We get into YouTube for business online video marketing for course creators and membership site entrepreneurs with Matt Medeiros from the Matt Report and Pagely in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Matt share a lot of tips for building out your content with video marketing strategies.
Matt has been very interested in video and radio for much of his life, and he had been doing videography work before everyone had an iPhone and was able to record videos and take pictures everywhere. The editing process was long and arduous, but he predicted video would be the new big form of media.
Video streaming capabilities are more accessible than ever to the regular person, and many people are engaging with that form of media. Chris and Matt talk about how effective video is and how it will only continue to become more relevant to online marketing and sales with the opportunities it provides to build connections with customers. Consumers buy things from people they know, like, and trust, and being in front of the camera is a great way to let people get to know your personality and build trust with them.
The principles of AIDA can help you out a lot with creating online content: Attention, Interest, Decision, and Action. These are things you will want to be mindful of when you are selling using digital media. A big part of engaging your audience will be finding content you can comfortably produce with good cadence.
Thinking locally can also help you to build up a following for an online course. A course for stay-at-home moms might not sell as well as a course for stay-at-home moms in New York City. By specifying the location and cutting down your possible customer base, you gather more attention from a local group of people.
Investing the time and money to make a high quality video is worth it. Getting a fairly high-quality microphone and camera setup will make your videos much more pleasant and tolerable for your listeners. Chris shares how doing research on your niche and taking the time to write high quality content that appeals to them will vastly help your ratings as well.
To learn about Matt Medeiros head to MattReport.com and YouTube.com/TheMattReport where he posts videos on business and tips for video creation online. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett. I have a special guest, Matt Medeiros, from the Matt Report and Pagely. Welcome back on the show, Matt.
Matt: Chris, thanks for having me back. I’m excited to be here. It’s great to see your new set, your new amazing, remote, but not remote office that you have.
Chris: Awesome. It’s good to be back with you. Ever since I came across you, I could just tell there was this overlap in sales, marketing, video, work press, podcasting. There’s just all these similarities. It was great to connect with you online, and then ultimately run into you at conferences and things like that. I wanted to geek out today for the course creators and the membership site builders out there that are making content, thinking about marketing, trying to get their message out in a bigger way.
I wanted to really zero in on the YouTube economy. For me, video marketing, if you want to call it that, has always been my weapon of choice because I just enjoy making it. Even before I had a business, I used to do a lot of mountaineering and expeditions, climbing and stuff like that. I was that annoying guy that was always dragging the camera up the side of the cliff face and pointing the camera at my friends. Back before it was easy and everybody had a camera on their phone and all that, I used to make little documentary videos and all this stuff. I’ve always been really into video. It’s translated really well to marketing and online content. What’s your history with video?
Matt: It’s funny. I was actually thinking about this the other day. I remember in, I think it was middle school … I think it was middle school. I think it was sixth grade or seventh grade science. We had to come up with something. I remember always being fascinated about radios. My dad, I guess, when he was younger was also fascinated with radios and transistor radios back then, because those were things that were a thing back when he was young. I remember growing up and he had this small, little transistor radio. He was always an army kind of guy, military, army … He wasn’t in the service, but he always collected things. He duck hunted and stuff like that. Sort of an outdoors kind of guy. It was a cool little radio, and I remember being fascinated with it. When I was a kid, I would just bring it everywhere I went. I would listen to it.
I remember that science class and we had to come up with something. My uncle was also into radio. He showed me how to make a handmade AM radio, which you can do with a roll of, I think I used the cardboard roll of the toilet paper with some copper wire strung around it. You can solder on some headphones and you can listen to AM radio. You can tune it by dragging … I don’t remember the specifics of it. I’ve always been fascinated by sort of, I guess, radio and audio. I guess maybe that’s my affinity for podcasting, why I like it. Plus, I have an opinion. I like to share it, whether people listen to it or not. I guess the podcasting helps.
The video side of it … I remember when I started my agency about a decade ago, we were … This is when I was looking at YouTube, like, “Wow, this is the next big thing.” I remember sitting down with a bunch of people years and years ago. They were like, “What do you think is the next big thing?” They were sort of a competitor in my local market. I was like, “I think streaming TV is going to be huge.” This is before Netflix. This is just on the dawn of YouTube. Vimeo was just coming out. They were like, “Yeah, yeah,” like, “We think it’s going to be,” some crazy thing, like, “The cloud.” They were just like, “It’s the cloud, is the next big …” I was like, “Oh, that’s great.” Now I look back and it and I’m like, “Damn, I was right.”
