A

Hey, it's Mike Stelzner. What if you had an AI system that wrote your ad copy, generated the images and video, reviewed its own work and made revisions, all customized to your brand without you ever touching it? That's exactly what Caleb Cruise is teaching AI Business Society members to build on July 16th. No coding required. Join today at socialmediaexaminer.com AI and if you're listening to this in the future and you missed it, the full recording and resource kit are waiting for you. Visit socialmediaexaminer.com AI. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads and more sales. Today, we're going to explore YouTube. If you want to create a YouTube channel, you've always wanted to basically put your knowledge out there on YouTube and kind of grow a business with it. Well, this is the episode for you. We're going to be joined by Ty Myers. And if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow the show so you don't miss any of our future content. Like, let's now transition over that interview with Ty, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today we'll explore how to build a profitable following on YouTube. My special guest is a YouTube coach who helps midlife creators grow and monetize on YouTube. His coaching program is the Six Month Momentum Builder. Ty Myers, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

B

Doing pretty good. Thanks, Mike, for having me. I appreciate it.

A

It's super awesome to have you here. Let's just start with your journey. How did you get into YouTube? Where do you want to start?

B

Oh, man. Okay. Well, with YouTube, it's been almost two years now since I've started my channel. And prior to that I was in a nearly 20 year career working for a large telecom provider here in the U.S. yeah, I just had an itch. I think like a lot of folks out there probably had this compulsion to maybe want to start their own business or maybe they have a creative itch to make content. And ever since COVID I've always admired people who create YouTube videos. And I was like, do I have a shot at this? A couple Years back at 44, I decided I was going to take a bit of a gamble and bet on myself to start a channel and try and start a coaching business and see how far I could get. And so, yeah, I basically said, you know what, just throw caution to the wind and see what happens. And so nearly two years later, here I am, still doing YouTube. Now doing it full time. I've got, I guess what I would call a fledgling coaching business that's paying the bills. And so I still feel very new and early, but it's been a fun adventure and it's a completely different environment from, you know, having a boss and having a routine schedule to going full time and working for yourself. So it's been, it's been a lot of self discovery and learning, but also very rewarding at the same time. So, yeah, that's kind of the, that's kind of how it all started.

A

There's so many people listening to this podcast that want to do something with YouTube and even me. I mean, for the longest time I've tried stuff and it just hasn't quite worked. How was it like in the beginning for you when you transitioned out of that career into YouTube and, and, and how is it different now? Just give us a little bit of that background story.

B

I think early on there was just less clarity and certainty about what I should be doing. The more you do it, the more things start to come into focus and the kind of like you kind of, you gain more clarity around your mission and, and who you're serving and what problems you're trying to solve. And then the business stuff starts to take shape. But of course there's always new challenges that emerge, ways to optimize, ways to become more efficient. But yeah, early on it was really just a lot of fumbling and kind of just trusting the people ahead of me who were kind of recounting their experience of what it's like to start a YouTube channel. And when you really look at anybody who's been on the platform for a number of years, if you go back and look at all of their earlier content, what you come to find is that no one really knows what they're doing when they get started. And I think that's just part of the process. It's just like figuring things out as you go. So yeah, for the first 612 months, just a lot of fumbling, bumbling around, trying to figure out what kind of videos do I like making, what is my audience actually like, what do they care about, what's resonating with them and like, what are some smart ways to keep this thing afloat, to do it? Long term. So that's, that's kind of like the evolution of where things have been over the last almost two years.

A

So tell us kind of today where you're at. How many YouTube videos have you created? Just give us a little bit of stats about your channel and stuff like that and just. And then we can transition into some of the stuff we're going to talk about today.

B

Yeah, so I do long form only. I don't do any shorts. So long form plus maybe 25 live streams, about 150 total videos in just shy of two years. And that's gotten me to. Right around 36,000 subscribers. And yeah, I mean, fully able to pay the bills at this point, which is nice. Not through adsense. And we'll talk probably more about monetization in a little bit. It just, it's just reps, right? It's just doing the thing and doing it messy and just finally figuring it out as you go.

A

Well, and what kind of background do you have? I mean, when you were working in corporate America, were you a creator, were you a marketer? Just what kind of job did you used to do?

B

So the last job that I had, I was a leader of a technical sales team.

A

Okay.

B

So I didn't have a background in video, I didn't have a background in writing or content, but I did help a broader team of technical salespeople sell to SMBs. So I had experience working with clients and customers and some of that stuff was actually transferable, believe it or not, to YouTube. You might not directly draw a line, but presenting to a camera over zoom or over like a Google Meet, right? You're talking to clients, you know, you're figuring out what their needs are. You're addressing those needs. And that's a lot of what, like what good educational channels on YouTube do as well.

