82 – Video is exploding: Tom talks YouTube Secrets

Episode 082 – YouTube Secrets
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody it's Tom here with episode 82 of screw the commute podcast Wow. We have a special treat for you today. This is normally our Monday deep training session with just me. Well guess what. I've got a pal that's gonna help me out today. It's a longtime colleague of mine and the chief instructor at my internet marketing school Marc Bullard is here today and he's going to talk about YouTube secrets. So we'll get to that in a minute. The last episode was Manny Nowak. Now this guy quit a great corporate job with Boeing and I mean this wasn't where they were downsizing they. He was on the rise of the corporate track I mean going up and up and up and he says I'm tired of this. So he quit his job started his own company and never looked back. So check that out. Another time that was episode 81. Now our podcast app is available in the iTunes store and the app store and you can check it out actually at screwthecommute.com/app and we actually made a whole thing of instructions in case you're not used to using podcast apps and it'll do all kinds of cool stuff on your mobile device so that you can even if you're driving in the car listening and you get a phone call it will pause and then when you're done with the phone call it will restart. And so anyway we have all the details on that at screwthecommute.com/app. Now another thing we're starting is our monthly youth episodes where I highlight a young person that's doing great entrepreneurial things so you can email me at orders@antion.com for details on how a young person can apply to be featured. Now our first young person was Tiffani Hockings who's the young girl helping other young girls. So check out her episode. All right our sponsor is the distance learning school the internet marketing training center of Virginia. Don't even think about retraining yourself or sending your kids to college until you check out our webinar on higher education and be prepared to be mad when you see what all these colleges are doing now. I don't want you wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars and putting yourself and your kids under crushing debt. So make sure you watch that you go to screwthecomputer.com and just click on webinars or just screwthecomputer.com/webinars.

[00:03:04] All right let's get to the main event. Marc Bullard has been a video editor for 15 years. He's also my YouTube and video marketing expert and a YouTube consultant for many other clients. And you can check out his successful YouTube channel. And we're gonna have the link to it in the show notes because it's a little crazy to try to remember it and write it down so check the show notes if you'd like to go look at his channel. Now he's also the head instructor at the world's first fully independent internet marketing institution. That's the Internet marketing training center of Virginia as well as he's the author of many books including The YouTube marketing manual which you can check out on Amazon. Hey Marc good to talk to you.

[00:03:52] Thanks for having me.

[00:03:54] Oh yeah. Yeah. Well we talk regularly at least twice a week and other times working on video stuff and all kinds of good stuff for the school. But I wanted to bring you on because you've got such a history of working with YouTube for many years and you've written several books on it. And so I thought I'd bring you on to really give some people the secrets of it because I don't know if you know this or not but I was talking to a potential client mentee last week and he was all bragging about some consultant had him start a YouTube channel. And I looked at it. He had like one hundred and fifty views in eight years. And so he was all proud of himself. And I thought well I don't know if that's I guess if they were all if all hundred and fifty gave him a million dollars apiece. But that's rarely the case. So so what do you think people should be using their YouTube channels for.

[00:04:53] Okay. Yeah. Good question What should they be using the youtube channels for. Well there's multiple reasons to use a YouTube channel. Most of us are trying to make money online. We're trying to get people to our Web site to hopefully buy our products our services and so YouTube can be used as a traffic generator. And what what I mean by that is you can have people find you on YouTube and then direct them to your Web site so it can be used as a tool to get people floating around on the Internet you know funneled into your site. That's one way you can use YouTube but you could also use YouTube as a standalone tool to make money right then and there. In the YouTube Space and there are people that that is what they do. Part of their product is their actual videos that are on YouTube. There are there other people that we work with that only use it for the traffic driving tool and then there some people that use it as a mix. They make some money online with their content on YouTube at the same time using it to drive people to their Web site and that's usually the main thing. It's either traffic driving to or as a money making generator right there on YouTube.

[00:06:10] Yeah that's the way that's the way we do it. And we've been doing for many years we probably have I don't know more than a thousand videos all told between the channels.

[00:06:18] Yeah definitely more than a thousand.

[00:06:20] Yeah yeah. That's one of those good whacked out folks that we had over many years. I mean I remember Marc and I shot 300 videos in one month about 10 per day for 30 days. Now in those days we slapped them all up there. If you remember but nowadays that's not a good idea right.