I remember starting video at the studio, doing YouTube, five, six years ago. Just like you said, iPhones just coming out, creating audio and video, or at least video, was very difficult back then. We started as a photography studio and we did videography. We had a local videographer that worked with us. But cameras were massive, file size was massive. We’re talking 1080, 720, 1080 p video. Everything was just big and bulky. Editing it was hard and arduous. I’ve been doing it ever since. I continue to do it because it’s just a fascinating medium for me.
That was a long answer. I hope that answered everything.
Chris: Yeah, that’s good. One of the things I like to do personally when I’m trying to relax or if I’m tuning out at work or just having some personal time, I enjoy geeking out and just going into YouTube. It’s where I like to get my entertainment. There’s different kind of, like fitness or lifestyle or health or personalities that I follow that have nothing to do with my work life. I learn a lot. Sometimes I see certain videos that have a ton of view counts. They’re not necessarily selling something, but I’m always looking for the patterns, like why is this video so huge. Why are people so interested in this? Why does this one have 20,000 comments on it? How can I leverage that for business?
I want to turn it back to you. What niches can we learn from or, I guess, have you learned from on the internet?
Matt: Yeah, that’s a great-
Chris: Or on YouTube?
Matt: On YouTube, yeah. That’s a great question. Literally, yesterday I just published a video on my YouTube channel about this or about one of the verticals that I pay attention to. That’s video gaming. Sort of just recently, there’s a Twitch streamer by the screen name of Ninja … His first name is Tyler. Of course, now I’m forgetting his last name. He is playing this game called Fortnight. All of the kids and even adults and friends that I have are playing this game. It’s quite a phenomenon.
Chris: Just to jump in, he’s live streaming this, right?
Matt: He’s live streaming this stuff.
Chris: Which means it’s not just recording and uploading later. He’s just live streaming him playing the video game?
Matt: Him playing the video game. For those that miss the headlines yesterday, whenever people listen to this, he’s doing $500,000 a month is sponsored revenue and ads that’s serving up on the Twitch platform and on the YouTube platform. He just recently, the reason why he got into these headlines and he was on CNBC, was because he had Drake, the rapper or hiphop artist, whatever you want to label him as, Drake actually played with him, played this game with him and streamed with him. It brought hundreds of thousands of live views to his channel. It’s just a fascinating entertainment industry now, because it is difficult.
The funny thing was is watching these folks on the CNBC Squawk Alley show being like, “You’re making 500 grand a month playing video games?” They just can’t figure that part out. To the laymen, people are like, “Wow, all I have to do is play video games and I can make money?” Yes, you can. Just like everything else. You can make websites and make money. You can hit a baseball and make money. You can cook food and make money. You just have to be awesome at it. Streaming takes it to a whole other level, because in these competitive games you have to be good. You can’t be terrible. Nobody is going to watch … Nobody is watching a guy go up to bat and strike out all the time or a girl hit a tennis ball and hit it into the net all the time. People want to see awesome athletes or awesome performers. You have to be really good at the game, and then you have to engage your audience at the same time.
It is multiple levels of talent to be able to play this game, win, and engage an audience, watch a chat screen, and do that five times a day. I don’t know about you, Chris, but when I create videos, and I watch your live streams whenever I can, if you go for a long live stream, just yourself talking to a camera, I’m drained by the end of it. I’m like, “Wow.” These guys will stream, and girls, will stream eight hours a day, five days a week. It is not an easy task. Again, long way of answering your question. Video gaming is something that I’m super interested in because I think it’s a whole different level of talent and certainly the start of an industry, esports, all of that stuff. This is just the infancy of where this market is going.
Chris: That’s awesome. There’s a lot I want to unpack in there. One thing is, just from a human perspective, before live streaming there was a concept called life streaming. That’s what we do on Facebook, on Instagram. Even at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned, “I’ve been sharing on different places pictures in my home office I’ve been building out in the yard.” I am life streaming my life through digital media. That’s a part of this. People attach to different people they resonate with. We’re now in a age where we share our life publicly. There’s just this whole life streaming thing.
There’s a couple concepts around that. One is who is the audience for that? Maybe somebody just likes it. Maybe somebody is looking for entertainment. There’s also this whole voyeurism thing. In the online space and online communities or blogs, there’s something called a lurker. This is somebody who observes, but doesn’t interact. Two, three, four years later, they’re like, “Hey, I’ve been following you since 2007. This is my first comment,” and blah, blah, blah. There’s something going on in human nature here. I find that very interesting.
Do you have any comments on life streaming, in general?
