Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we go through three specific YouTube tactics and strategies you can implement to move your channel to the next level in the next few months. I'm chatting with Trent Hare today. Trent has years of experience on YouTube, working with some of the biggest names on the platform to move their channels know hundreds and thousands to millions of viewers. He drops some serious knowledge about really specific tactical things that we can all do to either get started or to take our YouTube game to the next level. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too.
Before we started recording is always how every good podcast episode starts, because all the good shit is before we start recording. But I said that a big part of this series for me is I'm super interested, super fascinated with YouTube, but it's really intimidating, right? I had a good friend of mine the other day say, like, I see a lot of SEO and content people going into YouTube because the barrier is so high that it's just fucking so many people can't do it right. And even this series, for me, I'm going to spend 15 hours doing this series instead of doing videos because I think this is like me doing YouTube is just creating content about YouTube instead of actually doing it.
As you look at folks in similar positions to mine as you work with clients at creator campfire, how do you help folks get over that hurdle to say, like, just fucking turn on the mic and the camera and shoot something and it's going to be like 80% good? Because I think that's what's exactly the position I'm in. I'd rather talk to you about YouTube than actually do YouTube. How do we get me over the hump?
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the biggest reason people hesitate is because they don't know where to start. I think just the biggest thing because there are so many avenues and there's so much advice flying around, for better and for worse, that the first thing I do for a lot of my clients, especially if we're launching a new channel, for example, or most people that work with me generally know YouTube decently well. So it's not necessarily getting them to press publish, it's more of like getting them to make the pivot. But I think what I'm about to say holds true for both of them. And that's coming at it with a strategy and coming at it with a.
Have a strategy for what you want to achieve. I mean, it's just the scientific method of have a hypothesis and then go test it and have an idea of what you want, have an idea of which audience you want to serve have an idea of where you fit within that niche, because a lot of it is. There is a lot of record something and press publish. There is that. And there's also the procrastination side of overanalyzing everything before you press publish.
But I also encourage people to not put too much weight on, but at the same time have a bit of a strategy going in. I think you'll feel a lot better doing that. And also setting. I also like to set expectations from the start of this is a fresh channel. There are zero people that are going to watch this.
If you're scared of ten people, it's okay.
In six months, those ten people might come back and not even recognize your channel.
And I think it's much more about setting expectation of this is more of a learning exercise for you than it is about blowing up and getting rich. Yeah, there's a time investment, yes, there's monetary investment for gear and that sort of thing, if that's what you want to go for. But there's also plenty of people who record and edit and publish from their phones. There are no microphones. There's nothing like that. I think people put too much emphasis on perfection. And it's much more about progress. It's much more about getting content out there. Do it intelligently. Like, if you're just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, yeah, you're probably going to be stressed and you're probably not going to know which direction to take. But having an idea of your audience, an idea of how you're going to serve them, and a few topic ideas that you can choose from and just start publishing and seeing what works. So it's always nerve wracking to put yourself out there. I probably feel a lot of the same way. Whenever I posted content on LinkedIn that most people feel about YouTube, I was like, oh, man, these are all professional people. I can't be posting nonsense out here. I need to make sure. And it's one of those things of just post stuff and start the conversation and see what people respond.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Imposter syndrome. Cool. So in the podcasting space, we work in the podcasting space. A lot of kind of analogies, I think, to YouTube.
I take a pretty similar approach of just like, fucking publish it. Like, your launch is not going to make any waves. It's going to be your worst content. It's only going to get better from here, really. Don't worry about it.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: We want to get over this kind of minimum bar of acceptability.
And just know that you'll get better every time you interview someone and your gear will improve and how you interview will improve. All that kind of stuff. Would you say the same thing of like, have a decent light, have a reasonable looking background, just record something, edit it in whatever tool that comes on your computer or free tool like cap cut or something like that, and just publish it and just go from there? Is that it? Or is there like, hey, okay, we got to get to this point and don't publish until you can get to this point?
[00:05:19] Speaker B: No, I think it depends on their goals. Right, because I think there are so many people, I think it's about sitting down and evaluating.
