RS296: Creating Great YouTube Hooks with Jake Thomas [YouTube Series]

[00:00:03] Speaker A: So, Jake, as I, as I look at YouTube and the opportunity we have as SaaS companies, it's enormous, right? [00:00:10] Speaker B: It's like the only video channel. [00:00:12] Speaker A: I think a lot of attention is dispersed between LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter, whatever. TikTok maybe a little bit too. But for long form video, everybody goes to YouTube. So for me, it's the. It's the only place to be arguably, like, the only kind of content medium that we shall be focusing on. But I think a lot of the stuff out there is, like, how to be the next Mr. [00:00:36] Speaker B: Beast, right? [00:00:36] Speaker A: Or how to be the next PewDiePie or something like that. Right? How, as a SaaS business owner, should I, or folks who are listening to this think about YouTube differently for a business purpose, know, being the next kind of big gaming channel or something? [00:00:54] Speaker C: Yeah. So that is a very good point. It's a little cringe when people try to be something that they're not. And for SaaS, it's so easy. You can just kind of educate your customers, and then you're building credibility. And then when they're like, okay, well, now it's time for me to hire somebody. They know that you can do the job, so it just makes the sale so much easier. I have a little SAS myself, and I was searching for how to do something, and once I realized how to do it, I realized that it's going to be so much harder than what I thought it was going to be. So instead of me figuring out how to do it, I watched some guy's channel. I watched, like, ten of his videos. I said, holy crap, I'm not doing this. Can you do it? So instead of him being some crazy Mr. Beast type of entertainer, he was just an educator, and that just built so much credibility, I didn't even look for competitors. I was like, I know this guy can do it, and I want him to fix it. So that was for consultants, but kind of the same thing with SaaS. So Hrefs is a great example. It's the same playbook. It's pretty much like, hey, here is how it's done, and here is how the content is. Like, here's how it's done. And then the solution is, if you want us to do it for you, or if you want to do it easier, then hire me or use our SaaS. [00:02:24] Speaker B: So, Hrefs. [00:02:29] Speaker C: If I were a SaaS company looking for somebody who's doing it, well, Hrefs, in my opinion, it's an easy one to copy and not copy. [00:02:41] Speaker A: But just take their playbook. [00:02:43] Speaker C: Like, all right, cool. I'm just going to emulate. I like the word model, but let me just do exactly what they're doing, but for my industry and then just go from there. [00:02:52] Speaker B: Cool. [00:02:55] Speaker A: I've been doing this about six and a half years, and one thing that I struggle with, and I'd love your perspective on this, is like, how do I stay hip with the latest stuff as I'm not a new participant to the podcasting space, for sure. Not a new participant to SAS. How do I stay up on all the latest stuff? And I've talked about this topic before and Hrefs is the go to for me, but they're also an older company. Arguably they do really well, but I'm glad to hear that from your perspective, that's like the gold standard too, because that's always the one I point to. I'm like, if we can make our channel just like theirs, we'll be a success. [00:03:28] Speaker B: So that's good. [00:03:31] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, there's a couple things that you could do. You could be a little bit more of kind of edutainment instead of just talking to, just like using the SEO example. So instead of just saying, hey, here are ten ways to rank number one on Google, or here are ten ways to find long form keywords, you could also say, here is how I ranked number one on Google or my biggest mistake in ranking number one for Google and then just kind of give them what they need through you showing how you did something that could be another way of doing it. And I don't want to say education isn't done, but just being a little bit more edutainment and showing and telling a story of like, hey, here is how I did it. I used this software, I use my own software and I achieved the goal that you're trying to achieve. So that could be another style that you're trying to emulate. [00:04:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Cool. [00:04:31] Speaker A: So I did a video actually from my own channel last week, and it was talking about these buckets of types of content that a SaaS business should publish on their channel. And it was, and we'll see if I can remember all of them. One is like industry how to. [00:04:49] Speaker B: Right? [00:04:50] Speaker A: So we're a podcasting company. It would be like how to get your first sponsor, how to think about a podcast intro and outro. [00:04:59] Speaker B: How to. [00:04:59] Speaker A: Record using QuickTime, actually one of the more popular videos on our channel. Kind of like you're saying how to do a thing not with our product. So maybe even just take product out of that entirely, but just like, conceptually, how to think about being successful. Right. The other one is like, product walkthroughs. [00:05:15] Speaker B: Maybe I'll there bifurcate. [00:05:16] Speaker A: It's our product, or it's just another product. Like, hey, how to use Riverside? We use Riverside for recording this longer form onboarding, which I thought was a little different. [00:05:26] Speaker B: Right. [00:05:27] Speaker A: So, like, if a new customer comes in, we just want to point them to this 20 minutes video, and it shows basically, like, 