Matt: Yeah. I think it’s something that humans have been doing forever. I guess generally in the form of the, I guess, the more traditional liberal arts, painting, or I guess the real arts. Not just liberal arts. The real arts. Painting, poetry, writing stories, that kind of thing. I think a lot of people have expressed themselves that way in centuries, thousands of years of mankind. Now, with the tools that we have in front of us, iPhones and iPads and Facebook, it’s just a new form of expression. That’s the way I see it. I also see it as something that, if you’re a business owner specifically, my prediction is a little scary, is this is the last thing we have left. I don’t know what else we have besides ourselves to build a brand for your company.
I really see it as our last defense against … We, you and I talked about this on another podcast a little while ago. I see this as our last defense against big corporation, like an Amazon, who comes in and says, “Hey, that’s great. Chris makes blankets. He sells those blankets for 100 bucks. We’re going to sell them for ten bucks. Forget Chris and his $100 blanket. We’ll get you a blanket for ten bucks.” You don’t really care, because you’re like, “I’m going to save $90.” Building the brand of yourself and being able to tell that story, I think, is the last defense we have against huge corporations and big marketing budgets.
Chris: And automation.
Matt: And automation, correct. Yep.
Chris: Why do humans buy and how can video help with that? Just to contextualize that, let’s assume we’re talking to a WordPress product company or somebody making an online course or membership site.
Matt: The only reason why I invest, there’s two reasons really, I invest in YouTube. One is just because I do find it enjoyable. I like to blog, but I’m not good at sitting down and punching out 1,000-1,500 words consecutively. Turning on a camera, editing a little bit, and uploading is super easy for me. There’s one side of it. Two, you’re making a deeper connection with your customer. I talked about this in another video that I did. This is the electronic handshake.
I grew up in the car industry and in the sales process and just the initial pre-sales process of meeting a customer, finding out if you have the right car for them and are they the right customer for you. It was interactive. Obviously, they were on the car lot. As you walk up to a customer, you see their body language, whether or not they want to talk to you, how are they dressed, where are their kids, what are the family, what are they drive in on. Everything is a very interactive touch and smell kind of experience. They hand shake. How do they hand shake? How do they talk to you?
We don’t have that in the digital space without video. Especially for freelancers out there who are building websites, a lot of people, “How do I get more customers?” You’ve got to go out and meet people. If you can’t get out and meet people or if you want to augment that experience, you still have to get out of your seat and go talk to customers and find customers. If you want to augment that experience, launch some video, do some YouTube. That’s the way I see it supplementing these businesses, telling the story and connecting with people.
Live stream is the second component to that. A lot of people just might think of it as the same, but the live streaming component is the chance for you to interact with your audience in the moment on a given time. Whereas you’re-
Chris: At scale, too.
Matt: At scale. Right. At massive scale. Whereas the one-off uploads that you do to YouTube or your Instagram stories or just regular video uploads is you able to present this particular story, this case of yours, and here you go, watch this and consume it.
Chris: That’s really good. There’s a classic sales statement when someone is trying to figure out their marketing. You hear people say, “People buy from people they know, like, and trust.” How can we as business owners convey that through video?
Matt: First and foremost, don’t try to copy somebody else that you’re aspiring to be or a competitor. I say that because I think a lot of us, myself included, we all start by saying, “Look what she’s doing over there.”
Chris: I can do that.
Matt: I’m going to do that exact thing. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve told this story countless times. When I started my podcast, I copied Andrew Warner of [Mixergy 00:15:17] Podcast to a T. The intro, the little quirky music, and the way I did ad reads. I did it for like six episodes. It was so difficult because I was trying to be him or at least have this framework of him. I was like, “Ah, I can’t do this anymore. It’s just way too much work.”
In order to win, you have to be yourself, which a lot of people will start off for the first time with a lot of faults. I think that that is okay. That’s actually the organic way to build a true audience. I look at internet marketers like Derek [Halpern 00:15:58], who I’ve followed for quite some time. He was one of the first guys I saw really invest in high quality HD video when no one else really was, or at least the people I was following. They weren’t really doing. This is maybe five or six years ago. It was great stuff, but it was produced. He was teaching a particular lesson and he was giving you information. You were watching because you wanted to learn what he has set out to teach you. It was just great quality video, and back then it was hard to come by.
Now, here we are in 2018, and he’s sort of revitalized his video by doing what you said, life streaming and trying to be more of that Gary Vaynerchuk thing, where it’s just follow you around and here’s what I do at work. It was a little choppy. It was a little rough for me. Because I felt like he was trying to force this particular flavor of video onto us. He got a lot better at it. I think what he realized was, yeah, I’m trying to be like Gary Vaynerchuk thing that I know my audience likes. He sort of dialed that back, and it’s become much more sort of talking head stories and lessons, which I appreciate. I didn’t really appreciate the following him around kind of thing because it felt really staged, the stuff that he was doing.