What do you want out of YouTube? Is it just an experimental event? Are you wanting to just see what it's like? Are you wanting to convert people off platform? Are you wanting to go viral and blow up?
At least just have a goal in mind of what you're wanting to accomplish?
Do you have to know exactly which audience you're serving? No, not necessarily. You just have to have an idea of what you want to talk about and just go for it. If you're too scared to even press publish, then yeah, just record a bunch of stuff, throw something up there and see what sticks. And then after ten videos with three views, you realize like, okay, cool. There's literally no pressure. I can just improve every single time.
I always tell people, what about competitors? I need to analyze what they do and do that. That's market research, sure. But your only competition is your last video. So if you're publishing your first video, you have literally zero competition. You have to make your own competition and then start going against.
So it's just get something out there, realize that literally no one will watch it and get on with your life and go on to the next one. The stakes are a lot lower than most people think. It's also not hard to private videos or delete a channel and start over. Once you get better, that exists too. So it's by all means like to use bezos as an example. It's an open door. Once you go through it, it's not closed, it's not irreversible. You can always reverse it and go back and get better. So there's a lot less stress that way.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: I heard a strategy from a previous conversation about YouTube that at first I was like, what the hell? And then I was like, oh, it's super smart. And it was find a channel that you like and just copy it for your 1st 20 videos, copy everything about the style and the topic and the outline and the thumbnail and everything, and just copy it, and then you'll know whether that's actually you or if you need to take a fork and go a slightly different direction. Do you agree with that? As somebody who's like, okay, I want to talk about Minecraft, right?
I want to think about an aspect of Minecraft. Do you just go and say, I'm going to watch Preston's last ten videos and do exactly what he did? Is that like a reasonable place to start.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: For the mega youtubers copying them? Probably not.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Mainly, I mean, you can try it. It's always one of the things of, if you want to go out and copy someone, try to copy the best and see what all goes into it. You'll learn a lot that way. I mean, I know from seeing how the sausage is made thereof, there's giant custom development teams and mods that have to happen and the team that scripts it and everything. I know all that stuff behind the scenes. But if you can go in as a solo person, you'll find out all of those things yourself. Of like, wait, how did he get this to happen? How did they put this together?
I think going through and copying them, whether or not you even publish those videos, there have been plenty of clients that I've worked with that we were going to launch a channel and it took us recording 510 videos that never saw the light of day just to get the feeling right for what we wanted to do. Granted, the stakes are higher because there are larger brands, larger names, but it's very much like, just go out and copy it, see what we like, what we don't like. Take the time to improve it behind closed doors and then come out. Swing it.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: So I think you'll learn a lot either way, for sure.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Cool.
Everyone who listens to this show is kind of thinking of doing YouTube mostly in a b, two b sense, whether that's like b, two b for my company, Castos, or b to b for me and my personal brand and me wanting to develop that so I can sell more for my company. Right. That's the whole goal. How does the strategy differ from what we hear about YouTube, which I think mostly is b to c for b to b businesses like ours?
[00:09:10] Speaker B: I think there's two things that come to mind off the top of my head for differences in b to b.
One is expectation. Don't expect to be Mr. Beast. You're not going to get 100 million views in a week. That's not your audience listen. If you do and they all still manage to convert, congratulations, go write a book and retire.
And the reason I say you're not going to get that viewership is because your videos, whenever I'm talking to clients who want to, are more like the entertainment ish side, whether they are still entrepreneurship or anything else, but they're wanting to reach wider audience.
It's very easy to do that. Whereas b to b, you're trying to really narrow down and kind of target specific things that these people talk about. And the average person might not understand the lingo in what you do, but I think there's also ways to like, one of my favorite strategies is what I call hiding the vegetables, where someone might not care about whatever it is that your company talks about. But there are ways to package the videos in such a way where people do care and then they're able to go in and see, oh, wow, this is how they do it. Oh, this is a thing that I've always talked about.
I think to give a shout out to Ed from Ed Lawrence to give him a shout out. Like one of the examples I've heard him use in the past is he wanted to make a video about lighting for youtubers.
