SPEAKER_01: 0:57

Welcome to Embrace in Marketing Mistakes, the podcast that helps you grow your brand and ROI by learning from the failures of the world's top marketeers. I'm Chris Norton and my mission is to help you, the senior marketer, avoid wasted spend and build smarter strategies from day one. Today I'm joined by David Greiner, co-founder of David and Luana Co. He helps coaches and consultants use YouTube not for vanity metrics, but as a serious client acquisition channel. In this episode, David reveals the biggest mistakes marketers make on YouTube, why subscribers don't matter, and how to design a channel that reliably drives high-ticket leads. David will break down why chasing subscribers is a trap, how to use data to fix underperforming videos, and the automation tools that can cut time from 40 minutes to two. So, as always, sit back, relax, and let's hear how you can stop wasting time on YouTube and start making it work for your business and brand. Enjoy. David Grainer, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00: 2:03

Yeah, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 2:05

Yeah, great. I mean, I'm a bit excited to get you on the show to talk about all things YouTube because um, you know, Will and I have been on YouTube, although we don't do videos to camera and things like that. We've done a couple, but it's a little bit awkward. Um, and we're always looking for like advice on how to we've got I think we've got four and a half thousand subscribers to the YouTube channel, which is you know not bad to say we've never actually pushed it hard. Um, how did you get into YouTube as a tool for your clients? What what what prompted you to get into this and like break it all down?

SPEAKER_00: 2:36

Yeah, so I actually was everything by mistake, so it wasn't like one day I was like, hey, I want to help more people in YouTube with business. Um so it was more like a personal story. I started um yeah, experience a little bit with the entrepreneurship side. So I was like, hmm, I like kind of finances. So I started actually um doing like the short form stuff on Instagram, but I quickly noticed like there is something missing why it's not really working, like why is it not really kicking off? And then I started to say, hey, you know what? Let's try YouTube as well. I like I thought kind of it was like the natural step, you start with short, and then you kind of develop into the long form, and then I quickly noticed, like, ah yeah, cool. So on long form, you have actually you can build more trust with the people because like it's so hard to teach people about, especially about fighters. Like, hey, in 30 seconds, hey, here's how you do it with your money. And people say, Okay, uh whatever. And um, so I was started on YouTube. I fell in love with YouTube. It's like wow, YouTube is so cool, you had way more analytics and all these things, and I got really like I was soaked in everything like in a like as a sponge because I was just like, Yeah, as I said, like I like YouTube so much, and I could see this huge potential because you can see all these other people having so many views and the subscribers and all the success they had. And so I work on this uh on our finance channel, and um in the same time, me and my wife we decided to leave Germany and um start like our own life, our own entrepreneurial story, and we moved to Brazil with no plan. And um, a couple months later, she saw that her ex-boss, he's like uh he's a CEO of a digital marketing company which does millions in revenue. He had a podcast, like just a picture he posted, with like one of the biggest entrepreneurs in Brazil. They are like Steven Ballet level, and she's like, I kind of have the feeling that I should talk to him. Should I just talk to him? Because I feel like these people in Brazil they are not that well with podcasting, like in the international market. So, yeah, sure, reach out to him. So that's how kind of we fell into that, and it went so well, actually, that we got like with the first four videos, we got like 30,000 views. We broke the thousand subscriber um milestone to get like the the monetization going and all these things, and yeah, then we had uh so like two videos hit over 30,000 views. All the other videos we kind of touched on had all over a thousand views as well. And it's like, hmm, I think there is something into it. Though back then we yeah, a small mistake I had to learn is like we were focusing a lot on the view side, and um, yeah, obviously, this guy of this million revenue company, he's like, Um, okay, cool, you got me views, that's cool. But obviously, he wasn't exactly as excited as us. And um, so then I had to learn, okay, how can I make it more exciting for these people? And then I learned basically views don't pay the bills, and um, I mean, a little bit of brand awareness is cool, but at the end of the day, if you can't translate it to real revenue or like real results, then like yeah, it's just views, you know. Try to repay your employees with views, right?

SPEAKER_02: 5:43

So without um, I mean, what why don't you talk us through how you can actually monetize YouTube then? Because I think a lot of people will be listening to this thinking, surely YouTube isn't, you know, isn't isn't primarily a lead gen channel. You know, no, they will think about you know, perhaps using Meta or LinkedIn or something like that. So I suppose there's a two-part question. One, is it is it effective at lead gen, and and how do you use it as a lead generation channel?