Again, long way of saying don’t copy people, because it shows. Be able to tell your story and stay true to it is the second piece of that, is how I would frame that.
Chris: That’s how you get the knowing, the liking, and the trusting.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: I want to talk a little bit about big view numbers. One of the classic strategies I recommend for course creators specifically is to take your best two lessons and take that video content, upload it to YouTube, and you’re giving out a free sample. I have videos in the organic gardening niche that have been up for a couple years with 30-40,000 views on them, but they’re inside of my paid course. They’re a great lead generator for my online course website. It’s a very tight niche within organic gardening, within something called permaculture. The video was not, that particular course involved us filming somebody on the stage who is a best-selling author in that industry. We were basically bringing this industry online. We got big view numbers for that.
What are you seeing that gets big view numbers?
Matt: It’s really easy. If people want to grow their YouTube audience fast, is they just have to create content that people are searching for. The challenge is finding what they’re searching for, what the competition is, how are you competing with other creators out there that are creating the same kind of content. I’ve been telling this story. I was just checking, while you were talking, I was checking my other YouTube channel, [Plug in Tut 00:18:58]. It’s at 5,400 followers right now. Not a huge number by any stretch of the imagination.
Chris: [inaudible 00:19:06] LMS only has, I think, 1,200 as of this recording. Just throwing that out there.
Matt: Right. The Matt Report only has about 1,300. The thing with that channel that I learned really fast was, one, I didn’t like making boring tutorial content. I like creating tutorial content, but I didn’t like doing it at a constant cadence. I was kind of like, “Ugh, another tutorial.” There’s other people that can sit there and do that better than I can.
What I did learn is, man, if you just search terms and you’re putting in key words that people are looking for, and you have at least an inkling of interest and you’re sort of entertaining and you actually have the right content, people are going to like it. I just quickly looked. The 2017, yeah, the 2017 theme, I did a tutorial video on that. It’s got 50,000 views on just that video alone. Again, these aren’t huge numbers, but we’re just talking WordPress here. The idea was I was creating content every week, tutorials, and I in six months got it to whatever, 2,000 subscribers. I haven’t touched it since. Almost a year, and it’s almost doubled. It well beyond doubled itself without me even touching it and uploading another video, in just a year.
That goes to tell you that that evergreen content, that SCO’d content, and that wasn’t my intent going into it, but that good titled content and creating good content is going to get people to subscribe and grow your channel. It’s one of those things where I look back. It’s like, man, if I had just kept it going, what would I be at now? Would I be at 50,000 subscribers if I kept going? Which is sort of a life lesson. Creating that titled content or well titled content and answering what people are searching for is a great way to grow your channel.
Chris: I think the human brain is sometimes hard at grasping big numbers, whether that’s how much money does a billionaire actually have or what’s the difference between a video that gets 500 versus 50,000 views. The content creator may just, their passion level for their videos may always be about the same, but then you hit a nerve and you see the numbers really go way up. Sometimes it’s hard to conceptualize the demand that’s out there for different things. Not all niches are created equal.
Matt: People, the humans are … The humans. Humans are just, we’re just so attached to big numbers. As a creator, you want to see numbers go up because it’s a indication of, I guess, success and growth. You want to see numbers. I posted a video the other day, and it got one thumbs down as soon as I posted it. I’m like, “God. This drives me crazy.” But at the same time, I just have to let that stuff go. You have to look at your markets, like you said. This is WordPress, or at least for me anyway. A lot of the content that I’ve talked about for five years or six years now. It’s only so big. There’s only so many people that care about WordPress. There’s only so many people that care about WordPress on YouTube. What’s that number? 100,000 maybe. You have to start branching out to more broader entrepreneurship and business if you want to go beyond that.
You look at somebody like Peter [McKinnon 00:22:37], who’s this creative individual who has gone from zero to a million in a year, or over a million now. This is photography, this is creative, and this is entertaining. He puts out amazing work. Then he does some stuff with Casey Neistat, so there’s some connection and networking there. There’s a whole big bag of things that go together to make that success. The point is it’s a whole different space. If you want to be just a vlogger of mountains and skiing like he’s doing, you can do it, but you have to do it like him in order to get the tremendous amount of numbers. It’s a competitive space when you start to break out of those little niches.
Chris: That’s awesome. I want to give people … If you’re interested in getting on YouTube and you’re like, “Where the heck do I start,” I want to give people an idea that I used when I very first started my WordPress web design agency called Badgett Web Design at the time and how I got my first clients from YouTube. That was I created 20 videos. I went fly fishing down by a river in Montana. I brought my laptop and a little table. I prepared before I went to have basically ten questions that people ask me, as somebody who builds websites, and then ten questions that people should be asking me but they’re not. Those became the prompts for me 20 videos. When people type into Google or YouTube, it was the phrases that would come up in the search results. That’s a selling skill that comes from empathy and putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. What are they asking. Not what is your expertise or what do you offer, but literally what are they asking.