80% of how to use the tool. And then the last window is like, testimonials. We have a thing where we do video testimonials with everyone who scores, like, a nine or ten NPS on our survey, but those are, like, the four. [00:05:46] Speaker B: Or five types of content that we. [00:05:49] Speaker A: Publish and then podcasts. We do video for most of our podcasts, and we publish them to our YouTube channel. Anything that I'm missing there before we talk about the allocation of those types of. [00:06:05] Speaker C: I like. I like them. This is. This might be a personal preference, but I typically like to have one format, one channel, type, one audience. The end goal for YouTube, I believe, is for someone. So the end goal for YouTube is to have people spend as much time on their platform and be satisfied as much time as possible. So I like to have, if it's like a ten minute tutorial or not necessarily tutorial, but, like, ten minute education video. I like for all of my videos to be ten minute education videos because someone can just watch one video and just watch every single one of my videos and get value out of that. When you start sprinkling in testimonials and an hour long podcast, like a five minute testimonial, a ten minute education video, and an hour long podcast, then it's a little different. We like what we like. So I'll give myself as an example. Before YouTube broke out, like shorts and long form content, or shorts and non shorts, everything was kind of mixed in the homepage, and I had a knee problem. So I was watching knees over toes guy, who's like, really popular YouTube guy, and I wanted his long form content. I didn't really want to see shorts, and it was so hard for me to binge his channel because every other video is like, okay, do I actually want to watch this? I don't know. [00:07:43] Speaker A: Interesting. [00:07:43] Speaker C: So it gave me little hurdles. It didn't just suck me in, like, cool. Everything is for me, and I'm going to watch every video. The opposite is true. I think with squat, university is another one where it felt easier for me to just binge all of his videos because I didn't have to add that extra layer of like, okay, is this a short. No, I want something meaty. Or even this wasn't the case here, but like, oh, is this a 60 minutes video? I'm not in the mood to watch a 60 minutes video. So I just like everything kind of in one bucket. And the more competitive your niche is, the more you have to play by YouTube's rules. If you're the only channel who is giving people what they're looking for and what they need and what they want, then it doesn't really matter. You can do whatever you want. But if you are trying to compete in a saturated niche, then it would be better for you to kind of. [00:08:48] Speaker B: Play by YouTube's rules. Okay, wow. [00:08:52] Speaker A: All right, I'm losing my mind here. Okay, so I really totally agree with what you're saying, but I just had never thought about it like that. [00:09:03] Speaker C: And I don't have data to back this up. But I have noticed that most of the successful channels are one content. Mr. Beast is the easiest thing. Every video, twelve to 20 minutes, same content, same. Really? He probably has, like you mentioned, the buckets. He has a couple of different buckets, but they're all in the same format. [00:09:28] Speaker B: Okay. [00:09:30] Speaker A: All right, then for our channel, right. I think the easiest one to get rid of would be the podcast episodes themselves. Just break them off to their own channel. [00:09:38] Speaker B: Right. [00:09:38] Speaker A: We call our network of podcast Castos Originals. So, hey, this is the Castos Originals channel. If you want to see our podcast content video format, go over here. That's easy. Testimonials. Also, we're recording them mostly for ads, so I think we can get rid of those. But then you're down to the success and then the product walkthrough stuff for us. Would you suggest we get rid of how to be a good podcaster videos, which is basically just me talking and doing a listicle of best this or ways to do that. Because I think that, like you're saying, hrefs just shows their product in every video, so I guess we would want to keep those, right? [00:10:20] Speaker C: It could be a mix. It could be a mix. I'm thinking about the customer, and I'm thinking about what do they want? They do want to know how to make a podcast, and they do want to know how to find a sponsorship, and they do want to know how to record on QuickTime, but also in addition to the stuff that they want to know that you guys help with. So I would just think about what does my audience want and how can I make all of my content in one format and deliver that to them? I really like the idea of attracting and building a relationship on social media and then selling via email and obviously once a quarter, once a month, once a year, doing a shorter testimonial like hard sales video. But for the most of my product, I would love to just build my email list to as many people as possible. And my YouTube channel is focusing on mostly building the email list, giving the audience what they want, and then all of the sales, all of the kind of deeper nitty gritty stuff. I'm emailing that to them. [00:11:43] Speaker B: That's how I would do it. [00:11:45] Speaker A: Got it. [00:11:49] Speaker B: Man, you're rocking my world. [00:11:50] Speaker A: Okay, cool. So you touched on something that's really important because we also have this concept of a media brand, right? If you're talking about our customers who are businesses, we believe that podcasting is a really integral part of the whole kind of ecosystem of them being