SPEAKER_00: 6:10

So obviously, I'm super biased. For me, it's like one of the best lead gen channels out there. So the huge difference obviously is like like I'm not saying stop doing all the other stuff. Um, for example, is because like in five minutes I can write you now, especially because of AI, I can write you something, uh, a quick post on LinkedIn. That's cool. Uh for YouTube, we know it's like, okay, we need first, we need to have the idea, uh, so which is obviously helping our audience, not just something because I felt like then we need to work on the title, we need to have then the thumbnail, and those need to work together because it's like one of the most important things, so people can click. Um, because if they don't click, they don't watch. And then we need to work on the whole script with the like the first hook, um, because this is where we lose most of the people in the first 30 seconds. We can always see that in the graph. Like, that's why also YouTube is always saying, Ah, you have like 50% of the people still in your video after 30 seconds, and then yeah, the full video as well, and then you have the whole editing, so it's obviously taking longer. So that's why I understand that not everyone wants to jump on YouTube. So the huge difference though is um I like always to to use like the psychology behind it. And there's Robin Dunbar, a scientist, he says it takes around seven hours to build trust with a person. It doesn't matter if you're having now a call, or if people watching this this podcast as well, or if they're even reading a book, or if it's actually in person, like this still exists. Yeah, so that therefore, like to have like if you're thinking now about the typical shorts, they are really usually ranging for 30 seconds to 60 seconds. It would take you like more than 400 shorts to come to these seven hours. While for for the like it's be talking about a podcast, yeah, seven podcasts, and you have already the seven hour mark in. Now, the other thing is there's a little bit of a pet peeve. Like, I always write this in my LinkedIn post. I always say like link in the comments because LinkedIn doesn't want you to have better business results. LinkedIn suppresses usually the links uh if you post them in your post, while YouTube actually likes it if like they're actually helping you. They know what a huge support they can do for businesses. Now, for the lead gen wise, like if you're just talking about factual numbers, um if you take in one of our um sales coaches, um our clients, he's a sales coach. So he is we're not talking about ad sense, we're not talking about sponsorship, I'm talking you purely about lead gen because um, yeah, a thousand views get you what like ten dollars in ad sense. Like, this is peanuts for a business. It's a nice to have. Obviously, it's better to have ten dollars than to need ten dollars, but so he's getting um around ten thousand views long form. I'm not counting even the short form per month, and from there we are getting more than um yeah, we're getting more than 100 clicks on the landing page. So if we're talking now also about the trust, it's we get he's getting a 20 to 30 percent conversion rate on his landing page. And yeah, this is something I don't see with other platforms, and we're tracking everything obviously with UTM parameters and all this stuff. And another big thing is when we talk about shelf life, about different um formats or different platforms. So we know. Have you ever seen a real or LinkedIn post that is older than two, three years? No, not really. Have you ever watched a video which is older than like on YouTube, which is older than three, four years? Loads. Yeah, so as you can see, the shelf life for YouTube is so much longer. So in average Need Portella has a data, it says like ah it's around 17 days, and um, yeah, actually, the sales coach has a video which is like four years old, six years old, and they have like 200,000 views in it every day. Hundred more people are coming in, so it's like it's it's yeah. So that's why I think YouTube is for me the best platform.

SPEAKER_02: 10:10

So let's break down the actual content of a video then. So we know we can if we build trust, you know, we need the seven to eight hours of of kind of authoritative content, we'll come on to that. We can convert them through a link in YouTube, which you say YouTube particularly favors. But how how do we create a hook and what do we, you know, what do we create our videos about? You know, and and that's a broad question because it depends what sex you're in. But how soon do you know how soon in the video do we need a hook and what kind of hooks should we look at?

SPEAKER_00: 10:39

So the most important thing, I this is goes like basically for everything, everything content especially, it's always about the audience. Because if you're just doing content for ourselves, like okay, this is like you can call it art, but it's always about the audience. So something we do with all of our clients is when we start working, is like okay, who is the audience? Because we really need to understand like what is their voice, what are their pains, what are their desires, and this obviously then shapes the whole video. Because, yeah, if like sales coach, okay, we can talk now. If we're just talking to the normal salespeople and we're gonna start talking about a CRM, yeah, they won't watch because like a salesperson usually doesn't like CRMs, um, but instead they want to hear about objections, they want to hear about sales scripts. So this is very important. The same thing if I'm taking my case where I'm talking about YouTube. If I'm trying I tried two times um teaching entrepreneurs, business owners, this is how you create nice titles and thumbnails. But the truth is they don't really understand the importance of it, and no business owners are sitting there or like thinking it nice, like, ah man, I wish I would I would know how to create better uh thumbnails or titles. So this is something very important. We always need to have the audience in mind first. And um this goes then as well then with the title in the thumbnail. Uh as I said, it's like about we need to make them click because we can be the we can have a million-dollar business, we can have the we can have billions of clients, but they don't know this as long as they're not clicking on this um on this video. So that's why title and thumbnail is so important. And here we usually work with psychology. So I learned these things from um Jake Thomas, he's like the title king of YouTube, and he's saying there are always like three click triggers, the most dominant one, and usually you can combine two. So it's usually always like always always is curiosity. So you always need to make them okay, how can you make them kind of feel like this video? Ah, you you need to click on this video now. The second uh thing is then it's uh curious um desire, and then the other one is fear. So we eitherwise can do like curiosity with desire or curiosity with fear as like the the two prominent um combinations, and there again we need to speak the the language of the client as well. So, for example, if we um so we had recently had with our sales coach, we had one video which wasn't performing so well, and it was simply because we used jargon. So this is something never use jargon because it's like people only who are like your peers, they will understand. So we need to make the language so easy that basically everyone understands it, no jargon, make it super simple to understand and really play with the emotions, like ah, I want to click on this. So, for example, sell better, sell more, or um never get rejected again, you know, it's like for YouTube, like ah, this is the easiest script on how to make get more views, and etc. etc. Now then with the hook. Usually we say on YouTube it's like 30 seconds. So the easiest to follow is actually from Alex Tomozi. It's approved, plan, promise. So in the beginning, as I said, the no one knows who you really are. And if you're talking about on YouTube, they're always you can see this in your analytics, we usually always talk into 80% of new people all the time. So we always seek to say, okay, for example, hey, I'm David, I've been working with many businesses, we created so many views and so much uh we created so many leads and so much money just through YouTube, because otherwise they're gonna think, okay, cool, you have a nice video, you look nice, you look friendly, you have a nice Thailand thumbnail, but why should I listen to you? And then um, which is like very simple, is like first we're gonna tell them also the promise, like, okay, this is the promise you clicked, and here's I'm gonna give you exactly why like the promise. I'm kind of reflecting it again, kind of repeating it, so they're like sure, like, okay, I clicked on the right video, and then people like to be guided, so then we can also use like a quick plan, say, hey, we're gonna have like three steps on how I walk you through to to never be rejected again in your life, and you're gonna have a closing rate of 80%. And I say usually um it should be around 30 seconds. Now, if you're talking about podcasting, also that's a little bit more difficult to hit the 30-second mark. But yeah, I would say around like a minute till or minute 30, unless it's like um the diary of the CEO. I mean, they're always doing like a small mini movie in the intros.