[00:06:42] No absolutely. Of course it's a great idea to create some videos if you want to do them all at once or all in one week like what we did. That's fantastic. You can basically have everything planned out but yeah. Well we did it back. Jeez what was that 2008 09 something like that. Yeah. We dumped all of it all of the videos all at once. So we were excited because we had a lot more content on the YouTube channel but right around that time YouTube changed how they how they paid attention to your youtube channel and one of the main things that YouTube focuses on is the amount of content that you upload to YouTube. But not just in one lump sum like what we did there. They're now looking for constantly new content and new video in there. In their case new videos uploaded to their server so they're looking for a very similar to a blog and Google paying attention to a blog. Google pays attention to blogs that are active keep having new content the same thing with youtube youtube paying attention to these channels that keep adding new videos to their channel on some sort of base regular basis some sort of schedule so we could go back in time and do it again with that large chunk of videos. What we would do is we would space them out so there would be a new video going public in some sort of schedule so it could be either once a week two videos a week what we but the main goal would be to make sure that the channel is active through you know throughout that time.

[00:08:25] If we have 300 videos that we wouldn't pop them all at one time and then a funny thing that occurred is that each day I would shoot 10 videos with the same shirt on and then when we loaded them all up at once it looked like the same video. 10 times because because I had the same shirt on. So so it is good to shoot them all at once. Make sure you vary your clothing and things so your channel doesn't look like it's just one video over and over and over again and then another thing we started doing is custom thumbnails tell them a little bit about that.

[00:09:02] Custom thumbnails whenever you if you've ever been to YouTube. Most people have. If you've ever search anything on YouTube you're going to get results. A list of videos that YouTube thinks are relevant to that word you typed in and there's also a still image next to each one of the videos and that's still images known as a thumbnail. Now when you first start out with YouTube you you have you don't really have much of a choice when it comes to what your thumbnail is going to look like. YouTube looks at what you've uploaded and it picks three random choices and you can choose one of those three random choices and sometimes all three of the choices don't look that good. But if you continue on and start to develop your YouTube channel and your account with that YouTube channel then you get a new feature that's opened up to you and that is a custom thumbnail. And what that means is you can create a graphic that can be used for that thumbnail and you when you upload your video you also upload this thumbnail graphic and and then that is what shows up in the results. Now why is that good. Well like I said sometimes YouTube picks three bad choices. But now when you have a custom thumbnail you can add a little bit of branding. You can have a picture of your face if you really want to get you know get your face out there and in and in front of your audience and you can also provide a little bit of text you know some words on the thumbnail to let people know exactly what that video is about even before they click on your thumbnail.

[00:10:37] That makes it stand out. That gives you a better chance to get chosen. You should probably just go to YouTube and start looking which is the thumbnails that jump out at you. And that would be an example of something that you should emulate. So that your videos jump out. So. So what are some. I mean there's tons of. But what are some of the important things people need to know about their YouTube channel.

[00:11:04] Yeah. There are tons of things tons of things. But I'm going to focus on just a couple of the main ones. Now when you have a YouTube account you have a specific channel and it's very similar to your own Facebook page very similar to your own Twitter page and all of that you have your own specific channel that only shows your videos. And so it's always good if you can to promote your channel on in you know other avenues your Web site Twitter Facebook everywhere else. And so when people come to that specific channel your channel again they're only going to see your videos but not only that they can also get a little bit of information about you because on that channel there is a specific tab for a bio or an about an area that is fantastic for keywords and of course providing information about you your business but also on that specific channel. There is an area for a another graphic. It's not a thumbnail but it's called a banner. Now this banner is only visible on the channel but it is a fantastic place to brand yourself some more.

[00:12:11] It is also an area that you can have a clickable link to your Web site. Now that is very important because YouTube usually doesn't really want people to leave YouTube understandably but they do provide a couple areas that you can click away and and this channel banner is one of those. So it's a fantastic place to get a link to your Web site market yourself and promote only your videos and that is a good thing because if there's other people's videos floating around sometimes you know there's a tendency to have a person just trail off and get sucked into the YouTube void and never come back. So yes. So you want to make sure that the about section is optimized. You want to make sure that the banner on your channel has some sort of graphic and or information about you your services. And of course you want to make sure that you have some content on that channel and that comes right back to the. The videos that we are talking about and makes making sure that you have constantly uploaded fresh content going into that channel.

[00:13:12] Yeah. And I know we can't really illustrate on a podcast but maybe we can put some examples in the show notes. But making the banner is not as simple as just making a banner for the top of a Web site because of the. It has to adjust in size. Right. For different tablets and cell phones and everything. And so there's strategic places you have to put things so that they don't disappear when the banners made real small on the cell phone. Right.

[00:13:42] There are four different devices that YouTube is trying to appease. And you know phone tablet desktop and television and so all of these screens on all of these devices are different obviously. And so they tried to make one graphic work with all of these odd screen sizes and they have a method. They have a little template that you can fit in you know fit your elements in but it can be tricky. But you know there's people on fiverr or that can do it for you and there's I mean I wouldn't even be hesitant to try it myself even if you have no idea what you're doing because it's not set in stone you can upload a graphic for the time being get an idea of how it looks on a desktop how it looks on a phone you might be happy with it you might not. You can always go back and do it over and over again until you have something that looks good on all of those devices.