Very dry, very boring topic to discuss. There's nothing really sexy about lighting, but discussing tricks that youtubers use to hook you or mistakes that beginner youtubers always make. There are ways to package these things up in a way that is still a little bit more mass appeal than average, but it'll give you a better platform than to discuss the real meat of what you want to talk about. And I think there's a lot of that that needs to happen on the b to b side because there's an element of there are people like Jack Butcher and visualize value. And his YouTube channel is one inconsistent because it's Jack. He just posts stuff up there whenever he wants to, but also it's just him discussing things in a room and seeing what happens and kind of sharing an idea and moving along, or might be office hours one day. None of his stuff is necessarily optimized by any means, but for the people who are interested in him and then go and find, it's a really great connection point. So I think it again comes back to do you want your content to be a deeper nurture place or do you want it to be more about discovery and figure out, do you want this to be top of funnel or middle of funnel? Like where in the funnel do you want this to land? Because there are different strategies that apply to all of those.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: And do you think both work or could work equally well?
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Top funnel, middle of funnel, probably not bottom of funnel, but yeah, bottom of.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Funnel is an interesting one. A bottom of funnel is more like if you're posting any type of, whether if you're posting top or mid funnel content, like bottom funnel is where you send them afterwards.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: Website or email or something.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that kind of thing. And so I think, again, whenever I look at top and middle of funnel, it's the same principle across the board. And YouTube is no different on this front of just viewer intent. Are they more interested in this or are they kind of passing through?
I want this to be a sales hotspot where everything converts or you have a higher conversion rate, or are you wanting it to be like, hey, we just need to have general awareness and we'll have big numbers. And if we convert half a percent to a percent of them, cool, they'll at least come through and we'll see what happens?
I think it's just defining that.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: I'm sure this is a moving target, but is there a point at which you say, okay, we need to create top of funnel awareness until that top of funnel is at a point, and then we can worry about conversion again in a b to B sense. Whether it's like me as a single person, maybe I'm a coach or a consultant or I have a SaaS product or whatever, like talking hundreds of views per video or thousands of subscribers, it feels like you need to get to a point before you try to sell anything to ten people. Right?
[00:13:35] Speaker B: Sure. YouTube is a little bit different. I say sell from the start. Like, if that's your goal, they should already be used to it. You should just be providing content as long as your content is valuable for wherever you're serving, whether it is top or mid funnel.
Give people a way to connect with you. I look at Patty Galloway as a great example of this. Obviously, his channel was built on doing very detailed breakdowns of viral channels and people.
And his business, I would argue, grew off the back of that because people found his content. Whenever I was at TVR, we saw his stuff. We're like, we need to talk to this guy immediately. Let's get him in the door and talk to and giving people away. Like, if he hadn't have had his calendly link or whatever on his YouTube banner or like, a way to find him on Twitter to then find that, like, that wouldn't have.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: So I would argue that he got his start from that, where if we hadn't been able to see that, we wouldn't have been able to reach out to him. And then I also think about each piece of content that you publish is a piece of digital real estate and has a chance to blow up, potentially. And so if you decide to not sell until a certain point and something hits, you're stuck up the creek without a paddle, so to speak. And so being able to have the audience be used to it, have them know that, hey, this is what I do, this is a way to connect with me, this is how I do things. And eventually your audience will become used to it over time. The same thing with merch plugs or subscribe ctas or anything else on the platform, that all becomes pretty standard and your audience can look past it pretty quickly.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Yeah, got you. We were kind of touching on personal brand there a little bit. And this is an area of my personal development that I'm really kind of focused on.
And to be honest, I'm a little torn. Right. Like, I have a lot of belief in YouTube as a platform, but I think the distance between where I am and a result is really big on YouTube. Right? It's a year probably, whereas take your pick. Twitter, LinkedIn probably. We're talking like months for me to be able to continuously post high quality stuff and get more visibility and all this kind of stuff, I guess. First of all, do you agree with that, that time to impact is lower on other channels, venues.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: Potentially? I think the reason people see time to impact being shorter on LinkedIn and x Twitter or whatever we're calling it this week, the reason it's shorter, it feels like, is because you're posting more consistently there and you're able to get feedback quicker. It's a lower barrier to entry because it's text.