SPEAKER_01: 15:32

Yeah. Um, yeah, because you talk about the 8020 principle, which we've most people have heard of, but you're using you sort of strip it back, don't you? You strip a lot of stuff back to keep it simple and focus on the to get to get 80% of your profit. Is that do you want to explain that process a little bit to people? Because the people that listen to this will be from mar the marketing world, and many people are aware of the 8020 principle, but how are you applying it?

SPEAKER_00: 15:56

Yeah, so obviously 8020, there's always the 20% that bring the most results. And if I'm thinking more about YouTube, so as I said, with the short form, I'm not the biggest fan of it. I can see it also in the data, like with we talked about the trust, and I can see in the data nowadays how many of your regular views are watching the shorts, and I can see like okay, the number is much, much lower, although like we can get much more views for shorts. So I think shorts are more like for new people, but they usually don't stick around. And I can also see in the data from our long form videos, ah, they're only like 2% of people clicking from like the short form to the long form. So first things first is always okay, let's focus on on the long form video. Now, then I said um so on YouTube we have like this this order, what is like brings in the most uh the most yeah, the most results. So the first thing, as I said, is like idea. If you don't have a great idea because it's not aligning with the audience, then this video is almost for nothing. And then the next thing would be okay, let's focus the next part, let's focus on the title and thumbnail. Because as I said, if they don't click, they won't watch. And the next part would be then the hook. And this is exactly how I plan my videos then as well. Um, so I think a lot about my idea. I analyze okay, what could work, what could not work. Then we took focus on the title and thumbnail. Okay, how can we make them click the most? And then it's like the hook. This is a hook for my personal videos, for example. I script them out. The rest, I just um I just use JetGDP. So before I know we all have the knowledge in our minds. So I'm speaking, before I record a video, I just take the mic and I'm gonna speak the all my ideas I have about the video. I just speak in a mic. Um, then I just go back to JetTPCP and say, Hey, can you order this in like uh nice bullet points and order in a way that is like the most novel way, so something people haven't heard a thousand times yet. And then I said, Okay, is there anything missing? And said, Oh, you could maybe talk about this, and there I have it. So I was like, even for the scripting process, I I take around like 10-50 minutes maybe to script, and it's like 10 minutes or 50 or 12 minutes probably go into the hook, and one minute goes in the outro to say, like, okay, the goal of this video is to either why send people to another video or to send them to um to our landing page, if it's for example a deep dive. And yeah, and then I just speak in the mic, and uh one minute I order them in JetTP, and that's how I basically plan my videos. Now, another thing is like I always think, okay, what is paths I don't like to do, or like they cost time but doesn't bring a lot of stuff, and that's for example the description and the meta tags and creating the chapters and all these things. They don't really do a lot of stuff, like the video is more important, obviously. So then I created um I started to dabble around with make the automation platform, and um, yeah, now within two minutes I can create uh two UTM um links, and so so like uh trackable links, which uh either way send people to our landing page or to our school community, then a quick um summary of the video, like one, two sentences that people say, Okay, is this video really for me? And then the chapters. So I don't need to re-watch the whole video, say okay, he's one chapter, two chapter, three chapter, and um at the end just the the keywords which are like not even I don't even check if they're right, I just check, okay, is there anything that it would be like really weird? But yeah, that's it. So it takes me like two minutes to write the description, something which took me like more than 20 minutes. So that's how I approach it.

SPEAKER_02: 19:27

So um the the actual video, the actual content of the video you would recommend would be some kind of value, i.e., advice or or an expert guide or something along those lines. I can see how that could work if you're targeting consultants or um you know sales directors or something like that. But could this approach work for businesses in any sector, or is it restricted to kind of certain key job type you know, jobs or roles or sectors?