[00:14:36] So I just want people to know that this is an issue so not to just put something up there. They love them on their desktop and then it looks terrible and doesn't help them at all. On the other format. So. So tell me a little bit about voice recognition and transcripts and some of those little details a lot of people really don't know about.

[00:14:55] Ok. When you upload a video to YouTube YouTube is smart enough now that it's listening to what you're saying and it is actually making a text transcription of the words that you were saying of your audio. And so now what we're finding is that what you say in the video is just as important as the title and the description which we haven't really touched on just yet. But what you say in that video is very important to know you want to make sure that you have some keywords in there. You want to make sure that you're providing information. YouTube and Google Google also pays attention to YouTube YouTube and Google both like you know informative content they like when they want information they want you know hopefully an expert on whatever topic it is. And so what you say in that video is just as important as as the text elements because YouTube will convert that to text.

[00:15:48] So that will be readable and searchable by YouTube and Google and you need to check your transcriptions once in a while because I had a guy told me that there was something really dirty in my transcriptions I thought it got hacked or something. And turns out that it just didn't interpret something correctly. Didn't hear me right and put a really dirty word in my transcript so you can edit these right.

[00:16:14] Yeah you definitely can go in and edit them. YouTube does use a relatively good job but if you talk like me talk fast or mumble it sometimes picks the wrong word so it doesn't hurt to go in. Take a look also what's nice about this transcriptions is that now you can actually download these transcriptions so if you wanted to you could use it as you know sort of a free makeshift you know the audio to text transcriber and then you could have another e-book or you know content for your blog. Straight from that video you could just download it and there's the text ready for you to use in another capacity.

[00:16:51] Yeah it's a great repurposing kind of thing. So tell me a little bit about upping your chances of being found because a lot of people you know just throw in a crazy title that they think it's cool. And then the crickets chirping. So with some of the ways to be found.

[00:17:07] Right. And I did to just touch on this a second earlier and one of the ways or one of the main ways to be found and what does that mean. Well like I said Google pays attention to what's going on in YouTube and YouTube pays attention to what's going on in YouTube. So if you can have a video that is easy for people to find then it's going to show up in multiple places.

[00:17:30] For people who don't know Google owns YouTube. So for a long time now. So there is a symbiotic relationship there. So you want to please them both.

[00:17:39] Absolutely yeah. And you can with with a YouTube video you can please them both and also right behind Google YouTube is the second largest search engine. People are using it as a search engine. So you know it's kind of a double whammy if you can do a good job with your video. So how do we make a video that's good and easy to be found. Well we want to optimize this video with keywords and if you've ever listen to anything else Tom said I'm sure he's talked about keywords.

[00:18:05] Episode one is all keywords.

[00:18:07] Yeah go check it out if you haven't. That's probably the most important one. But yeah. And so if you can even before you shoot the video have an idea of what the keyword or keyword phrase that you're going to focus on. And because remember you're going to hopefully say this in the video which will be transcribed but each video has different areas that you can also make sure that you have keywords you added to and that. So the first area for each video that you upload is a title. It's a very good idea to have the keywords in the title in some sort of natural way. You don't want to just have a list of keywords but you know a nice title with a broad general keyword like say for instance. Tom you know does public speaking and let's say he is this one particular video is about stage fright. Well he could have a title such as public speaking Dash. How to get over stage fright or how to deal with stage fright. So what we did there in that example was we had a general keyword keyword phrase public speaking and then we had a more specific phrase that has to do with public speaking. How to get over stage fright. And that's a nice way to get keywords multiple keywords right there in your title. Now after you get the title you can add information and text to a description. Now the description can have a lot more characters than the title can but it you know and it is a fantastic place again to put the same keywords same keyword phrase in some sort of natural way in a paragraph or two in this description but the description can also have more information that might not necessarily be specifically related to that one particular video.

[00:19:50] Stage fright video in this example it could be related to just all about public speaking so if you have just a couple sentences in your description that talk about this particular video the fear public speaking below that you have up to 5000 characters in this description area and so you can provide more text and it could. Again it could just be general about public speaking it could be about Tom could be about his services but it is a good idea to put some information in there with phrases and keywords that are related to your business.

[00:20:22] And it could link to your other videos.

[00:20:23] Yes. Yes it could. Other videos it can also in the description you can have clickable links to other websites and I already talked about it once YouTube doesn't really allow this in many places. This is another place that you can have a clickable link to your Web site to your Twitter to your Facebook. You can put these in your description and it just kind of helps to fill out the description makes it look like you know you are popular.