like an omnichannel media brand, right. Social media, long form audio and video content kind of sits in the middle and then website and email at the bottom. Like you're saying, how do you think. [00:12:21] Speaker B: About the types of content that you create between social and just say YouTube? [00:12:29] Speaker A: Let's just discard podcasting. [00:12:31] Speaker B: But like social to YouTube to email, how do you think about the, it's. [00:12:37] Speaker A: My day to create content. How do you think about like, fuck, where do I start? I want to talk about this thing. Is it a tweet? Is it a YouTube video? Is it an email? Is it all three of them? [00:12:49] Speaker B: Because frankly, a lot of times I'll. [00:12:53] Speaker A: Sit here and I'll turn the camera and the microphone on and I'll be know not just what I want to talk about, but where I'm going to put it and how I'm going to present it first because I think that. [00:13:06] Speaker B: We can record a YouTube video and. [00:13:07] Speaker A: Then cut a bit out for a video piece on social or something and then we got to write the email later. Where do you start? How do you figure out the whole path to create those three channels of content? Yeah, that is a really shitty question. Really shitty question. [00:13:22] Speaker C: I'm sorry. No, see how you do. It's not really, it's a good question because it's a hard question and it's a real question. No, I don't think it's a bad question. I'll give you a couple of examples. So for me personally, for my personal brand, like the creator Hooks brand, what I did today is I'm working on a YouTube video. It's not my video. I don't really have a YouTube channel. Twitter is most of my stuff. But I'm working with Vidiq and we're going to make a video together and I'm working on the hook and just like the first three sentences of the video. So I tweeted it out today. I just wanted to see do people like it? Are people engaging with this tweet? And if it passes the tweet test, if it gets a lot of engagement, comments, bookmarks, retweets and all that stuff, then I'll be like, oKay, cool, this is a good hook. And this is what we're going to go with in the video. So Twitter for me is more just like shoot my shot really low key sometimes threads if I want to test something more. [00:14:31] Speaker A: You mean a Twitter thread or the Threads platform? [00:14:34] Speaker C: A Twitter thread. A Twitter thread. [00:14:36] Speaker A: Sorry, I don't know if anyone's still using threads. [00:14:39] Speaker C: I'm not sure either. I was tempted, but I'm like, you know, we'll see. I'm a very slow adopter. I'll let other people figure it out first and then dive in if it's worth it. And so far it doesn't seem like it's worth know with Twitter. It's a big testing ground to try to see what works. And then for I, back when I was a channel manager and I do have my own little kind of testing YouTube channel, I am very specific about, okay, this is what I want. I know this works on YouTube. And so this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to create this video for YouTube. So I try to create content for the platform. If I'm trying to rank on Google for a blog post, what are people searching and how do they want that information presented? And then I'll write a blog post to rank on Google. And then if I'm trying to make a YouTube video, okay, what are people watching? Why do they want to watch it? How do they want that information presented? And then I'll make a YouTube video. So they might want the same thing and it might be largely similar content, but just really trying to think about the platform first. And I like to do a lot of research on platform and also kind of like cross platform for YouTube. I'll look at my competitors and I'll look at adjacent channels to see what is working. I'll turn that stuff into tweets, but also as far as length and format and all that stuff, I'm trying to keep it platform specific. [00:16:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. [00:16:24] Speaker A: That's interesting. As I've been getting into doing some more YouTube stuff, I've adopted a bit of the skyscraper technique. Like Brian Dean's. [00:16:32] Speaker B: Right. [00:16:32] Speaker A: Like, just take the best five articles out there and swish them together and make the ultra best one. I kind of do the same with YouTube. Is that wrong to say, like, go search, how to make a podcast in Quicktime or how to use Riverside. [00:16:44] Speaker B: Right. [00:16:44] Speaker A: We're using Riverside. Fantastic platform, by the way. How do you use Riverside? Go watch the five videos that come up first and then make mine. That's the best of each part of that. Is that like the quick and dirty way to do research from your perspective? [00:16:57] Speaker C: Pretty much, yeah. I love the quote. It's easier to get a million views on one video than it is on ten videos. So that pretty much means just like, focus on quality. So if you start cranking out three videos a week just to create content and like, okay, we just need to be out there and you're not doing that good of a job with your title, with your thumbnail, with your idea, with your content, with your storytelling and. [00:17:24] Speaker B: All that other stuff. [00:17:25] Speaker C: If you're just cranking out mediocre content just to crank it out, then it's going to be okay for the algorithm. Like, cool people are going to see it, but if you take your time and create one really good video, maybe it's longer and people are going to watch it more. YouTube loves that. It's a great topic. You spent time on your title and your thumbnail, so more people are going to click it. So the