And also those algorithms, in my mind, are designed much more to feed people success earlier. And YouTube can do that, assuming it's quality content and it hits a certain barrier and all the things that we've already discussed, unless you're doing like, news based or very time related content, is much more evergreen, you're going to see results five years from now. Whereas if I post a tweet that goes viral, I might see success from it for a week and then no one knows me the next week. But YouTube has much more of the lifespan of a video that can bring in results forever, as long as it's up. I always tell clients who are more b to b, I'm like, you're posting Evergreen automated lead gen that just works for you nonstop. Like every single video has the potential to replace an employee.
Obviously that might be a little bit dramatic, but you get the picture of these videos are going to work for you for a long time as opposed to just being in the cycle for a second and then out again.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah, no, for sure. The durability, I think, of YouTube is probably only second to content on your site and really only second just because YouTube is a platform, whereas I own my site and nobody can take it away from me. But you could theoretically get kind of whatever smashed by the YouTube gods. So there's a bit of a kind of algorithm with platform risk there.
Do you see a lot of people doing what you would see on LinkedIn be like personal brand building?
Do you see people doing that on YouTube as their primary avenue? And do you think that's a reasonable.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: Strategy in order to do well on YouTube? My hypothesis is, aside from the concrete analytics and CTR and AVD and all of the things that go into it, what it boils down to is satisfying an audience. And I think that comes from especially on b. Two B and the sales side is providing value first. I think too many companies and people go too heavy on. Here's everything you need to know about me. People aren't searching YouTube for you. They don't care.
They need to be able to see how seven mistakes that people make whenever they're first getting into niche or there's so many things that beginners need to find or going more in depth on specific problems in different areas and knowing that it can be a little intimidating. I think it's backwards compared to a lot of places where you have to really put value forward in order to receive it back. Whereas most places you can kind of talk about in generalities about clients that you had and I did this, this and this. No one really cares. It's much more about showcasing, giving away knowledge. Like going back to Patty as the example of breaking down other creators. People who want to grow on YouTube are very curious to see how these big trending creators are doing. How are they doing it? What are they talking about? Oh, this guy seems really smart and broke it down very easily for me. Let me go talk to him. He seems to know what's going on.
I think a very similar blueprint just applied to a bunch of different niches.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting.
I want to talk about discoverability in search because as I understand, when it comes to discoverability, there's suggested in the sidebar and the homepage and then there's search right and people are searching for how do I change the windshield wiper blade on my Subaru? Or how do I grow my SaaS business? Or whatever? I think the sidebar and the suggested, that's a whole nother animal, but let's focus on search right now. So Castos is a podcast hosting SaaS platform.
Our customers are podcasters.
Without asking you to do a whole bunch of work, which we did on the last one where we did a homepage teardown, I won't ask you to do that. But from a framework perspective, how should I think about assuming we have no videos on our site, which is not true, we have a bunch. How should I think about, okay, I want to build out a bunch of search focused content.
How do I do that? Do you just go like the same kind of keyword research methodology as you would for Google content, like written content? Or is there like a special trick for it? For the if I want to do keyword research to figure out what kind of content I want to build, that's built for search for my channel generally, how do you like to go about it?
[00:20:44] Speaker B: If I'm building stuff for search normally, the way I think about that, yeah. There is an element of the typical keyword research. Hop on Google Trends, hop on XYZ SEO tool. There are hundreds out there. There are some specific to YouTube with Tubebuddy and Vidiq.
Look at Quora for whatever your topic is and see what top answers and questions are and answer those. And I like to look at what are the questions everyone's asking. And then very similar to backfilling a website with a bunch of blog posts is all right, let me make some videos that answer all these questions in a good way and move forward with that.