People type the most private, obscure things into Google or a YouTube search, and they could end up with you. They may not know what the solution is. They just know what their problem is. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Matt: Yeah. One of the things that was going through my head is I was thinking about a lot of … Just because I was at my coworking space the other day, and there was a local web designer meetup happening. There’s a lot of people that, like you did, could benefit greatly if they created a dozen frame worked videos of here’s what it’s like to do work with me, here’s the services I provide. At the same time, what I see … This might not answer your question 100%, but we’ll find out. What I see in the web developer and web design space are people are so opinionated with how they do this stuff that they don’t listen to their customer and that they don’t speak the way that their customer is going to connect with them.
There will be a point where, hands down, you shouldn’t be doing video yet. You have to be able to know that this isn’t just a conversation, if you’re recording yourself, this isn’t just a conversation that you’re having with this camera in this room. This is a conversation that you’re having with hundreds of thousands of people in front of you. That’s the way that you have to approach it, and that you’re selling yourself in that video.
A lot of people will just be fact oriented. This is the way I do websites. It’s going to be mobile responsive. It’s going to be-
Chris: This is my process.
Matt: Yeah, this is my process. You have to understand this is going to be that pre-sales connection and it’s less about that and way more about the person that’s watching the video and how they’re going to engage with you in this person. Even-
Chris: Just an example. I just want to give an example. The business owner is going to type in, “How do I get more leads through my website?”
Matt: Right, yep. That video is going to be, number one, how you’re going to solve that, but not in the technical details. It’s going to be how are you going to educate them, what is a lead to them, what is a good conversion rate to them. More importantly, that person who typed in, “How am I going to convert more leads,” are they hiring me for the right vertical? My friend and your friend, John Locke, he sort of focused in on SCO for manufacturers. If a restaurant came to him and said, “How do I book more tables,” yeah, he knows how to do that, but he doesn’t serve that specific client or that set of clients. That’s an opportunity for you as the creator and agency owner to say, “I’m going to create content that qualifies the right customer,” so none of our times are wasted with an engagement like this. The expectations are set right out of the gate.
Yeah, connecting with a customer, videos, sets of videos. These are all great things that people should do. I don’t see enough of it. Myself included. Myself included. I create so many videos and audio podcasts. It’s on my to-do list. This exact thing is on my to-do list, to have a frame of videos that say, when you come to the Matt Report, this is what you should expect. It’s not easy, because there’s this whole content wheel that’s being created all the time. You never find the time to actually get that … The painter’s house is never painted, or however that phrase goes.
Chris: Exactly. Also, as experts or content creators, teachers, membership site people, sometimes we get so close to our expertise … It’s called the curse of knowledge, expertitis. It has a lot of names … that we forget about those original pain points, which makes it hard to create content. To bring it back to digitalizing, or augmenting yourself, I think, were your words, part of the sales process, the classic framework is AIDA. Awareness. What’s I? Interest. Decision and action. Your YouTube videos can really help at the beginning of that. You might need to personally help close and help them take action, but just for people to become aware of your offer, your service, your products, your learning program, YouTube can really help with that and generate interest. This is the top of the sales funnel, especially from an inbound marketing perspective.
We talked a little bit about big numbers, but I want to talk about small numbers. If your business, like John Locke’s SCO for manufacturing, is well niched, it’s not necessarily big numbers that you need to care about. You’re just trying to get qualified leads. If you have a video that gets 120 views in a really tight niche, awesome.
What would you say about that?
Matt: A lot of this stuff, and I’m going to pull in some of the points that you just made, I think a lot of the … You have to define your own success. Just like you said, you might not need huge numbers. You don’t need Casey Neistat numbers to make your living doing whatever it is that you’re doing. What I’m not really good at is I’m not good at … Let me take a step back. I know a lot of creators, podcast and YouTubers who are just amazing at content plans, content calendars, buckets of content that they’re going to create and how they’re going to convert on that and which headline they’re going to use. They map it all out. I am terrible at that. What I am good at is I just like doing it. I know a lot-
Chris: Consistently.
Matt: Consistently. I know a lot of those people that do all of this sort of streamlined workflow, everything is to the T, but they hate it. They don’t hate it, but it doesn’t generally inspire them. They just do it because this is my marketing plan, I know I have to do this, I’m going to do, so I do it.