YouTube algorithm is pretty much click and stick. So if you can focus on those two things instead of just kind of spray and pray, then you're more likely to get more views, subscribers, sales, and also build a loyal audience because they're like, oh, crap, this company creates good content, right? So essentially, yes, the skyscrapers technique. Do all your research, put them all together and make as good of a video as possible. I'm not a fan of just, okay, we need to create content every Tuesday, Wednesday, or every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, just because that's what we do. Let's create really good content and bring something for audience that they're going to love. [00:18:32] Speaker A: And is once a week good enough for most SaaS businesses? [00:18:39] Speaker C: It depends. I don't think that consistency matters. That is. That is a hot take. If you look at Patty Galloway, who's one of the best YouTube consultants, he publishes like Once a quarter, I don't think he's published in like a year, but when he was publishing, he was doing it like once a quarter. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. I think he kind of pigeonholed himself into one specific format, but every video did really well. And even if you take like a month or two off, if you come back with a banger video, YouTube is going to be like, oh, wow, this audience likes it. Let's push it out to the audience. And it kind of also depends, what are people watching your video for? Are they watching it because they have a relationship with you and they don't really care about the content, they just want to hang with you because it's more entertainment based, then yeah, maybe you want to publish more, but if they're watching for the topic and not necessarily for the creator, then just make a good video, delivering on what they're looking for, helping. [00:19:55] Speaker A: This is a huge thing. I want to talk about idea generation in a minute because it's something I've struggled with a lot on my personal channel in the last couple of months and why I haven't published anything there. But first, let's say I have an idea on a topic. How do you decide to optimize it for kind of the three ways that people view your content, which is search. [00:20:15] Speaker B: Recommended next or because they're subscribed and they're a fan? [00:20:19] Speaker A: Like, how do you think about, ooh, for this topic? I want to optimize it for this kind of discoverability avenue. [00:20:27] Speaker B: Yes. [00:20:27] Speaker C: So I don't really think about the third one. They're subscribed and they're a fan. If they're subscribed and they're a fan, they are probably going to see it on their homepage. I don't really think about it. I mostly think about, you know, is this for browse and suggested or searched? I kind of think about those two buckets. [00:20:48] Speaker B: Okay, great. [00:20:49] Speaker C: And first off, the easiest thing is, are people searching for it? If they're not, then okay, this isn't a search video because there's not enough search volume. [00:21:02] Speaker A: Sorry. Where do you get that information? [00:21:06] Speaker C: Sometimes you can use keywords or you can use keywords everywhere. There's a bunch of different tools. My favorite thing is I'll just search and I'll search how to start a podcast. And if the first five results are, if they have fewer views than what I want, then it's like, okay, this is not by searching you can see, all right, this will happen to my video if I rank number one for this and if that result is not what you want. Then go for browse and suggested. So YouTube does kind of make it a lot easier just to tell you. Okay, cool. This is what search volume is, but you do have to factor a channel size. So if the number three video has 50,000 views and number one and two each have like 2000, well, let's go for the number three video and let's check out their channel and do a little bit of research. Like, okay, they averaged 50,000 views. So cool. This video was on average for them, but like the other channels maybe they averaged 1000 views and this did well for them. Okay, I think I fudged those numbers. [00:22:21] Speaker A: No, I think I know what you mean. So you're basically saying you look at the result like the views and the search results and then compare that to. Was this about average for the reach of a channel? Is that what you're saying? [00:22:32] Speaker B: Correct. [00:22:33] Speaker C: Yeah. Because if somebody is ranking for something and they have a million subscribers and they have a very dedicated audience, then it's probably not the fact that this video ranked in search that got all those views. Yeah, got it. Yes, that's what I do. And if you see the top few videos don't have as many views as you would hope, then don't do it, don't make it. And you can talk about the same topic but just position it for browse and recommended. [00:22:58] Speaker B: Okay. [00:23:00] Speaker C: And then how you do that is you can use curiosity, you can use fear, desire, you can talk about kind of like the end benefits. Talk about another kind of example that I like or metaphor is like the chocolate covered carrot. You need to eat the carrot, but nobody really wants to click on the carrot when you're next to all this other junk food like Mr. Beast videos and TikTok reactions and all that other stuff. So you give them the chocolate covered carrot and you talk about their biggest dreams. If it's a video, like how to start a podcast. Well, nobody really wants to learn how to start a podcast, but how to have a podcast that generates 100,000 downloads a month. How to blow up, the easiest way to blow