SPEAKER_00: 19:54

No, I would say this goes for for all sectors, all industries. So the simple thing is like Alex Homozy always says this. I don't know what the original origin is. It's like um we we give away the secrets for free and sell the implementation. So and I really can feel this as well. So if we just um yeah, there are many reasons. So, first of all, you prove already that you are the man, you can solve me this problem. So it's okay, cool. Sales coach, okay, you know how to sell. Um, YouTube guy, me, I know how YouTube works, marketing, you okay, you know how to get more more people. Then the other thing is, like, especially nowadays, there are too many gurus, they're just promising the dreams. So, this is something where you're gonna stick out as well. Then there's then you're building the trust as well, I believe. So, um, because like, yeah, okay, he already showed me all this knowledge, he's giving it all for free. Like, I remember in the beginning when I met Alex Domal, like, wow, he's giving everything for free. This is so crazy. Like, I was so in awe, and yeah, it was also like unique, but then I was like, as then you start thinking, man, imagine what the paid product would be, like the paid service. So, yeah, that's how I felt. There was um who was it recently? I was watching something, I was like, ah, yeah. So, as I just started to go into the whole school community stuff, so there is this woman, she uh Evelyn Weiss is her name. She's talking all about how to grow your school without an audience, um, just with ads, so like the fastest way. So I watched all her videos when I just started recently, and I was like, cool, man, as soon as this is gonna work out, like um we haven't launched it officially yet, but as soon as it's gonna work, the first thing, the first dollars I'm gonna make, I'm gonna reinvest in her community to learn even more about her. So I watched all her videos. Got all the good knowledge, like, man, imagine if you could have like more touch point now with this person. So, yeah, that's why I think it works for all industries. Because you just prove you can do this, you show like many times, okay. I done this in this case, and then you can also say, Hey, okay, I had this specific case, and it's like, man, this is exactly my case, or very similar. So um, that's why I think this is the only way to do it. Because if you just gatekeeping everything, it's like, yeah, people say, Man, there's probably someone else who's giving me all the the the info, and then I'm gonna trust him more than you.

SPEAKER_02: 22:25

I like that. So, what's that quote? Um, provide the knowledge, sell the implementation. And and I think probably uh yeah, a lot of people are afraid to do that.

SPEAKER_00: 22:32

Give away the secrets for free and then sell the implementation.

SPEAKER_02: 22:35

Yeah, and I think a lot of people are afraid to do that, aren't they? You know, what you know that this but that's um it's the it's kind of flipping that on its head, isn't it? Like you say, demonstrating the knowledge, adding as much value as you can, and then building that trust, and then naturally when you know you have that kind of so when it comes to the kind of call to action then, um you can obviously how how do you actually include the link in a YouTube video? Would you include it in the in the kind of description of the video? Would you include it as a sticker on the end frame? You know, how what's the kind of the most effective way to do that? And and how direct can you be in terms of asking people to take some kind of action?

SPEAKER_00: 23:10

So what I found is it's depending on the video. As I said in the beginning, we need to be clear on what the goal of the video would be. So I said they're always like two, they're always two CTAs, in my opinion. So I I will if a client is gonna say, hey, please subscribe, like, I was like, really? Like for what? Like for some vanity internet points. So um, so it's like watch the next video simply because we want to we want to get more trust, like the longer they stay on the platform, they're gonna build more trust. Also, YouTube loves it when people are gonna start binge watching your stuff. And another one is um, yeah, go on my website. So here's how I plan it. If we're having like let's say, for example, for solo episodes, like we're having like more smaller byte um videos, then we're always trying to send them to the next video. Um and then we're having one major video, which is usually like a deep dive. And this is like where we really show, okay, this is not all like maybe it's like four videos appact in one, kind of like four, like where we had like four different videos, like where we kind of split the aspects. Like it's like in my case, okay, one part is like we're talking about high-level thumbnails, the next part is about how to getting more views, and then another part is like how to get more clients to the video. And now I could make like a huge complete video where I talk the whole strategy, maybe a whole case study about it. And this one is then where I really give give everything out, like the whole strategy, how I built the whole strategy for for my clients, and then I say, hey, and if you want this for yourself, click the video down below. And yeah, down below, I always have my links there, so in case um people want more. But there's only in this case when we're having a deep dive to to send people then to to the landing page directly. And as I said, very importantly as well is like to have trackable links, very important because this way I could see now, okay, the deep dives, they perform exceptionally well. So we're having I think it's our yeah, it's our first video on this on our new channel. It was a it was a podcast masterclass, and this video had like 200 views, like nothing much. We kind of got not really found in the algorithm this time, um, because we we got mostly just shown in search, unfortunately, but like 200 views, and we got like 20 clicks. So we're talking here about a 10% conversion. Now we're having other videos which are like, for example, we're having some podcasts, they got like 300 views, but yeah, we got like what was it? I think like it was like five, seven views. So it wasn't more than uh 2%, if I correct if I remember correctly. So then I could see, okay, obviously it makes sense. If I'm having a podcast with another influential guest, like who's on my level, um, it's gonna be harder sending people now to my to my landing page. That's why I also I say every podcaster should have solar episodes, so you can start now building trust with your own audience. Because as the host, you're usually not the star like the guest right now. I am more the star than you guys. You're just there to guide this this this interview to um to ask the question your audience would like to hear. And um, yeah, as I said, like imagine now you would uh say it like we would have Alex Samozi on the podcast and say, Hey, okay, Alex Samosi has so much cool knowledge, but by the way, if you want all this, click my link. It's like, yeah, that's weird. So um that's how we do it. And another thing is also um, if you're talking about videos in general, so we had this video which was went exceptionally well for our channel. I got like 800 views and like two people clicking. I was like, okay, now we can see not every view is equal. And this makes a huge difference because now, okay, if I want just like if I try to grow this channel, okay, I can go this route. But if I want actual business results, yeah, I shouldn't do this video, so I should do more like deep dives. And this is something I'm gonna be trying now to do like every like three, four months to go with the deep dives and um then sending people directly to our landing page. That would be the goal.