Chris: I want to jump in on that point. I know people who are like, “Oh, I’ve got to do another live again, because that’s what I’m supposed to do as a marketer.” When I go live, I’m like, “I can’t wait to share what I have on my board.”
Matt: Yeah, yeah. I think that balance is going to help you determine what that success is. Because it is a lot of work. A lot of people don’t realize that. You can get burned out really fast. You’ll never be able to see the fruits of your labor come to fruition, because you’ve given up too soon. This is the long game, at least I think so, for this stuff. It is long game thing. You’re planting these seeds now for the future growth. That balance is super, super key in all of this. That’s where you find, hey, I might not be getting those big numbers, but it’s certainly a connection that is made.
I was thinking about this, too, the other day. Would I ever stop doing this stuff? What is it going to look like in ten years, from small to big? Recently, I launched, or I am launching … I’ve already made the announcements, created the Facebook page and everything, for a local podcast in my community. It’s called We are Here. It’s about south coast Mass entrepreneurship. I’ve been sitting on this idea for two years maybe. It just hasn’t been the right time, but it’s becoming the right time. Entrepreneurship and startups and the sort of ethos in my area is really kicking into high gear now. There’s a lot of startups coming into this area. It’s just talked about more. The tools of Facebook and live streaming are just getting better. People are becoming more conditioned to, “Entrepreneurship stories, That’s really cool. But that’s Shark Tank. I don’t know anything about that. I want to know about something in our local area.” I’m striking when I hope the iron is hot. It’s been an amazing reception from the local community. People are sharing it. People are excited about it, much more so than the big, broader WordPress stuff that I do.
That has been really cool to see. I think what we’re going to see, if it isn’t already out there, the trend isn’t already out there, is more media creation from small indie creators like you and I, but for the local scene, and people being really engaged. You start to look at the numbers and say, “Hm, it’s really difficult for me to grow a YouTube channel of general interest and general internet marketing to 50,000 viewers or 50,000 subscribers. I bet if I started in my local community right now, I might get 50,000 listeners in my local community,” depending on how big your area is. I sit in between two cities. Providence is only 30 minutes away. There is a strong chance that 50,000 subscribers to a YouTube channel or a podcast for a local niche might not be unheard of. Right?
You start to balance, boy, competing in the big internet cloud or doing something local, you might actually be able to build bigger numbers locally and then funnel them up to something more general in the future. Those are just my threads of thought on all that stuff.
Chris: That’s a great insight, kind of that it’s still early days in some ways. It’s easy if you’re in technology to get wrapped up in, “Oh, it’s all been done before,” whatever, but things … WordPress is an example. I talk to people all the time, have no idea what that is. I know a lot of people who don’t have a single video on YouTube. It’s still early days.
Matt: Here’s the gut check. I live a lot of this stuff just by my gut instinct, for better or for worse. When I’m at local events, “What do you do?” I have the number one podcast on WordPress entrepreneurship. They’re like, “Okay.” They’re like, “I don’t get it.” But I start telling people, “I’m creating a podcast for south coast entrepreneurship,” and people are like, “Oh, that’s great. Does anybody-”
Chris: That’s great.
Matt: Yeah, yeah. People are like, “Does anybody else do that?” I’m like, “Not that I know of.” They’re, “Wow, that’s amazing.” You start to hear it. I’m watching people share it and I’m watching people tag other people in the comments. I already have half a dozen to a dozen … I just launched this last week. I have a half a dozen to a dozen people who have already sent me a contact form, like I want to be on your show. People have known that I do podcast before, but they’re already like, “We’ve got the perfect person that should be on this show.” People are ready to give me content in this space because it’s unserved. It’s kind of cool to see this happen.
Chris: That’s a really great insight. It’s like another layer down on [niching 00:35:45]. Like you said, do you want to go big and go global internet, cloud niche or make it local. For example, you could make a course or a membership site for stay-at-home moms. Or if you lived in New York City, it could be stay-at-home moms New York City, and now that’s a much more targeted audience. You get to exploit the local factor.
Matt: It’s a way of validation. A lot of people in my local market, when I told them that I had a podcast and I could show them whatever, 100 plus five-star reviews on my iTunes channel and just a whole bunch of videos on YouTube, they didn’t even care about the subscriber rates. They were just like, “Oh, you know this stuff. You’ve got all the stuff on it. Obviously you know this stuff. You’re the guy.” Everybody refers to me as the WordPress guy around my local market. It’s only because they just know I talk about WordPress all the time. They probably haven’t seen 99.9% of the websites or products that I’ve put out there. It’s just validated because I do this thing.