[00:20:50] Your most important link. Tell them about that.

[00:20:54] Yes you have your most important link should be your Web site. Most people are going to be using this to drive traffic to their Web site. So absolutely hundred percent put the link to your Web site in this description but put it as the number one first thing in the description because this description which has 5000 characters isn't entirely visible when somebody comes to watch your video on YouTube page.

[00:21:21] They basically only see the first three sentences of this description. And if they don't click a little button to expand the entire description they will never see the rest of those the remaining lines below those top three. So if you put your Web site in the first number one first position it will always be visible regardless of if the person expands or doesn't. And it's also very visible to the play button it's visible to your youtube channel it's on a highly visible area for the viewer. So we do recommend putting your most important link usually your Web site as the first link in the description.

[00:21:59] It needs to be the entire URL link http or https://mydomain.com/youknowwhatever and then a space after it. So you can't just put you know the abbreviation of your domain without all the stuff in or it won't be recognized as the link.

[00:22:21] Right. That's right. Now we were talking about how to optimize and we talked about the title and the description but there is one more place that we can optimize each and every one of your videos. And when you upload your video to YouTube you can again you can enter in this title description area information but there is also an area for tags and tags are little words phrases that are related to the video and generally related to the channel as a whole.

[00:22:49] And you can enter in these these tags. Now we recommend the tags to be keywords and relevant keywords to this video and to your channel and you can actually have a good amount of phrases and tags. We don't really recommend going too overboard with the amount that the number of tags that you put into this tag area anywhere from you know roughly 10 to 20 keywords or keyword phrases in your tags is is a good safe area for the amount of tags that we do recommend for each and every one of your videos.

[00:23:23] I would rather see you shoot another video on a very specific keyword than lump a whole bunch of keywords in one video because you start looking like a jack of all trades and Google and YouTube and the best search engines like specific results for people so that they're happy. So if you look like a jack of all trades you know you you don't get high results. So I would rather see you shoot another video very specifically on that keyword than lump too many keywords in one. Now tell me about what you can say in your video to help this out. Like like don't forget to check out my description there's a link there. Give me a thumbs up. All that stuff.

[00:24:08] Yes definitely there's. And if you watch anybody's videos on YouTube you've already probably seen this where you actually mentioned in the video Hey if you basically ask them to do some sort of action and you can ask him to do more than one action. But at the very least ask them if they liked the video to give it a thumbs up which is a rating people can give your video a thumbs down or a thumbs up. Of course we are trying to get thumbs up so feel free to ask for that. Also YouTube has what is called subscribers. It's very similar to friends on Facebook followers on Twitter. You know it's your group of people that are interested in what you have to say. And those people in YouTube are known as subscribers. So you can also mention right there in the video. Hey if you'd like this video subscribe I'm going to have more videos about this. Give me a thumbs up. Leave a comment so you can also have. There's a comment area for each video so you can have a conversation going. So it's a very good idea to get those comments going the comments the thumbs up and the subscribing. All are monitored by YouTube as well. And in YouTube considers you know your video. How popular it is based around the commenting the subscribing the likes and dislikes not. And on top of all three of those YouTube is paying attention to how long the person stays watching your video. YouTube calls this watch time and they want you to have the perfect watch time would be people are watching 100 percent of your video but that doesn't always happen. It's not always going to be 100 percent of people watching 100 percent. So they pay attention to watch time they pay attention to the percentage of Watch time.

[00:25:53] And so you want to get people hopefully to the end of your video. There are tricks that we do that really tricks but there's some techniques that we use to improve our Watch time. One of those is that we make short videos short and sweet short of sweet videos that only improve your watch time because it's a lot easier for somebody to watch 100 percent of a two minute long video than it is to watch 100 percent of a 20 minute long video. So that improves your watch time but also this is a short attention span theater YouTube is and people want to get in get what you find wherever they want and get out. So a lot of the times people are looking for some short short and sweet quick answers to whatever their question whatever their problem is. And so that's why another reason why we do these shorter videos not Not to mention if you do a shorter length video they're easier to shoot. So when we did that big lump of you know 300 videos and one week they were all roughly two to three minutes. It was nice and easy way for us to get a lot of content out in a short amount of time.