up your business and the answer is start a podcast. So trying to figure out what are some other ways where you can position that content, where this is the stuff that they need, but they don't necessarily. [00:24:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I love it. [00:24:07] Speaker A: Dan Martel calls it chocolate broccoli. So it's a fantastic metaphor because you say it, I'm like, fuck yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. [00:24:17] Speaker C: Okay, cool. [00:24:19] Speaker A: That's really helpful. I think that's a good segue into what you do with creator hooks. So you give us a spiel on kind of like where you typically help channels to grow their audience or to. [00:24:33] Speaker C: Yeah. When it comes to ideas, there's a framework that I love called the topic and the frame. So your topic is a proven topic. So let's say we wanted to start a podcast. How to start a podcasting channel. What we would do is we would look at all of our competitors and let's just say we have our top five competitors. I would look for outlier videos. So, like, if they average 1000 views a video and then one video has 10,000 views, like, okay, noted. I'll take a note of that. Then I'll sort all those channels by most popular and I'll try to find the topics that are popping up all the time. Maybe it is how to get your first sponsor and say, okay, cool, well, I need to talk about sponsorships and doing that with all of your competitors looking for outliers and most popular, looking for trends in those. And that'll give us proven topics so we know what works. And then we also want to look for frameworks, like how do we position those topics in an interesting way to. [00:25:41] Speaker B: Get people to click. [00:25:43] Speaker C: So kind of the easiest thing is just modeling your competitors, right. And that is going to be the highest likelihood of success because it's proven that it's been done. However, you're always like a step behind your competitors and you're always just kind of waiting on them to figure things out. So then you can go do it. But if you look at adjacent channels. So we want to start a, how to, how to start a podcast channel, we could look how to start a YouTube channel, how to blow up on Instagram, how to start a TikTok. We would look at all of those adjacent channels, how to get rich, like personal finance, nutrition, all that other stuff that are similar. And they have the same kind of content style as us. And we look at and see what works for them, and then we remix, like, we'll look for outliers. That's how we get our frameworks and we remix our proven topics that we got from our competitors. And we kind of mix those two together and that's how we come up with infinite good ideas. So an example. So I used to work for a fishing channel, and I was a channel manager, and we were saltwater fishing in the Southeast United States. So not that many successful channels that we could. So one of our videos was like, best trout lures so I would look at, like, you know, a finance channel, and they would be a video that would do really well for them, are like, top ten credit cards of 2023. So I would make a video top ten trout lures of 2023 because I know it works. And then I kind of borrowed their frame, and it's not copying because they're a totally different niche. So anyway, so that's the topic in the frame, that little framework, what creator hooks, what the newsletter does, is it gives you frames, five frames every Monday morning. It's like, hey, here's why this worked, and here's how you can model this for your channel, essentially, because that is what we did every Monday morning at the phishing channel. We would have our team meeting and I'd be like, hey, guys, this worked for fitness, this works for finance. Let's do this for hours for our cHannel. So that's what creator Hooks does, is it kind of gives you ideas that you can model and kind of breaks down the reasons why they worked so that you can think outside of the box even more and really understand psychology and use that to help come up with good ideas. [00:28:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. [00:28:14] Speaker A: And I think that topic ideation is such a massive barrier, both for podcasting and for YouTube and for fucking any social and blogging and everything. It's just like you sit down and you look at the blank screen and you're like, what do I do? And especially for me, especially with YouTube, because you and I can get on and talk for an hour and it's just like, nothing, right? But if it's just me and the light is on and it's hot and I'm staring at this goddamn camera, and I psych myself out way more on YouTube than I do anything else because you can't make it up as you go. I think that's the challenge, is. [00:28:54] Speaker B: You. [00:28:54] Speaker A: Need to be prepared and ready and outlined and have a good topic and stuff. And I think that's why I struggle a lot with it, is like, I don't have a lot of great ideas that are easy to do. So I like that framework for coming up with ideas because it's a big hurdle for folks. [00:29:13] Speaker C: Yeah. And then you can remix that to, like, infinity if you have your five proven topics, and then you have 20 proven frames, frameworks that you got from other channels, that's 125 video ideas right there. Okay, make those 125 videos, and then you go get 20 more frames, and then that's another 125. So that's 250 ideas. And they're based on a proven topic. So you're pretty sure they're going to do well. They're also based on a proven framework that. Okay, cool. There's something about this psychology that made people click. It's the easiest way. I call