SPEAKER_02: 26:57

Where do we where do we where do we start with um YouTube analytics? Because for the for the layman, it's really complicated, isn't it? There's I mean, and it's it's quite different to any other social platform. You know, if people are kind of just getting started, what what are those key metrics they need to be looking at?

SPEAKER_00: 27:14

Yeah, I totally agree. Like first time you open YouTube analytics, like you can see you can see almost everything. It's it's crazy. So one thing is um you I would always treat YouTube like a part of a business. So very important is we're having returning viewers. So because if you don't have returning viewers, we can't grow. It's like churn in a business. Same thing. We need to keep the same people in there and try to grow this space. So this is something I would look. Then there are some major KPIs I would say on YouTube, which are always important. So the first thing is the CTR, so like the click-through rate, how well was your title and thumbnail to see that? And another thing is is um is the the average view duration on YouTube as well. Because as we know, each platform is differently. So, for example, LinkedIn, they want the they want engagement, so you need a lot of comments and likes. Instagram wants to send features, so they want to like to connect with friends, so they want to send features on YouTube, is like they always talk about satisfaction. And one of the main KPIs you could see is in the average view duration. So if you try to always like improve this, um, this should be like, yeah, this should be your golden ticket. You can also see if you're having, let's say, in average you have like a 20-20% of average view duration on a podcast, and then you're having one video which is like 15%, you're gonna see immediately that you want to reach the same views as the other videos. So that's how you can also see like how important is obviously the YouTube algorithm is super complex, so um they have obviously more parameters, which we don't know, but I would say these are like the the three main KPIs.

SPEAKER_02: 28:53

The the other thing actually that our listeners might find useful, um how do we um you know what's the best practice when it comes to YouTube SEO? So, you know, we let's say we launch, you know, we launch a video, there's a ton of value in it, we're answering the question our customers are asking, you know, the actual video is high quality, but how do we make that more visible in YouTube? I mean, obviously it's it's a huge second biggest search engine in the world, isn't it? Um how do we how do you know is is there tricks or hacks that we can do?

SPEAKER_00: 29:25

So one thing is there are no hacks on YouTube. So if I can tell a story back on YouTube, I don't know, it was like many years ago. There was like um there were many females on the thumbnails back in the days, like very pretty females, but they were never these pretty females never appeared on the video itself because people just done uh clickbait and people left. And YouTube's like, damn, we're getting all these views, but people kind of got sick of YouTube because everyone is just doing clickbait. How can we solve this? And that's why YouTube is also like analyzing now the first 30 seconds. Like, are you really um like yeah, keeping your promise of the video or not? And that's why yeah, hacks don't usually work. YouTube is always trying to find out how to work out their own hacks. Now, SEO is actually not a thing since 2019 anymore. Really? Uh, we're still getting every month, probably getting lots of emails from some people saying, Hey, I can help you with your SEO score, but that usually doesn't work. Now, you said it correctly, YouTube is like the second biggest search engine, but in fact is there is a statistic that 70% of the main traffic on YouTube is coming through the whole recommendation feed. That means the home feed or like the videos on the side when they're watching. So that's why I would focus on this. And the reason why also like YouTube is not really focused on SEO anymore, is YouTube reads the whole transcript of your video, it's reading everything, and it also also has the the AI, which is like checking also on the visuals as well. Now, we had for example a podcast with Greg Wasserman. I didn't mention his name in the title. I put his name though in the in the description so people can find him though afterwards with his clicks. But if you probably type in like Greg Wasserman podcast, you can find and it said it shows in the transcript it was like at 16 seconds, like yeah, today we have Greg Wasserman on the show, we're talking about this and that. So that's Is just a proof to me that YouTube is actually focusing, like is scanning your whole video already with the transcription. Now, as I said, okay, how can we make it more discoverable? Is like as I already repeated like three times, it's we need to work on a title and thumbnail to make it exciting for our audience to click. And yeah, for a smaller channel like ours right now is a little bit tougher because you don't have too many data and too many people coming back because like you have no audience. So, but yeah, work on the returning views, always try to see if they're coming back. If you're gonna see suddenly that you have a dump, it's like ah, okay, what is the problem? Are the topics? Is the video the problem? And um, yeah, it's all about be being seen in the recommendation feed. This is obviously very difficult because um if you're gonna put a video out, we're always gonna be seen with the biggest people. So if you're talking about entrepreneurship, yeah, you're gonna suddenly compete with Alex Homozi and Stephen Ballet at the same time. It's like, oh okay, how can I compete with these big guys? So one thing I would say is like if you like super niche, they can't compete in your niche. Because they've got so big and so broad that if you're gonna speak directly the words of your customers, like, yeah, that exactly what I'm feeling right now. I need this video. So this is how would I I would tackle it, and this is uh how I tackle with all our clients.