Chris: Yeah, persistence. That is awesome. I wanted to get real tactical for you, the listener, and just share some things. You thing, you mentioned you posted a video the other day and you got a thumbs down. One of the things I’ve observed when studying YouTube is it’s one of the most negative places in the comments. Fortunately, on my channel, for Lifter LMS, it’s generally relatively positive, but I know a lot of people experience a lot of negativity on YouTube. I just want to tell people that you go there, it seems to have the highest population of trolls of any social media area. I don’t know. Do you have comment on negativity or keyboard warriors on YouTube?
Matt: Man, it’s funny. We go back to this evergreen content that we were talking about before. This is where YouTube does a really good job of it, of surfacing searches, but at the same time it does a terrible job at it. Evergreen, and at least in software … If you’re doing a tutorial on how to build a shed office, that’ll probably last fricking 50 years. Hundreds of years. You’re following the same principles that people have been building houses forever. But software, it changes every month. Right? Mostly. I get comments on reviews … They weren’t even really reviews. They weren’t even fully tutorials. This is half baked stuff that we did way back in the day at the studio. One of the first ones we did was on WooCommerce and Gravity Forms, were huge back then. I still get comments on this five year-old content. People are like, “This is stupid. This doesn’t even exist anymore.” Why are you watching this? The date on it says five years ago.
Chris: Google rewards, what do they call it, seasoned content. That doesn’t work for software tutorials.
Matt: It doesn’t work for software. As a creator, you’re like, “Well, maybe I just delete this content,” but then you look at the content and you realize that it brings people into the channel at the same time. Yeah, again, I grew up in the car industry, so I know what it’s like to get rejected literally to your face. It’s something of sort of just a thick skin that I’ve been able to build up over time. I think a lot of people just have to be cognizant of that.
There are times, man, I will look through other YouTubers, people that are putting stuff out, especially in the tech review world … Like if I want to learn about, I don’t know, I don’t know, a new phone that’s coming out or a new piece of camera equipment or something like that, there are honest people that are just trying hard to build something, and people are just vile. Sometimes, I want to be the keyboard warrior back. You click on their channel and they’ve got no videos. It’s like how about you put up a video? Let’s see your face on YouTube. It boils my blood a little bit, but it’s something that you do have to just hopefully ignore. It can be pretty hurtful and hateful for some people I’d imagine. If you can’t deal with that stuff, don’t look at comments. Or if it’s really bad for your health, then I would say shy away from YouTube if you can.
I don’t know even know off the top of my head if you can shut comments off on …
Chris: I think you can.
Matt: Yeah, I think you can. I would just maybe do that if you wanted to. You might suffer on some community engagement or some ranking stuff, but if it’s something that you really can’t take then maybe try that route.
Chris: That’s cool. Let’s do, just to close it out, I’m going to put you on the spot. I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to go first to give you time to think about it. If you the listener out there wants to get into video, Matt and I are going to give you some tips on how to get the most out of YouTube for your online course, your membership site, or just your entrepreneurial effort as a business owner, not just an entertainer. I’m going to do five and then hand it over to Matt.
The first thing I would say is to spend a little bit of time thinking about the title, which we’ve kind of talked about. AIDA, awareness, interest, decision, action. People are aware of the problems they’re having. They may not necessarily know the solution. Just look at that. When you title something, don’t title it as if they already know what the solution is. You’re more likely to get a lot more views on that video. Use keywords. Use their language, not your language, to title it. That’s my first.
My second is take at least two minutes to actually write a description, put a link to your website in the first couple of lines, or to a, even better, a specific page on your website or blog. Or another video in your channel. Always have a call to action in there. Even that link shows up in the search result. It’s just great for traffic. That’s my total secret weapon on getting website traffic from video marketing.
The other tip I’m going to give you is just to start. You can see Matt and I have decent microphones and decent backgrounds or whatever. I cringe when I go look at my old videos. You’ve just got to start. Especially if you’re camera shy or whatever, just get it done. I don’t even go back to look at some videos if I … Whatever. Just get it done. Just get that fly wheel spinning. Maybe that snowball will get quite big one day. Everybody starts somewhere. Every time I listen to a podcast or a YouTube channel, sometimes for fun I go back and look at the early stuff, mine included, and I’m like, “Dang, they’ve gotten so much better over time.”
The other one is just to research YouTube. Research your niche. Research other niches. When you’re researching a niche, look at things like Amazon and look at the comments, look at pain points in your niche. There’s another good … If you see a trend in popular books in your niche, in the comments you can find pain points and stuff like that. Look at the videos that have bigger views in your niche and see if you can figure out why. Just do some research. Don’t just assume that you know what’s best. That’s my fourth tip.