I think the fun side of it is blending a bit of SEO with the suggested and looking at what really works well for other channels in our niche and seeing if there are ways to twist it that way. It's not just pure questions because everyone can answer the same questions, but finding if there are formats that work. Obviously we're blending this a little bit into the suggested. So it's not clean SEO, but finding ways to see what people are watching and then hacking into that. Because if it's similar and they've watched it, you can potentially show up on their homepage and get new viewers and get growth that way, as opposed to manually having someone type in a certain query to find you to do that, you can also make certain videos that would then instead of the viewer having to do the work, you will do the work for you and then surface your video to the viewers. Assuming it would be something that would.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: Kind of. What kind of split between search and suggested focused content would you suggest for a channel with under a couple thousand subscribers? Like focus mostly on search, focus a lot on suggested. What do you like that mix to be?
Or is that not a good question? Is that dumb?
[00:22:33] Speaker B: I don't know.
I'm not going to say it's a bad question. That's a terrible question. Why would you ask me that?
[00:22:38] Speaker A: No, that's totally fair.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: You're the expert.
I'll be a guest on zero podcasts after this.
No, I think there's not a percentage. It's channel by channel because it just depends on what your audience is like. Because people in one niche might behave differently than people in another.
But I think starting out, if you're a fresh channel, and by fresh I just mean you haven't had a big pop or a blow up or something like that, you don't have a trail to really follow.
I split up content into buckets and then I'm looking at, okay, I'll just use the jobs to be done framework. Okay, the goal of this video is how to begin this thing with $0, whether it's podcasting or whatever else.
Here's how you do it with $0. Here's how you start. My goal with this one is, yeah, it is kind of clickable and it's been optimized a little bit, but mainly this is going to be people searching of how do I start this thing? And then I'm looking at another bucket of like, okay, whether this fits with your audience or not, what are some challenges, what are some other things that I've basically split SEO and suggested into those two buckets? And for each video, just adjusting expectations for each one, knowing that if I'm posting something that's SEO based, I'm not going to see a return on that for a while. Most likely it's going to be living in the algorithm. And then six months to a year from now, I will begin seeing traction as my channel matures and it becomes an older video and trusted and that's all the typical SEO stuff that goes into it.
And then looking at the other videos and kind know as long as you are. The blessing in the curse of YouTube is the suggested algorithm, because if you go viral for something you don't want to do and it's a terrible audience, you've hosed the channel completely. You'll be battling that the rest of the time. But at the same time there is no better platform there it. Sorry to bring that back up. I hope you don't see like Vietnam flashbacks in your head right now.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: Let me share the story because it might be interesting or podcasting channel. We talk about podcasting. We did a webinar on how to promote your show, I think, and we had some folks on and this webinar replay went for us, went viral like thousands of thousands of views as opposed to like tens or hundreds. And wasn't about our product at all.
Probably didn't even talk to our ideal customer Persona. Exactly.
It kind of died down after about three months, but it was going hard for three months and then kind of trailed off.
So I think we have quite a few subscribers to our channel who aren't really good subscribers, aren't looking for what we're doing. We even consider taking the video down because it kind of conflated to things a little bit. But yeah, it definitely happened to us that, man, we didn't want this one to take off, but it got in the algorithm somehow and it did.
[00:25:46] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. It's definitely the double edged sword. I mean, the good side is then if you don't want those viewers, then that's obviously the bad case.
But if you're the fresh channel and you're kind of dividing up your buckets, then it's about following the breadcrumbs and just making sure each video you post, hopefully is something that serves the audience that you want to have long term.
Just to remove some stress of this, because I feel like people are going to be listening to this and being like, oh God, every idea is a closed door. I can't, I'm freezing. We pivoted Preston's channel, it was his Minecraft channel as his main one at 9 million subscribers. And we pivoted it and it's now the real life channel that everyone knows today.
So if we could pivot at 9 million, granted, we launched another Minecraft channel so that we had an outlet for people, but if we could pivot at 9 million, the channel is fine like you can too. It's really not that stressful. I also look at Thomas Frank, who does productivity stuff. He had a lot of notion guides, spun out his notion stuff because that was almost like a bigger sub audience for him and spun out Thomas frankly, or Frank explains, or something like that. It's now a separate channel for him that is purely focused on that and converts super well for him on his templates. So it's always something that can be established and then pivoted later as well.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
One kind of specific question I have is around testing and testing of thumbnails, testing of titles, things like this. Right.