SPEAKER_01: 32:48

So what what's the what's the biggest mistake you've made in YouTube then, David?

SPEAKER_00: 32:53

Yeah, so as I said in the beginning, um well, actually, so my previous channel, as I said, it was a finance channel originally, and I did a huge mistake I seen with too many big channels as well, and I call it this the Carnival channel. So, since I'm in Brazil, um carnival, so it's like what I mean is like it's going all over the place. So I had this finance channel, but then I was like, okay, it's kind of always the same. Let's try something else. So I did this video about how to how I learned a language, like the lazy way, and it went so well. I got like 27,000 views, is what my best video performing video. Uh, my second best video only had like 4,000 views. And then I started to do a little bit of lifestyle here, a little bit of how I uh helped here and some experiments, and uh so I was like, okay, this is not a pure um finance channel anymore. So now I basically have on this channel now a group who subscribe because of the language channel, then I have a group who subscribe because of the because of the finance side, and then I have a uh a few people subscribe because of uh the health stuff I did, where I didn't eat sugar, or I tried to do a fitness routine. So it's like if it's like a party, it's gonna be like super confusing. You're gonna see like these three groups, and this is what many people are doing as well. You know, it's like, okay, I'm a sales coach, cool. I'm gonna teach about sales. Let's tell them, let's do a vlog, show them how I make my coffee. They say, yeah, okay, some people like to watch vlogs and watch vlogs, but the people like to watch sales videos are gonna watch sales videos. Said, oh, let me talk about how I manage my private life after work with my wife, and so I talk about my my my relationship with my wife, and uh, AI is cool, so let me talk about AI.

SPEAKER_01: 34:37

That's a different channel, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00: 34:39

Yeah, then it's like getting all over the place, and um, this is not gonna work. And another thing is, as I said, I had this video, 26,000 views. Nice. The problem though is it made like zero dollars. Our clients having videos with 500 views, and they're making like$15,000 out of it because they're having three uh high-ticket clients making out of this. So, this is what I had to learn as well in the beginning when we helped this CEO. As I said, it's like, hey, we got you like 60,000 views just with two videos. You monetize now, and like you're getting now a little bit of extra money. Uh, it's I know it's not much, but hey, why not? Um, you're getting recognized by YouTube. It's like, yeah, but that doesn't excite me, really. It's like, what do you mean? It's you're having great results on YouTube. It's like, yeah, so I had to learn, okay. This is actually for business, it's like it's totally different how YouTube works than for let's say YouTubers' influencers. You know, as an influence, you need all the views, you need to just to be seen. So sponsorships and all these things, you get your ads sent. But yeah, a business, we need to tackle the lead side, and I think this is the most effective side if we're doing like, hey, we only focus on our audience, we only doing like we do in every four months or so, every three months we do in deep dives where we give everything out for free and try to bring people as many, many people on our our landing page. And um, we can also see that we had I think it was April, we had with our um sales coach, we had our best month. It was like 12,000, uh 12,000 um long-form views. I was like, wow, cool. We started at 4,000, so we tripled the views, and everything was going well, the leads were going better as well. And then we had July, we had a month, we only got like 9,000 views. So I was like shocking, like, ah damn, 9,000 views. So he was like, Oh, what happened? What happened? It's like, well, this is actually our best month. And he's like, What do you mean? It's like we had a record in leads this month. He's like, wow, so more views doesn't mean more views. And this is something I think most of the people need to learn. I had to learn, and um, I think, yeah, there are too many people still screaming out brand awareness, brand awareness, you need more views, you need more views, but uh more views don't translate into more revenue at the same time.

SPEAKER_02: 36:54

So um, aside from YouTube mistakes, have you ever made any other mistakes in your career over the years, um, work-related or otherwise, that you can think of that you'd care to share?