My fifth tip is use a … Like we’re doing right now, we’re using, I think, laptops or a video camera that is fixed in place. Use a tripod if you’re using a regular camera. If you are going to be on the move … You know people how they do those videos in the car, but they’ve got their phone steady up on the glass. There’s something called a steady cam or selfie stick that can just give a little bit of control. Nothing kills a video more than the handheld iPhone shaky, it makes certain people dizzy and want to throw up shots. You can still do that. I recommend doing that if you have something really important to say or you’re capturing a global event or something like that. That’s my one tech tip is stabilize the camera.
Over to you, Matt.
Matt: I’m going to hit that, I’m going to bonus that one just a little bit more. Right now, I’m just using my webcam, but I also have my webcam on a tripod because I talk a lot with my hands. You can probably hear this through my microphone. Normally, I have this off my desk. I hit the table. I’m hitting the table, and the camera is not shaking. I used to do it with my camera right on my monitor right here, and the whole monitor shakes. That’s shaking. That would drive me crazy. I’m sure it drives the audience crazy. Even a web cam, put it on a tripod if you can.
Tip number on, starting with the hardware, you don’t have to get lost in doing crazy camera investment, like I did and do. This is actually a cheap end of the spectrum. This is what I shoot most of my, or all of my videos on, for YouTube, is a Panasonic G7, for those of you watching. This is a super affordable, great quality, 4K camera. I don’t shoot in 4K anymore because the files are massive, but you don’t have to crazy like this. If you don’t want to spend a few thousand bucks, you can get something super affordable for under that. What really makes a difference is some decent sets of lights or use the natural light outside. Lighting is really critical in video. You might want to invest in that, versus investing in a camera. Good audio, second, or maybe even first in terms of what makes good video.
My second tip for YouTube channels is find something that you’re going to be able to rinse and repeat and do without having to think too hard, especially if you’re in the phase of I need to grow an audience and I don’t have the luxury of just having something on autopilot. Creating YouTube videos, again, is going to be something of a challenge, not just in time, but even simple editing and uploading to YouTube takes time. Then creating the thumbnails and doing the descriptions, like Chris said, all of that stuff takes a whole bunch of time. The most important piece of it is promoting it and getting people to view it. We didn’t even really talk about that too much today, but maybe that’ll be my tip number three. Tip number two: find something that you can comfortably do at a good cadence.
Tip number three: promote the heck out of it. It’s like everybody who is into daily blogging, it’s like, yeah, you can daily blog. That’s great for SCO and crawling and search engines and stuff like that. What about promoting it? If you’re promoting a daily post every single day, the most you’re going to promote is three, four times a day for that one blog post. Then you’ve got to do it again the next day. How about just create an awesome solid piece of content once a week and then promote bits of it out throughout the week and use something of a different promotional calendar that way. Promote the heck out of that.
Tip number four would be, I guess on that same line, is be confident about it. The worst thing that you could do is feel like you’re not putting out your best quality work. When you promote it, feel confident in this is a great piece of content that people should see. Don’t be forceful about it. Don’t go into Facebook groups and dropping it into every single Facebook group that you’re a part of. But if it’s a piece of content that fits one or two Facebook groups that you’re prominent in and you think that it serves value, then you go in and say, “Hey, look, I think this is a great piece, great information for this group. Here’s why. I’d love for you to watch it.” Promoting it and feeling confident about is, they go hand in hand for me.
Is that four? Number five.
Chris: One more for the people.
Matt: One more for the people. Number five, don’t listen to the haters. Right? This is going to take some time. We talked about the negativity on YouTube. Again, that local podcast that I put out, I asked people to go and leave me a review on iTunes for people who are excited. There’s one preview episode out there. I got one one-star review. I’m like, “Man. Listen, people, you have no idea who you’re up against here.” Don’t listen to the haters. Use it as something that’s going to fuel you to keep going. Again, I think a lot of you as you get into this, I think many people are going to say, “I know I’m good for YouTube. I know this is going to be my thing.” There are people who are like, “No way. I can’t put my face on camera.” I totally get it. The people who are on the fence right now which way they can go, you have to persevere. I think what’ll happen is you’ll find something that you really like to create on YouTube. You won’t worry about the numbers as much as you think you will once you find something that you like publishing.
Just a lot of confidence and reassurance as you move along.
Chris: Matt Medeiros, ladies and gentlemen. That was YouTube gold for you. Thank you so much, Matt, for coming on the show and sharing your insights and wisdom with us. We really appreciate it. How can a listener connect with you further?
Matt: The website is mattreport.com. Youtube.com/themattreport, you can check me out over there. I’m always experimenting. So far, I’m doing a video everyday this week. I have another video to post up here today. I usually do it once a week.
Chris: Awesome. For you the listener, turn this off and go make a YouTube video. Have a great day.