I know some channels will go so far as to run paid ads on thumbnails ahead of the episode being released so they know kind of what resonates.
But also after it's out, use tubebuddy or vidiq I'm sure does it too to start split testing and stuff like that.
I've done zero of that. How much of that should I consider doing? I don't have the bandwidth to do all 200 videos on our channel.
How do you approach Froka? You got a little bit of content. You know, you should probably try to juice a little bit of it with split testing of the title and the thumbnail, I guess is like the big thing you can. How do you think about that?
[00:27:59] Speaker B: So whenever I'm looking at and you're talking about going through not just like changing, updating your strategy for stuff moving forward, but optimizing backlog of content.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: So for that, usually what I'm doing if I'm evaluating clients for this kind of stuff is I'm looking for signs of life. So I'm going back and looking at hopefully establish at least some baseline level of like what is the typical CTR in the first 24 hours? What is it at the first hour? Same for retention and kind of getting some of the bigger key metrics. People can go way overboard and have 57 different metrics that they're listing and tracking at all times. And it's exhausting.
But looking at those and at least just having some sort of a baseline in place and then going through your backlog and finding the stuff where retention is at average or slightly above and maybe CTR is below average. Because if you go and change a thumbnail on a video that has 2% watch time, it doesn't matter what packaging you put on that no one's going to watch it. And so that's how I kind of limit it and kind of narrow it down also ones that might have potential higher, like evergreen potential, going back and finding things that going back. And I think of a game that for Fortnite where they have updates seemingly every other month, going in and updating one of the update videos doesn't make a lot of sense because no one's going to be going back and seeing what season one was whenever you're on season seven.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:32] Speaker B: So I think that there are looking at stuff that has the potential to perform like if I update the packaging and I think this topic is still relevant, then maybe it's worth me spending some time in doing this and going back that way.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: If this has an impact, will that make a difference in performance of the channel or the business? Yeah, got you.
To that point, I would guess.
Sort of top of funnel, middle of funnel. Doesn't really matter as long as it's like evergreen and the content is good. So that if we just get more people clicking on it, it makes a difference. Right. But where it is in the funnel, probably not important. No.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Whenever you're optimizing this stuff, as long as it still speaks to that audience, there are also people that go and they might have something that's more of their core audience. And as it gets older, they change the packaging to be more broad, reaching to play better. And suggested that's another strategy. That's probably way too complicated for a lot of people. But it's a strategy that exists.
But no where in the funnel doesn't matter. It's just better performing on YouTube.
And so then keeping track of your conversions, if you're tracking people that move off platform and doing that to make sure nothing's going too haywire there. But no, generally, if you're going back and updating it on a solid video, just better performance is better performance regardless of where you're at in the funnel.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Cool. Okay, I have two more questions and then we'll take a minute. One is duration for me on my personal channel. And for a lot of the cast of stuff where it's just me talking about how to be a good podcaster. The videos are seven to twelve minutes.
Is that reasonable?
[00:31:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's reasonable.
Obviously, the monetization side of me is like, make them eight minutes so you can get a mid roll.
But if it's stretching content to get there and it's not helpful, then don't. I think audience trust is more important than the extra dollar from YouTube.
Yeah, as long as if that's the case, then I think that's a reasonable spot to be in.
Definitely seen plenty of longer form content doing well. I also see people who post average eight to twelve minute videos. And they post one that's 30 to 40 minutes, whether it's a compilation or whatever. And they think, oh, cool, this is doing way better because it has more overall watch time hours. And there's a lot more evergreen potential there. And then they double down on it and then that becomes the norm. And then they have an issue going back down to the shorter videos.
So there's a balance to be had. But where you're at with that link, that seems solid for what you're serving your audience with, and they're getting solid information out of it.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, just for me as a creator, it's pretty easy for me to say, all right, I want to do a video about sales, call scripting, and how to close deals, right? I can talk for eight minutes on that. Really easy to talk on that for 20 minutes is like, fuck, I got to get an outline and should I have a teleprompter and all this shit?
