I've actually had some people recently complained in the comments that I ramble. And you know, the problem with that is, is that's my comfort zone from a content creation perspective. If I'm too strict and rigid and scripted, I don't have any fun. I don't execute very well and it just doesn't happen. And so this is where I like to live. And if you don't like the rambling. not trying to push you away. I love you. I'm rooting for you. Don't watch my channel, you know, and go find somebody who just gets it out the way that you want it to get out. be comfortable in your delivery of content in the way that you're pushing it out and that will help you reach some of these time thresholds. And I actually think it's okay to make it organic. I prefer that. I like listening to thought leaders that hop in and they're, thinking and learning as they go. Jordan Peterson is like this for me. when I listen to Jordan Peterson, I can see him discovering the topic as the discussion happens. It makes me feel like a participant. It makes me feel like I'm actually, like, actively there. I like to do that same thing. Not that I'm anywhere near as intelligent as him, but trying to follow kind of those themes. That'll help you get to 10 minutes. Instead of just saying like, here's the news, right? You're not a newscaster. Don't use a teleprompter. Talk about what's happening and then what your ideas are behind that thing. And again, YouTube likes long form content. And by the way, 10 minutes is the minimum you could have. We've got some of our highest traffic videos are hour Or more. As a matter of fact, one of our highest performing ads was an hour. Can you believe that? It's unbelievable. Number four, aim for a 70% retention rate at the 62nd mark. Also, from Evan, you want people to click and to stay. 70% retention at the 62nd mark. And by the way, this is hard. I rarely achieve this. As a matter of fact, I've got a Slack channel where my marketing team. Dumps in our YouTube analytics, so I'm gonna read you my analytics from last week Monday uncovering the dark side of Google's price fixing Retention rate at the one minute mark 71 percent That's great Tuesday, why you should embrace imposter syndrome. Retention at the one minute mark, 62%. Wednesday, how I lied my way to the number one spot on Amazon. Retention rate, 59 percent at the 60 second mark. Thursday, why scaling and maintaining efficiency don't mix. 59 percent retention at 60 seconds. And Friday, Rest in peace, Google search. Generative AI is here and it's awesome. 61 percent retention. So out of five days, I hit the 70 percent retention mark one time. Now, obviously I want to optimize that, but just here to tell you, this is a gold standard and it's hard. However, what it means is you actually don't want to clickbait videos. You don't want clickbait titles, or at least you want to be really careful, like obviously you want your titles to be compelling. But you want to be so compelling that the person who clicks and starts to watch goes, You know what, this isn't as interesting as the title was, because then they're gonna leave. And you're not going to get recommended. And being recommended as a YouTube video is, is, that's the mecca. Like, that's where you want to be, you want to go. So aim for a 70 percent retention rate at the 60 second mark. One of the ways to do that is to front load all of, like, the amazing nuggets and sound bites. And so I stole this from Evan. We used it for a short period where it said coming soon, and then there was like all these quick little snippets and quick hitters. I ended up stopping that for a couple of reasons. I didn't like that it took the wind out of the sails of the remainder of the videos. And then, I also felt like, just because I do a lot of shorter form content than people like Evan do, you know, I'm not doing a three hour interview. And so, if you're doing a ten minute video and you bring all the, highlights forward, it's a little less effective. But it can work for you if you're doing longer form content. Number five! Your primary call to action should not be to leave YouTube. everybody's called action is like go to my website and fill out my form schedule an appointment go buy this thing YouTube's number one goals retention Then I think they're stated number one goals retention and google very rarely tells the truth about their goals so that this will be a first google wants the people to stay in app You have to feed that by recommending other videos. So instead of the recommendation being to go do anything else, and you can have those softly, right? It's like, hey, if you ever want help with Google Ads, you can go to my website and request a free action plan. And then that'll happen every now and again. But, your primary call to action is to watch this video. And this video is a video that's relevant to the video that you're watching. So right now you're watching a video on cracking the code on YouTube algorithms. So maybe the next video that I recommend to you is like, content creation, video production made easy, how do you run YouTube ads, that type of thing. Primary call to action should not be to leave YouTube though. You want to help YouTube maintain retention. Number six! Thumbnails are key. And I hated this part to be honest with you. I was like, if my video is good, if my content's good, why do my thumbnails matter? Here's what's sad. Your thumbnails matter more than your video content. Doesn't that hurt to hear? It hurts to say. You wanna overinvest in your thumbnails? We have our designer, her name is Jack. She's brilliant. She's a, literal genius, and she comes up with these amazing thumbnail ideas and you know, one of the primary reasons that our YouTube channel's been so successful. and, technical details, you want your text on the left, not on the right because it'll get covered by the time code. You want your image on the right and you want your text to be bold and easy to read. We used to slam our. Thumbnails with just lots of text and nobody could get through it. So make sure your thumbnails are good With AI tools now that I'll actually get better and better and better And then you also want sure your title has to be clear and compelling And don't oversell the video because you're gonna hurt your retention. So make sure that your title is very Consistent maintain continuity with what it is that you're offering people that was number seven Number eight use the video description to offer additional resources, timecode notes, and deeper calls to action. Anytime I'm on a video that I love, I notice that one of the first comments that people like, above all other comments, is anybody who's gone in there and offered the timecoded notes. So they like it, you know, one minute, thirty seconds, they do this. At four minutes, they talk about this. At nine minutes, they talk about that. Just do that for people! Naturally. It's not hard to do. And then give them stuff. Give people the ability to like, comment, subscribe. Obviously Instead of YouTube, but like give people the ability to sign up and for your newsletter or request something. Let them know what you want to do. What is it you're selling? Because as people learn to know and trust you they also want to buy from you and you want to give them that opportunity. And the description is the best place to do that. Number eight Is you have to ask for the like and the subscribe. You have to tell people what it is that you want. I'm, not very good at this. I usually make it a dismissal. But when people like, and comment, and subscribe, those are indications to YouTube that you're doing something right. So, if you're watching this video, and I've offered anything of value, like would be great, a comment is better, and if you actually want to hear from me every day, because I shoot a video every day, then go ahead and hit the subscribe button. I appreciate everybody YouTube channel. Truly grateful to you and for you. and I'll see you tomorrow.