[00:26:55] And I know myself like you know I do a lot of research and learn new softwares and everything and I want to learn like one specific thing on a piece of software. So I type it into YouTube and then I'll see here's one that covers that subject at 15 minutes and 38 seconds and one covers in four minutes. Guess who's getting the click. You know because I'm in a hurry I'm just trying to get the information and get out. Shorter is better and it improves your percentage your watch time for sure you're whole lot of benefits of it. We actually have formulas for traffic driving videos that we teach to give them some good information. You can't just say hey go to my Web site. You got to get some good information. But then we always are pushing them towards the Web site because if you can get them on an email list or some some mechanism under your control then you can market back to them over and over and over and over again. So so it's A lot of things like this that we're only we're probably going to give you 20 percent of all the things you could be doing on these. But it's really worth it because there's just a billion people there every day just about. So it's worth.

[00:28:09] Yeah I think it's worth it also remember we were talking about Google owning YouTube. And so if you have a Web site about shoes and you go type into Google you know used shoes or new shoes whatever you're going to get thousands of results. But if you go to youtube and type in the same word you might get hundreds of results. So just you know it's a numbers game. If you create a video based around shoes it might work a lot better to promote you your information than if you created a web you know a blog or an article on a Web site because there's less competition on the YouTube side of things. Also Tom we were talking about what should we say in the video and I was talking about you know subscribers thumbs up you know and comments but we didn't talk about the most important one and you touched on it getting them to your Web site. So in your. Yeah. That's really one of the most important calls to action. So yes we do recommend you also say that in the video you can say hey if you like this information I have more at my Web site or if you like the you can go to my website and get a free e-book about this topic. So there's a lot of others. You know you definitely want to mention a call to action to get people to your Web site and touching on that freebie thing and going back to the watch time. Remember we want to keep people hanging on to the end of the video.

[00:29:29] Well a lot of times we will recommend to our clients that when they're shooting a video within the first couple of seconds say hey I'm going to tell you how to get a free e-book about saving money or talking on stage at the end just hang on to the end of this video and I'll show you how to get a free you know free whatever. And if you do that that actually if you do that at the beginning of the video it actually does help keep people hanging on to the end. They want to find out what this freebie is. And then you put the actual call to the action at the end of the video and hopefully it drives them to your site.

[00:30:04] And tell me a little bit about end screens.

[00:30:10] So at the end of each one of each of your videos you can promote other videos of yours other playlists to playlists group of your videos. You can do this by using what's called an end screen an end screen is actually a little clickable area that appears at the end of your video. It appears at the last 20 seconds of your video you can make it shorter but you can make it any longer than 20 seconds and it always appears at the end. And so what happens is at the end of the video they will fade onto the screen. They almost overlay over your video and you can you can adjust where on this video they will overlay. But then they will promote your videos. They will promote your channel. So a person could click on one of these overlays and instantly be subscribed to your channel or they could click on one of these overlays and go to another one of your videos. So this is another great way. If somebody is watching one of your videos and they like what you have to say if they see two more videos or three more videos being promoted at the end on one of these end screens you might be able to continue on with that same viewer and have them watch more than just one of your videos. So end screens are very nice. They add some interactivity and they are a little bit more advanced. There was something similar to an end screen a long time ago called an annotation. If you've ever heard that you might be shaking your head. Those will be long gone probably in the next year because they don't work on mobile devices. However the end screens do so end screens work on desktop and mobile and it is a free feature that you should add to every one of your videos of course after it's been uploaded to YouTube.

[00:31:52] And the replacement for annotations was called cards and so you see it in the top right of the screen with the little "i" next to it for information and they do work on mobile. So one other topic I want to talk about here and then we're going to get into how to make money with YouTube is tell them a little bit about playlists.

[00:32:13] Yes playlists. OK. So I did mention that playlists are a mix of your own not just your own but they can be a mix of your videos. They can also be a mix of your videos and other peoples' videos on YouTube. Now what's interesting about playlists is that a playlist will come up in the YouTube search results as a separate result. So for instance if you have a video that has to do with the changing a transmission on a car and then you also put that same video in a playlist that had to do with all with all types of transmissions or all types of car maintenance could be the same exact video but it could be in a playlist if somebody types into the YouTube search engines how to fix the transmission. They might see your individual video as in the results and they might also see that entire playlist as a separate individual result. So this is again another double whammy that you can use with just one video you can have the show up and the results more than once. Now what we do recommend is yes we do recommend making playlists with your videos. We recommend making a playlist with majority of your videos and maybe one or two maybe just a tiny tiny fraction of somebody else's videos. That's not against yours is somebody else's videos that is are in this playlist.

[00:33:36] This is perfectly permissible. This isn't cheating.

[00:33:42] Yes absolutely. You're allowed to use other people's videos in a playlist. If that person takes it off their channel it will still be in your playlist but it will be deleted. Basically it'll say This user has deleted this video so you have to kind of keep an eye on it. But what you can do is you can find a very very very popular video. You know public speaking has millions of views and then you have let's say a bunch of your videos and they probably have millions of views just yet. But if you add those all to a playlist and then you take this one very popular video and also put it in your playlist what you have is you have a lot of your content kind of hovering around this other very popular video in this playlist.