It's an exponential jump for me from like five to ten minutes to 20 minutes or an hour, heaven forbid, is like, no, forget about it. I need so much more support past about ten minutes that it's just a non starter.
An interview. You and I are chatting, like, we can go for an hour, that's fine. But, yeah, if it's just me as a creator, like, to stare at this cannon for ten minutes is just fucking exhausting. And I do it first thing in the morning and then I'm done for the whole day. Like, if I talk for ten minutes, I'm literally just gassed and I go take the dog for a walk and I go out to lunch and stuff like this, and maybe I can do some stuff in the afternoon, but it's exhausting, man. Yeah, cool. Okay. Other question is shorts.
The way I approach shorts is it's not even in the funnel. It's like above the funnel, right? It's just like, can we have eyeballs on my shit so that people know who I am so that when they see my other stuff, maybe they'll engage with it.
Is that a fair way to approach it?
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's fair.
Shorts is very much.
I just look at it as a wholly different audience.
YouTube is attempting to build bridges and bring people over to long form, but they're swimming against the current because that's not just connecting the audience that's interested this with the audience that's interested in the long form too. It's much more audience viewing preferences, and there's not really a way to enforce that.
The only word of caution I have for people doing shorts is just make sure it's relevant to your content so that people still, if they find you from some random challenge on YouTube, shorts or TikTok or not really, you might get more viewership potentially, but they're not going to convert if they do ever come across your stuff or if they watch any of your other short stuff. So just make it relevant, make it as optimized as possible.
I think if there is a place to choose more broad reaching topics, shorts would be the place to do it. It's also good testing grounds. I look at it as testing grounds of, like, I wonder if this title or this topic is interesting and make a 62nd version of it. Or make a bunch of 62nd versions of all the popular questions and see which ones rise to the top. And it's also a good way to do some audience research and some testing there, too. Not one to one because of short form versus long form, but still get some interesting insights from it.
[00:35:06] Speaker A: I like that I view Twitter as a similar kind of testing ground. Like, I'll fire off something on Twitter and if it really resonates, then, ooh, this is something maybe I should talk about or write a blog post about or a newsletter or something like that. So I like that kind of all within YouTube is, hey, this could be a testing ground for how I approach this problem or how I answer this question or something. If it resonates, cool, I'll go make my seven minute or eight minute version of cool. Cool. I'll tell you, the shorts are just like we were talking about with LinkedIn or Twitter. Super enticing because I get big numbers. I'll get a thousand views on some shorts sometimes, which is like way more than anything else I do, and then zero of it converts to the long form stuff. Like the crossover there is almost zero. And I talk about my kids a lot with respect to YouTube because they watch it all the time. And they're a perfect example of what you're talking about, where my daughter only watches shorts and my son only watches long form stuff. Right. He watches the Minecraft guys and stuff, but he never watches the shorts. And that's exactly, it's like viewer intent, right? Like he wants to watch the 100 day Minecraft challenge stuff, and that just has to be 30 minutes. And my daughter wants to watch makeup tutorials or fitness stuff or whatever. And those are all shorts. It's crazy. They never cross over between. It's crazy.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: Yeah. That's wild to hear. I'm glad to hear that the hypothesis is true.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: So I want to go back to strategy because, like, the beautiful thing about having a podcast is like, this is my problem. And so let's solve Craig's problems on the podcast. But I know that it's the same for a lot of people. If you haven't invested the tens of thousands of dollars in a consultant to help you figure this shit out. I think a lot of us have this analysis by or paralysis by analysis. And just like, fuck, I'm just not going to do anything because I'm afraid of doing the wrong thing for, say, a b to b SaaS business that knows that YouTube is important. What are the three things that they should after they leave this episode go do?
[00:37:12] Speaker B: Oh, man, only three? Okay.
No, I'm joking. I'm joking.
[00:37:18] Speaker A: What are the few things that they should do? What I want is someone who's listening to this says, man, Trent knows what he's talking about. I need to do some stuff, maybe before I start working with him or whatever, but I need to have something to show for myself so I don't feel bad about my YouTube efforts. How does somebody get started?