SPEAKER_00: 37:05

Uh, I think all the time, probably. I think most about marketing is always about learning the mistakes. I mean, I'm st I'm still pretty new into the entrepreneurship if I think about it. It's like I've been now two years into it before I just was a wannabe entrepreneur where I was just binge watching Alex Hamozi stuff. Uh yeah, I think the the biggest mistake is in the beginning, I didn't know exactly what my audience wanted. So this is a big problem. So if I talk like, oh okay, I'm gonna show you how to get more views on YouTube, or this is how to make it better title or better thumbnail, it's like, yeah, people. Well, I still think I have this a little bit, I'm still kind of figuring this out. It's like I don't want to be seen as a YouTube guy. This is the big problem because at the end of the day, I'm trying to get you more clients. So this is my big promise. And I seen some other like I I had on LinkedIn the headline, like, oh, I'm gonna get you more clients on YouTube or through YouTube. Well, first thing is I felt like I was fighting more my competitors than actually trying to speak to my clients because like I see too many people, as I said, they are all talking about hi, get you more views, I'll get you more views, I'll get you more views. Okay, I'll okay, I do a little bit of editing, I do a title and thumbnail for you. I said, Yeah, I'm not like this. I'm focusing purely on the on the return of investment side here. And then it's like, okay, okay, I'll get you more clients on YouTube. And then the second thing is most of the people who are posting content on YouTube, they're not just posting content on YouTube, they're also posting on LinkedIn, they're also posting on Instagram. So it's like they don't care if a lead is coming from LinkedIn or from Instagram or from YouTube or from a referral. They're happy. A lead is a lead, right? So yeah, this is still something I have to to work on. How can I be how can I cut more through the market with this message? And yeah, like now, yeah, this is still something I'm I'm working as. How can I be not just a you like how can I be different from just a YouTube guy? And how can I can I make YouTube the no-brainer to everyone who's posting alts on all these other platforms? Like they don't know all these things I just said about like YouTube is the biggest trust builder and YouTube doesn't suppress links, it's actually helping you because YouTube says, Yeah, we're helping businesses, and all these things. Still something in the work.

SPEAKER_02: 39:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 39:27

What about the what about the difference between subscribers versus leads? Because like we've got, like I say, we've got like four and a half thousand subscribers on our YouTube channel, right? But we don't really we you know, like you were just saying there, you're explaining like um the videos are all about uh different different things. You come out, you script a video. Well, ours are we're interviewing podcasts or solo podcasts or webinars or whatever. That's tends to be what we've got on our YouTube channel. How do you figure out what your audience wants? I mean, looking at the data, I suppose. Maybe I'm answering my own question. And then was it looking at the average length of length of you know, the the average length of what somebody's watching it? What did you call it before? You you had a term for it.

SPEAKER_00: 40:08

The average view duration is called on YouTube. I always check on the the percentage-wise. So you said the first thing subscribers, yeah. Subscribers are actually there. Was actually a cool saying from another YouTube strategist. He said YouTube subscribers on YouTube do not matter, they only matter outside of YouTube. For example, if you're talking about like brand deals, you know, like how people see yourself, and it's like the social proofs. Like, like I'm not telling you, it's like I don't remember how many average views the diary of the CEO is getting. I know he's 11 million subscribers or something like that, you know. I know Alex Tamozy has three and a half million subscribers. Don't ask me how many average views he's getting, you know? So it's more about the social proof. But yeah, subscribers do not really matter. Funny thing is actually as well about the sales coach, he has a second channel. Um, the first channel is like 10 years old, it just broke the 100,000 mark, which is like cool, it's nice. And I was celebrating as well. It's like, hey, cool, uh, first line who's actually reaching that. Super cool. Um, but I know, like, it look, it's it's a cool feeling, but I know it's it's not there because the smaller channel, the the podcast channel we're working on, is having now six and a half thousand channels, uh six and a half thousand subscribers. And he's saying this smaller channel is making me almost more money than the big channel. So that's how you can see, okay, it does not really matter how big the channels. It's still getting though. I just checked, uh I think it was the big channel is getting 60,000 views per month, like like with shorts included, and the the smaller channel is getting I think 30,000 views around that's yeah, around 30,000 views, so half, like still it's crazy, just half, although no, it's getting 20,000.

SPEAKER_02: 42:02

What's your view on um on uh paid uh YouTube views, you know, advertising around your video versus organic, you know, would would you include an element of paid as part of a YouTube lead generally, or would you completely lean on organic views?

SPEAKER_00: 42:18

So it depends. So if you are trying to sell something, you have a product, go for it. Like go advertise it. We had an audit with someone who is purely going on paid traffic, and in fact, he had one month we had half million views on total on his channel, around half a million. Wow, and he's getting yeah, he's in better, is it's it's his own his sole strategy, is just putting money into it, and he's getting organically, he's getting around like two thousand views on everything on long form. So I I asked a question, like not to him directly, obviously, because I didn't want to offend him, but it's like okay, you're getting half a million views. It's probably like the next month is probably gonna be similar, maybe 400,000, maybe 600,000, who knows? But how many of these people are coming back? So that's why I don't see like paid traffic as something very good. I don't see it's really sticking, you know. So that's the big problem. So from like because like from half a million people, you're only having like not even 2,000 people coming back. We're not talking about a percent here. So that's why I think it's so difficult with paid traffic, with this. So that's why usually an all another thing is like when I had a look into this data, it was a little bit more difficult to see what is working, what is not working, because now all the like it's what harder to fiddle out this the the data for each um traffic source. So for organic was like this, um, for paid traffic was there. So it was harder to fiddle out, and yeah, so that's why I would say I would go purely organic, which can be especially like 2025, it's getting harder and harder to be honest, especially now. The bear entry barrier is getting lower and lower. There are more people than ever on this platform. AI is helping everyone, AI is also diluting the whole platform because now they are faceless, millions of faceless channels, and you don't even know what's real anymore.