[00:34:23] So if somebody types in you know public speaking tips and they find this very famous video in the results they might also see the famous video the results in your playlist. So the person might click the playlist. They might watch this famous person and what's nice about playlist is they play back to back to back if they're in auto play. So after the famous person or the big very popular video gets done playing yours will start up right after it or whatever video that you have in the playlist this will start up right after. So this looks pretty good if you're kind of lumped in with the various popular videos that are in this in this playlist. But we do recommend that the majority of the videos in any playlist that you create the majority of the videos should be yours.

[00:35:07] There's tons and like I said folks of things that you should be doing if you are going to try to have a successful YouTube channel because it's just so many people shoot the video just throw it up there and don't have a clue about what Marc talked about in the last half hour. All right so it's not even the bulk of it. We need to move on to some cooler topics. I mean all those all the minutia is what takes you to get to the next topic which is how do you make money on YouTube. Tell them about that.

[00:35:41] Ok. So how do you make money on YouTube again there's multiple multiple ways there's some people that do one method. There's some people that do a couple of these methods and so take a listen and see if any of them sound good to you. Of course we already talked about using YouTube as a tool to drive people to your Web site. And of course then you would be making the money on your Web site hopefully. But that's not always going to happen.

[00:36:04] And there's actually some YouTubers what they're called. There's some YouTubers out there that their main focus is the YouTube Space and not their Web site. So how do they make money doing that well there. If you've ever been on YouTube if you ever watched the video you might have seen a commercial that appeared before the video started and you might actually see a commercial that you could skip after five seconds you might instead of seeing a video type of commercial you might see a little banner that appears at the bottom of the video and then you can you know you can see you can read it or you can click it. There's a little x. These are all ads. And so advertisers pay YouTube to put their ads on videos. Well the videos that these advertisers want to place their ads on are based around keywords and phrases. So if you start making content on your YouTube channel that's you know whatever whatever it is if you start making content and YouTube YouTube search paying attention to it then more people are watching your content. Well then you can actually decide if you want to have ads appear before your videos or even at the bottom of your videos. You don't really get to decide what type of ad but you get to decide if you want to open up that possibility but a possibility to even allow ads to appear. Now these ads the companies that pay YouTube they pay YouTube YouTube finds the videos that the ad want. Know the company wants to place. Follow that based off based off of keywords and then YouTube will pay you some of the revenue that they made from from the ads. So you would put a video up an ad would appear.

[00:37:50] You don't really get to say what the ad is about. But if the ad appears and and somebody clicks on it then you get a small percentage of money. If somebody looks at it and doesn't click on it you get a even tinier percentage of money. And then they actually do click on and they buy something you get a larger amount of money. So that is how a lot of these people are making money there. They're opening up their YouTube channel and their videos they're content to allow ads to be placed on them and then they get a check whenever they meet their threshold. I think that the threshold is one hundred dollars but you can you can up it if you want to. But at the very minimum a hundred dollars every time you get a hundred dollars in ad revenue YouTube sends you a check goes right into your bank and that's what a lot of these people are doing. So a lot of these professional ones if. If you poked around YouTube you'll see you know there's people that are millions of views per video millions and millions they have millions of subscribers and these are the ones they might have a video every single day. They only have two videos a day and they are making a living just from the ad revenue from the content that they put on there.

[00:39:01] Let me give them something to shoot for here. It used to be the biggest guy on there was the guy a hoodie pie and he would just make snarky comments while he was playing video games. Seven million dollars a year make it. I just saw the other day Marc. I'm not even sure you saw this. I get the subscription to the good news network. So it's always some nice stuff news rather than nasty stuff. This eight year old kid is reviewing toys on YouTube. Twenty two million dollars he made for his family last year not too shabby. Something to shoot for. But you don't have to get that crazy to make decent money if you do this and you can get a lot of people viewing your stuff.

[00:39:50] Oh yeah. Definitely. And like we said a couple times that there's people that do both. They put content up on their YouTube channel. They open it up for ads and they might you know they might not be millionaires but they're getting some sort of revenue coming in from YouTube while at the same time all of their content is still directing people to their Web site. So you can make money in two different places.

[00:40:13] And you can do. You can use the content in other places than other ways. A perfect example right now is I'm repurposing a whole bunch of stuff I've shot for years to start a TV network on Roku and then Amazon Fire. So the stuff that I shot years ago even though we have to do a little manipulation to get it up to the best we can get it up to current standards all that stuff is in the can and be going to make money in another way on getting ads off of television and you can put them on in products and on membership sites so you can still do all kinds of things rather than just make money right On YouTube.