[00:37:36] Speaker B: The first thing that I would do is more of an internal exercise of really defining your audience and who you want to serve and who those people are.
So I guess an umbrella point for the first is just set your goals, set your expectations, set what you want from YouTube. All of the things that should be foundational before launching the channel in an ideal scenario. Obviously I give advice regardless of reality, so please apply it to. Please apply a healthy dose of reality to what I say. Getting all of those things in line first and really knowing who you're serving.
Next step is then finding other channels who are currently serving that audience.
Looking at competitors, looking at just doing the keyword research and finding all these things. The biggest thing you could do, aside from knowing your audience, is knowing which topics. Like the highest leverage thing you could do in terms of viewership for YouTube videos is spending double the amount of time selecting topics, selecting the videos, and selecting how you're going to like which ideas you're actually going to bring to life.
Really spend more time in the pre production phase and picking the right ones, picking ones that you think will hit, and then also doubling the amount of time you spend on packaging those. Like, one of the biggest ways I help a lot of my clients. Most of them have really solid content. They'll have 50% to 60% retention on a lot of these things, and they're doing decently well. But their videos aren't going anywhere. And a lot of that comes down to their packaging. How are they titling this? What kind of thumbnails are they putting together for this? That was a big part of my role whenever I was at CBNR, and it's a lot of what I do now for my current clients is how do I present this in a way that is not robotic and is still very interesting to humans. I think something I talk about, you just had the episode with Jake Thomas, I think about, he and I have discussed plenty of times, too many people get stuck on keyword, stuffing their titles as opposed to making them interesting for human consumption and having a couple of keywords mixed in.
And so I think if there were three things, one, know your audience, know your channel, know your goals. Two, really solidify your topic selection process, spend more time there. And then three, package it in a way that it's interesting to humans because you can look at retention, you can optimize every single piece of analytic data that you have. But if you don't have those three pieces, no one's even going to get to the video to give you any data. And so those are the biggest three leverage points that I would say that exist for the platform.
Honestly, they're the most often overlooked as well because people are just like, oh, we just need to publish. And it's like, what? Wait a second, you do? Yes. If you don't publish, none of this happens. You're correct. But once you're in that flow, really evaluating the topics and how you're presenting them, and then obviously the next step is how you deliver in them. And scripting, I'm sure is a to be determined video. Hopefully coming soon to this channel.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: George is coming after the new year.
[00:40:32] Speaker B: Perfect.
I think those would be the concrete next steps to take from this as well.
[00:40:40] Speaker A: Okay, so creator campfire, tell me what it is, how you help, folks. Give me the spiel.
[00:40:46] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure, man. So creator campfire is my business. Started out as the ogs will remember I had a job board before Patty launched YT jobs. He came along and did that because hiring in YouTube is incredibly difficult to find the right relevant talent. So I started out as a job board. I no longer do that because Patty blew it out of the water. And I told him, please. Thank you. I don't want to ever touch a job board again. You've saved me so much of a headache.
And so now it's much more focused on consulting, coaching, and also have a newsletter as well attached to it. So I help my clients across the board on YouTube. So anything in the YouTube sphere is something that I touch, whether it's helping out with shorts or titles and thumbnails, ideation, selecting topics, creative, overall channel strategy, retention, analysis, you name it. So basically, full service YouTube consulting and coaching. And then I have a newsletter that I send infrequently. So if you want to join and not get spammed. I am your guy. And also post on Twitter and LinkedIn occasionally as well. But yeah, that's my life.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: Awesome, dude. That's exactly what I needed to hear. And I think what a lot of folks need to hear, those three things are massive. So, Trent, man, this is amazing. Thank you very much.
Creatorcampfire co for folks who want to kind of check out what you do and on Twitter, you are at Trentair. H me I-R-E.
[00:42:14] Speaker B: Yes, sir, everywhere.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: Cool, buddy.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: I appreciate your time. Thank you very much.
Hope you enjoy this conversation with Trent Hare. For show notes and any resources, go to roguestaups.com. Thanks so much. If you're enjoying, please, like, subscribe. Smash the bell and we'll see you next time.