it the DJ Khaled Method. You're remixing proven topics and frameworks and I love it. [00:30:00] Speaker A: Yeah, let's talk about psychology. I know the title and the thumbnail are like, whatever, 90% of getting someone to click, right, like someone who's relatively new to YouTube. What's the 80 20 of that? [00:30:19] Speaker C: The three click worthy eMotions, curiosity, fear and desire. And it's usually curiosity plus fear. Curiosity plus desire. You could also just straight curiosity, straight fear, straight desire. But it's some sort of mix of and or of those three emotions. And as you start scrolling through YouTube and really doing anything, email, subject lines, any sort of content, you'll start to notice those three emotions and you're going to be like, oh, this is how they did that. I like this a lot. I'm going to do this myself. So that is the simplest way to think about it. As far as Curiosity goes, Curiosity is the most powerful of them and that's for the most part when we're talking about browse and recommended videos. Recommended next. And on the homepage, it's largely curiosity. If you're search, it's largely desire plus some curiosity as well. But it's mostly desire for search when we're talking about fear and negativity. That's also browse and recommended depending on your strategy. If you're trying to rank and search, you're going to use a lot of things like lists, you're going to use the current year. Because if you're trying to rank and search, you really want to know your audience, why are they looking for this and who are they? So talking about things for beginners works really well if you're trying to rank in search, and that's because the person is, they are a beginner. So how to do your first push up? How to start your first podcast if you're looking how to start a podcast, chances are you're a beginner. So make it even more appealing for that person. Like, hey, how to start a podcast for beginners. How to start your first podcast. Also, starting a podcast is changing every single year because technology is changing, strategy is changing everything. So if you make a video, how to start your first podcast in 2024, it's like, oh, cool, this is what is working now that kind of speaks a little bit more to the desire you could also. [00:32:38] Speaker A: Sorry, can I ask you a specific question about that? [00:32:41] Speaker B: Yes. [00:32:41] Speaker A: So we're recording this the first week of November. [00:32:44] Speaker B: End of the year is coming up. [00:32:45] Speaker A: I have this in mind to do a playlist or just a video about how to start a podcast in 2024. If we already have a video on. [00:32:53] Speaker B: How to start a podcast, 2023 or. [00:32:56] Speaker A: Without a year, do we delete that. [00:32:59] Speaker B: Or leave it or. [00:33:02] Speaker A: What's the strategy? [00:33:03] Speaker C: I would leave it. I would leave it. Okay. Some people will say that you could just change the title in 2024 for your old video and you might be successful with that. However, YouTube shows you the date that the video is published. So if you say how to start a podcast in 2024 and it was published in January of 2023, it's not a great way to build trust with your audience. [00:33:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:31] Speaker B: Okay. [00:33:31] Speaker C: So, yes, I would leave them. I used to be an SEO manager as well. [00:33:39] Speaker A: It's totally cringeworthy. I know. Like from multiple versions of the same thing. [00:33:45] Speaker C: Yeah. On Google, for the most part, we wanted one post to rank for one search term. I don't see that as much with YouTube. If it were me and I'm trying to how to start a podcast channel, I would probably make the same videos every year. So be like podcast predictions in next year, and I would publish that video in November or December, and then I would do how to start a podcast in next year and I would publish that in December to March. How do all the how to's that are changing? I would make them every year and I'd use the current year and I would just make those every single the change of the year every single year. And they would be slightly different. But it's such a powerful strategy that it's worth making the same video every year because it's not really the same video. It's changing all the time. [00:34:45] Speaker A: Yeah, this is where I get super selfish and I'm just going to get free consulting advice. Okay, got it. So that's like a handful to a dozen of how to X, and we do those every year. So that's part of the content calendar for the next year. And then can we also mix in how to do X with our platform or with another piece of software? How to record in Riverside, how to turn on castos ads, how to take donations with Castos Commerce? Is it worthwhile to have those? How to use our product, achieve certain outcome every year? Every two years? I mean, if the product doesn't change, I guess there's no need to redo it. [00:35:29] Speaker C: Are products not changing. I feel like most products are, or even like the landscape. [00:35:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I feel like many products all the time. [00:35:40] Speaker C: Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. I would assume that most things change and maybe if not the product, the audience behavior and the landscape. So yeah, I would do that for sure. I would do those. And you could even. How to start a podcast, there might be like, okay, part of it might be monetization. So then you talk about taking donations and all the other kind of benefits there. You could do both. You could have a video specifically for your SaaS, how to achieve