[00:40:57] Yeah. Yeah and then you know if you have a video on YouTube you can always put that YouTube video on your actual Web site. So now we have people that are coming to your Web site and they they don't just have text. They also have some videos to pay attention to if they watch a video that is that keeps the visitor on your site. So that's adding to your balance you know helping out with your bounce rate. So Google Analytics likes it so yeah. So you can have YouTube showing your stuff and then you can use YouTube to show your stuff on your Web site.

[00:41:28] And like what Tom said once you have that video you can do a ton of stuff where the Vimeo if you want to and like Tom said he's doing Roku and then remember I said everyone in your videos now is transcribed so that is text you can make a blog post or put all of those videos slap them together into an e-book. There's a lot of ways to you know like but Tom's always talking about repurposing and reusing that content.

[00:41:50] All right we going to take a just a brief moment for a sponsor which is us really. And then we'll come back and Marc will tell us about any new updates and features maybe the come on come around recently. So folks do you know what colleges and universities are doing. Well according to gradeinflation.com they're raising grade point averages to make it look like they're doing a better job of teaching when there's a mountain of evidence that they aren't. So I really want you to watch the eye opening higher education webinar at screwthecommute.com/webinars to potentially save yourself and possibly your loved ones friends and neighbors hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt when they go for higher education and also Plus check out IMTCVA.org. We'll have that in the show notes. That's where Marc's the chief instructor that's a school I founded quite a few years ago and to learn how you can have a lifestyle business in as little as six months. So check that out and now we'll get back to the main event. So Marc what's up. I mean new features that work there in the past.

[00:43:07] Yeah. Good question. Well on YouTube right now currently YouTube is in an interesting spot. For those of you listening it's about 2019 and in late 2018 they decided to do a basically a facelift and the facelift as the majority of it is on the back end. So when you're logging in when you log in and you go to your settings you're a cow. There's a lot of things that are taking place. A lot of changes. And the main one right now is called Studio YouTube studio and it's in beta right now because there's they were testing it. They're still checking things out. And so what it is is basically if you've ever been to your youtube channel there's a there's like a dashboard that you can get to you can see all of the list of all of your videos you can see some more account information stuff like that. Well that used to be called creator studio and now they're just gonna call it YouTube studio and so they're changing how everything looks. Now the problem with that is that they've only changed about 50 percent of the thing. So if you if you're listening to this anytime around the beginning of 2019 feel free to go take a look log into your account and go to the studio and you'll see some nice fancy little features you'll see your videos you'll see ways to add royalty free music or ways to add the title the description the tags.

[00:44:44] We already talked about that. And then what's interesting though is if when you're poking around the studio area you'll find other features and these other features are still the old ones. So they're not new. So what we're finding right now is that we're in this weird transition place where anybody who's using YouTube has to bounce between this new beta studio beta thing and the old creator studio. So it's kind of stuck. You know it's kind of a pain because I was I'm planning on doing a new YouTube book at some point but I can't do it because there's still all these old features that will eventually be up updated to this new youtube studio and YouTube has said that they said hey in 2019 we're going to fully add all the new features to the YouTube studio beta. So just sit tight.

[00:45:35] And so we're still sitting tight waiting for this stuff but some of the other newer features that are kind of nice is that we haven't really touched on is you can live stream now that's not entirely brand new but that is a feature that a lot of people don't take advantage of. You can actually have a live stream a live broadcast you can talk with your audience you can. You can have a premiere which is a specific time that a specific video is going to be shown and you can be you can do it be a live Premier air so you can type in and talk to people while they're watching this for the first time.

[00:46:09] Let's see. There are. There's a couple new categories and this probably would be you know specific to only probably a few people but there is a new gaming category. There are new analytics we haven't even touched on analytics as you get you can get stats or reports about how your videos are doing and how your audience is doing and how many subscribers you get. So you can get an idea of how well you're doing with your content. Well they've added in some new new things in analytics such as your impressions and your click through rates a little bit hard to do without showing you. So I'm going to kind of skim past that but oh geez let's see the end screens are relatively new because we said the annotations are falling by the wayside. Another thing that's not new ish it's it's it was around in YouTube a long time ago and then they just totally got rid of it but now it's had a facelift and they've brought it back and this actually is pretty handy to some people is there is an actual video editor built into YouTube and they used to have it a long time ago and I don't think anybody really knew about it and then it disappeared but now they've they've made it new and improved.