SPEAKER_02: 44:19

So, yeah, but for me the way that's a big problem for all of us, isn't it? Um, so um there'll be people listening to this thinking I really need to start looking at YouTube as a lead gen channel. And like I said, they're probably focusing their time and effort on things like Meta or um you know TikTok or or LinkedIn. So, what three tips based on everything you've told us would you give those people if they want to get started in in YouTube lead gen?

SPEAKER_00: 44:46

So if they're brand new, just start because YouTube is a marathon, it's not uh it's not a sprint, not like these other short plot short short form platforms. So you can see some people are blowing up on YouTube, but don't get really don't get confused by that because most of these people they eitherwise had another channel already or they've been working with um huge channels before they have a huge brand. So just post. For example, um I did a video on Alex Samozzi, how he grew recently, and I was shocked. He just posted in his first year when he started, it was just shortly after the pandemic, it was uh 2022, October something. And in his first year, he posted 140 videos. I was like, damn, that's three videos per week. And I was just looking in our channel, I was like, mmm, we had like 30 uploads, uh, we're posting most of the times every week, but we're not trying to get a slave to the algorithm. It's like, mmm, okay. How why does it help? Like, first of all, you're gathering data to know what is working, what is not working. You kind of just throw in in the beginning a little bit of spaghetti against the wall if you don't have a lot of knowledge about your audience yet or data. Second of all, you're gonna feed YouTube as well data because in the beginning, YouTube has problems with small channels. That's that's the fact. They always say like they have a dedicated team, but I don't think they have it completely figured out yet because these even sometimes comments like, Wow, how can this this channel only have so many uh subscribers? This channel should be super huge. So that's the thing. So first just start, try to get just in the rhythm.

SPEAKER_02: 46:19

Yep. So tip one, just just get started, launch your channel, start creating content. What about tip number two?

SPEAKER_00: 46:26

Tip number two, I would say, like, let's let's start then. Okay, start figuring out what has been working, what hasn't been working. And try to, like as I said, try to use trackable links because this is gonna show you, okay. This video might be just good for views, but this video was actually what my audience wanted. Why? Because they were clicking all on my landing page to figure out more. So this would be the second thing to to figure out what is working, what is not working, to gather all the data from your first phase. And then if we have step three, I would just say, okay, now let's let's let's focus double down on all the things that worked for like 80%, and then 20%, let's try something out because maybe you're gonna step on a new format, new video, new topic that is gonna be your new banger.

SPEAKER_01: 47:09

And everything's got to have a clear call to action. You just have are you saying just have one call to action in every video?

SPEAKER_00: 47:15

Yeah, I always use the the rule of one. So always say like think of the video in the beginning. Okay, do I want to lead people to the next video? Which is like a previous video, or maybe like your huge case study. And in the case study is like, hey, I gave you now everything. If you want to see it for yourself, click on the link down below.

SPEAKER_01: 47:32

Okay. And what do you normally have on your landing page then?

SPEAKER_00: 47:36

On my landing page. Uh we have now um yeah, we just have a quick quiz to see um, like we show a case study. Obviously, what we did was uh like one of our best case studies, um, and then we just tell them, hey, click uh click through the few questions to see um if you qualify, and then eitherwise we can work with you one-on-one, or we also have our school community um where we're gonna help you then with like weekly and uh more on the community side with other people and all this stuff.

SPEAKER_02: 48:02

That was great. It's real real value, I think. Well, as you'd expect speaking to a man like yourself. Um one question we always I've got a feeling I know what you're gonna answer to this. So, one question we often ask our guests is what who would you interview next if you were the ones, you know, if you were running the podcast? What guests would you recommend we spoke to next?

SPEAKER_00: 48:22

Um, so there's this one woman um I really like because I'm always thinking about marketing is about the psychology, and our human psychology hasn't changed in years. Uh so that's why I, for example, like Jake Thomas, who is talking about purely home human psychology about YouTube titles. So if you're talking about the YouTube spade, it would be Jake Thomas. But there's this Canadian woman, her name is I don't know how to pronounce her last name, but it's Caitlin, Borgoin, something like that. Um, she she's quite big on LinkedIn. She has uh I think close to 100,000 followers though, but she's always talking about psychology. Um, it's like, yeah, think about the psychology first before you start like listening to any marketing guru. And she's always saying as well, ask your audience because they have the question, not any marketing guru.

SPEAKER_02: 49:12

Oh, excellent. Well, we love we love a bit of um psychology and behavioral science on this show. We've interviewed a few people over. Um, in fact, if anyone's interested in that, um check out the Richard Shotten episode, which is all about kind of behavioral psychology and marketing. So, yeah, that sounds fascinating.

SPEAKER_01: 49:27

Yeah, great. Uh, if people want to get a hold of you, David, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_00: 49:33

Uh, just just send me a connection on LinkedIn as soon as I'm gonna see a connection, I'm gonna um send you a message anyway.

SPEAKER_01: 49:39

Yeah, cool. All right, well we'll stick your um we'll stick your LinkedIn in the in the show notes and on the YouTube video. Woo! Uh I want to clear culture. Do you want a trackable link? Um, yeah. So thank you for coming on the show, David. That was great.

SPEAKER_02: 49:53

Yeah, thanks, David. That was excellent.