the goal that your SaaS helps with. And you could also just talk about the big goal in general because we're here to serve the audience and what they want and build that trust. [00:36:29] Speaker B: Yeah, cool. [00:36:30] Speaker A: So it sounds to me like for most SaaS, it's talking about the three whatever desires. It's like curiosity and desire probably is the hook that most SaaS videos would fall into because it's for most part. [00:36:44] Speaker C: For the most how to use our. [00:36:46] Speaker A: Tool to do this thing, or generally. [00:36:47] Speaker B: How to be successful in this medium. [00:36:51] Speaker A: With or without our tool. [00:36:53] Speaker C: Yeah, the current year works really well. Time frames. So if the biggest thing that your audience wants is to save time, how to start your first podcast in 1 hour or whatever it is, if you make that time frame like a little shorter than what they are expecting, or even if it's just, it just makes it more digestible, it's like, oh, it's going to take me a whole week to start a podcast. But it's like, hey, here's how you do it in an hour or even in 2 hours, just making it more tangible. So that's another way to spice up your titles, calling out beginners or specific audience current year and time frames and lists are a couple of different kind of easy, tactical ways to do that. [00:37:45] Speaker B: Okay, got it. Cool. [00:37:48] Speaker A: I want to touch on thumbnails, probably as our last topic because I know it's along with title is the thing and there's fucking split testing it and using Tubebuddy and all this kind of stuff. But I'm going to start. I want to make a thumbnail for a video. [00:38:03] Speaker B: I have a bunch of headshots of. [00:38:04] Speaker A: Me with the super shocked expression or the pointing right, and I largely think they're ridiculous. But every single fucking video I look at has them. Do you just go with the masses and say, I'm a lemur, I'm going to do this? Or is it wrong to kind of buck the trend and say, I'm just. [00:38:27] Speaker B: Not going to do that. [00:38:29] Speaker C: I personally love split testing a lot. [00:38:33] Speaker B: Okay. [00:38:34] Speaker C: And I've used Tubebuddy thumbnail test is another one. Both of those, I like them a lot. The safe and the easiest way and the highest likelihood of success is to go with what is working. However, a lot of people just talking about in content in general is like, 80% of your videos should be videos that you are pretty sure are going to work, 20% are going to be a little bit more experimental videos, and you can kind of do the same thing with your thumbnails. Ed from film Booth, he has a course about thumbnails. I took it. [00:39:13] Speaker A: I love it. [00:39:15] Speaker C: And I believe he recommends coming in with three different thumbnails for every video. It's like, all right, I'm pretty sure this is going to do well because it's a proven concept. This other thumbnail, it's a little bit out there, but I think it could do really well. But the ODs are slightly lower because it's unproven and I can't remember what the third one was just coming with. [00:39:41] Speaker A: Mildly different. [00:39:42] Speaker B: Right? Like just a flyer. [00:39:44] Speaker C: Yeah, you could mix up. And it also depends on what's different about the thumbnail. You could have different thumbnail text and you could make ten different variations of that thumbnail. And it's really easy to do that because you're just in Photoshop or canva and it's like, okay, change text, change text. You're not needing to come up with some crazy abstract idea. [00:40:09] Speaker A: Yeah, because that was kind of a follow up question. So I look at Diary of a CEO as the pinnacle of Podcast YouTube channels. They're just amazing. And every one of his thumbnails are exactly the same. [00:40:24] Speaker B: Right? [00:40:24] Speaker A: It's the same template. But he talks about split testing them a lot. So I assume it's just like, what does the headshot look like and what is the title they use? [00:40:33] Speaker B: And it's just three or four words on there. [00:40:36] Speaker A: Is that the extent that you have to think about it is like, okay, maybe I got template A and I got template B and I got template. [00:40:42] Speaker B: C, and we're just going to do. [00:40:44] Speaker A: Slightly different versions of text on each of those. And that's what we're going to split test. Is that a good place to start? [00:40:51] Speaker C: I love that. I do love that. It's simple. If you know that it works, it makes things a lot easier. Words are powerful, especially with podcasts. You're not doing anything that crazy, right? You're not like making something and you could show oh, this is what we made. I like their style very much. And, yeah, changing a couple of words on your thumbnail could be huge. So, yeah, so I'm a big fan of that. And it could be changing the emotion of the person, of the guest. So I'm on there right now, and Jada Pinkett Smith, like, she's crying, but maybe they tested her with, like, she's crying versus, like, oh, she's happy, and you're changing big emotions. That could be a huge difference. [00:41:47] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:50] Speaker A: Last question about split testing thumbnails is like, you obviously split test it when you publish. Do you then go back a month later after it's kind of had time to settle in and start split testing again? Or like, yeah, I'll let you answer that. [00:42:05] Speaker C: So I have strong opinions about this. So it depends on the size of your channel. When you're doing a B testing in Tubebuddy, it's every 24 hours. So the