[00:47:25] And you can actually upload your raw footage edit all of it right here on YouTube add music if you want to add I think some text if you wanted to and then have a finished product already here public on YouTube. So I'm actually kind of excited about that because when that video editor was gone I was kind of upset. But right now we're all a lot of us are paying attention to the YouTube studio and waiting for all of that to get upgraded to you know to the new features.

[00:47:55] And what does the studio do.

[00:47:57] Well the studio is it's basically like a it's like a junk drawer of all of your stuff. It has the list of all of your videos that you've uploaded. You can access comments. Remember I was telling you that everybody can comment on your video. Well if you have a lot of videos you know one hundreds of videos and people are commenting every day it gets kind of you can't go to every individual video to see if somebody commented. So there is a new comment area in the back end here. And so you can click on it and YouTube will show you all of your most recent comments and it even does a good job of trying to find spam spammy comments. And so they'll have multiple tabs in this comment area to let you know of what probably is a real comment and what could be possibly spam and you can take a look at both. So you could take a look at the spam and make it make a decision.

[00:48:45] Does it go like we have multiple channels. Will who all the comments into one place or is it still per channel.

[00:48:53] No it's per channel yes you'd have to log. Well you don't really have to log out but it is per channel so a lot of people have a channel and they might have one or two channels under the same gmail account. If you do have multiple channels under the same gmail account then you can switch channels without having to log out and re log back in. But no when you look at your comments it's per channel when you look at your analytics it's just per channel. You don't get to see a whole amalgamation of all of them.

[00:49:22] So I have mine set where if I get a comment on any of them I get an email so that now that we get bad if I got enormous amounts of comments which I don't but that's handy because I can click and go right to the exact place and and make a comment. So yeah this has been really great. Marc I forgot to tell the story I want to tell them about you and how we met. I had an ad in Craigslist for a video editor or something and a long time ago. You've been here 10 years. So he shows up and he's like he's got flip flops on dirty feet long scraggly hair just look like a beach bum basically. And I'm looking at his resume and I'm looking back at him I'm looking at his resume. It's like okay master's degree in education I'm looking at this guy. And then it says professor at a technical institute around here I'm looking at this guy. I ask him I said Hey. So why are you giving up this professorship. And he said well they want to make me wear a tie. That's how our little colleague ship started 10 years ago or more. So there's a lot of talent out there that these young people folks that you know don't make em wear a tie. So tell me about your your book your latest one.

[00:51:04] Like I said I'm kind of in a holding pattern I'm waiting for this whole entire YouTube studio thing to get updated. But basically it's the book is just it tells you what you need to do. So it says hey here is this. You need to click here add this. I try to walk you through step by step. Go here click here do this add this. Be aware of this and a lot of it is what we what we talked about you know traffic and optimizing the videos. But a lot of the stuff is topics we haven't even been able to touch on. And like the whole back end. Like I said your account you need to verify your account. You can actually tell YouTube that you what your specific Web site is and so that helps that the commenting. We did talk about that a little bit but I didn't talk about how that can be used on other people's videos to promote your own stuff. I also in the book I also mentioned you know how to come up with ideas for content because that's one of the biggest things people are saying. I always I can't think of what to do and want to know a couple of tricks you can. You'll never run out of ideas. And so that's kind of what the book does it just it's pictures and instructions you know click here do this you wanted to look like this and be aware of this and then at the end of the day I just kind of summarize the most important things the optimization and the traffic building and then set you on your way. So that's what the newest book will be about. Once it comes out then. And then have you have any questions you can always contact me or Tom and let me know.

[00:52:44] Yeah. That's one thing about us. I know the podcast because this is we're talking about a visual thing is big picture stuff. What you should be doing. How you you know the features and all these things but that's one of the big advantage of our training as opposed to a lot of other people we're very nuts and bolts that we tutor you one on one on things and hold your hand through this. We take over your screen sometimes say no don't click there click here. And it's really really powerful. That's why I've been around doing this for so since 1997 been teaching teaching this kind of stuff. So we'd love to have you in one of our programs. You can always check it out. All of our stuff. Screwthecommute.com/resources that leads all the different programs we have free and paid and webinars and all that stuff so. So again thanks Marc for taking the time out of your busy day. We know you're a you're always knee deep hit video over there and all right. So next episode folks is 83 with Carla Rieger. She started out life with no laughter in her family and she turned it all around by doing improv and speaking and she wrote her rewrote her mind story and she even made an academy out of it. So check her out. Next episode episode 83. Check out all Marc's stuff in the show notes for this episode. This was power packed. I think this was the longest episode we ever had. And again we didn't even scratch. I mean we scratch the surface but we didn't drill a hole in it. Please subscribe and review and download that app. It's really really cool app that we now have. And please leave us a review and the star rating over at iTunes that really helps the show out. We will catch you all on the next episode. Thanks a lot.

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