problem with doing that when you first publish a video is that on day one, YouTube is going to show your video to people who are most likely to watch your video because it's all of your fans. So the expected CTR on day one, let's just say it's like 10%. Well, the expected CTR on day two is like 7%. So already your data is fudged. And the amount of views on day one is probably going to be greater than the amount of views on day two. Everything is all messed up. Thumbnail test lets you do hourly tests. So I really like that. And it's kind of the same thing. Even in the first hour, you're going to get the most views, and then it kind of usually goes down. But I like thumbnail test. If you have a big channel, if you're getting a couple of hundred views an hour, when you first publish for one of my channels, unless I'm very certain about the thumbnail, I almost always have an hourly test on day one of two or three different variations of the thumbnail. And then I usually don't do any of the daily tests. I'll do an hourly test on day one if you have a lot of traffic. If not, I probably wouldn't do tubebuddy or a daily test because the numbers are going to be fudged. So I would wait like five days. I worked with a channel, and all I did was a B testing for them. And after five days, I would wait every day for every channel or every video. I'd wait for five days so that the data kind of normalizes and then you can get a little bit more accurate data after that. I'm a huge fan of testing. Not forever, but whenever. If a video is getting views, then, yeah, you can test and you can learn. And another thing that I love about a B testing is you can just learn the trends of what your audience likes. You're not only a B test, a bunch of different videos. Yes, exactly. You're not only a B testing for this video, but be like, oh, my audience actually really likes this, and I'm going to do more of that. And then you come up with a theory, and then your next video, you're like, okay, I think that my audience likes this, but I'm actually going to split test it against this. And then slowly you'll start to dial in with Diary of a CEO. He was probably like, yeah, my audience really loves when I have a face and a text and red highlighted text. Now he's like, okay, cool. Well, they love this. So I'm going to do this all the time. And now I'm going to start tweaking different emotions or like long text, short text, and all that other stuff. [00:45:14] Speaker B: Okay, got it. Cool. [00:45:20] Speaker A: Anything that we didn't cover that you think is important for businesses or brands or SaaS in particular to think about. [00:45:27] Speaker B: With YouTube, nothing in particular. [00:45:32] Speaker C: I think just modeling is like, the secret to success. I'm working on my SAS right now, and I am not a SaaS guy. So I went and I signed up for another social media Saas, and I was like, oh, here's how they do their onboarding. Here's the email follow up sequence. And your audience probably knows. Okay, cool. That's how there's best practices, and you can kind of model things from other SaaS companies, and you can be like, oh, this is how their dashboard is set up. It's the same thing for YouTube. It's like, here is how they write their titles. Here's how they make their thumbnails. Here's how they do their lighting. Here's how they do their editing. Here's how they do their scripts. So just finding a channel to model and following that channel as closely as possible until you find your own voice is what I would do. And it's my thing as I'm learning something. It can be one of your competitors, but it could also be an adjacent channel. How to start a podcast, how to start a YouTube channel. Just do everything that this how to start a YouTube channel would do. And then you'll figure out your voice, you'll figure out what your audience likes and then you could start being unique. But, yeah, I'm a big fan of not trying to reinvent the wheel, just modeling and taking that step by. [00:46:56] Speaker B: Cool. Cool, man. [00:46:57] Speaker A: Super helpful. We'll have to have you on for a part two or we'll do like a tear down of the Castos channel. And then I want to talk about personal branding because I actually think for me that's like, maybe one of the. [00:47:10] Speaker B: Great untapped areas of YouTube is like. [00:47:13] Speaker A: You see all these fucking personal branding guys on LinkedIn and Twitter talking about, oh, my personal brand and email newsletter and all this kind of stuff, and I don't see anything about it on YouTube. And I don't know why because the same people like us consume on both platforms and I don't see anybody talking about it there. So, yeah, I think that maybe we'll have a part two about that. [00:47:33] Speaker B: Yes. [00:47:34] Speaker C: That'd be fun. Yeah, cool. Budy. [00:47:35] Speaker A: I could talk about this stuff all awesome, awesome. Jake, for folks who want to check you out, creatorhooks.com for the newsletter and the updates. Is that the best? [00:47:45] Speaker C: Yep. Creatorhooks.com. [00:47:47] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:47:47] Speaker C: Free Newsletter every Monday morning. [00:47:49] Speaker B: Awesome. [00:47:49] Speaker A: And on Twitter, you are. [00:47:53] Speaker C: Jthomas. Underscore, underscore. Score. All right, we'll include in the show notes, it's Jake. Just search Jake Thomas. Look for a guy with a beard and a dog, and that's awesome. [00:48:03] Speaker B: Awesome. Cool. [00:48:04] Speaker A: Jake, this was super fun. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. [00:48:09] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for having me, Craig.