A

Love it. Well, Ty, I brought you on the show for a reason. Because I know you're going to provide a lot of value to everyone today and I know this is early on the journey for you, but I also know there's plenty of people that have crushed it in other areas of their career. You know, obviously you have a background in sales. Other people might have a background in really doing well with written word content and that kind of stuff. But what are you seeing as some of the biggest misconceptions? Because obviously you've tried a lot of things. Right, let's just address that little bit today because there's probably some people that have this maybe false belief in their brain that they could never. Because A hundred percent.

B

I hear this all the time. One of the things I hear from people, especially midlife folks, is that they feel like they don't have the right disposition or demeanor or Persona to be on YouTube. Because I think we think of this characteristic, bubbly, charismatic, funny kind of comedian.

A

Mr. Beast, like.

B

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I would tell people, number one, you don't need to be that way. And especially if you have some sort of domain expertise, Maybe you've got 10, 15 years experience in a career and you want to translate that into content. As long as you have something valuable to offer, it doesn't matter the delivery mechanism. It really, I think, boils down to how well would you know your viewer to help them with a problem and how succinctly can you communicate that value to them and how do you make them feel? And so it's funny because there'll be this like, this like dichotomy of someone who's like super successful in their corporate career, like 30 years in executive leadership. And then you put them in front of a camera on YouTube and all of a sudden they're like a deer in headlights. And it's because it's just a new format for them. It's unfamiliar and so they kind of tense up and they might get in their heads thinking, well, I'm not cut out for this. Who's going to listen to me? I don't have anything valuable to add. But what you'll find in time is, number one, you absolutely do. Number two, you just have to like lean into your confidence. And number three is the more, the more reps you get, the more times you put yourself in front of the camera, the more numb you become to it. And then your true essence comes out. And that's what people are going to connect with.

A

Well, and I'm speaking to myself here as I speak to everyone who's listening. If you know that you can have a one on one conversation with someone maybe who is early in their journey in an area that you have a lot of domain expertise in, and they walk away saying, that was transformative, that was life changing. That was so valuable to me. Well, then you have what it takes to actually create content on YouTube. And I know I'm speaking to myself when I say this, right, because so many people that are listening know that they have a lot of value to add. They just don't feel comfortable the moment that camera turns on. And I'm really glad that you said that. So now let's talk about when people pay attention to what we're about to talk about today, when they, when they do YouTube, well, what's waiting for them on the other side? What are some of the upsides and benefits?

B

Yeah, I think a lot of people just think of YouTube and content creators as how having like this really fun and interesting life or lifestyle that gives them autonomy and freedom and money. I mean, there, there can be some of that. That hasn't been my experience per se. I'll speak from the lens of someone who started a channel with the intention of making it a business. One of the advantages when you do it well from the business lens is that you no longer limit yourself to marketing to people in say, your local geography. You essentially have the entire world that you can market to through free content, right? So when I think of an impression that one of my videos gets on YouTube, I'm not paying for that impression like you would if you're paying for ads, for example. And there's like 3 billion monthly active users on YouTube, which is just shy of half the planet. So when you think about that, it's like the single biggest marketplace for ideas, for sales, for community, for entertainment on the planet. And you only need to capture a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that viewership to make this thing fully viable and sustainable for you. And so yeah, all of the other cool lifestyle content creator stuff can come off the back of that, I think when you hit certain financial thresholds. But ultimately it is a lot of work on the front end. But when you do it the right way, and if you do it for long enough and you provide the right amount of value to people that need something, then monetization is certainly in scope. And you know, having a multi six figure solo entrepreneur business is certainly plausible, honestly, in just a few years if you stick with it.

A

And because this is the social media marketing podcast, I have to say that what gives YouTube a unique advantage is the fact that by its very nature it's going to go out and find you viewers, okay? And that is not true with the other social platforms. With the other social platforms, they're only going to find you viewers if you happen to have an incredibly nice piece of short form video, right? Or you built a big following that you know they're just going to show a fraction of it too. And of course it's the same on YouTube. You can have a huge following and no one's going to see it. But YouTube by its very nature is a platform. People go to watch longer form content to be educated and entertained. Where Facebook is A place people in Instagram and TikTok where they just go to kill time. And there's an intention difference, I think, which is actually very important. And there's also that search capability on YouTube. People go there to specifically learn how to do very specific things. It's a unique value proposition that you will not find on many of the other social platforms. And as a result of it, a video on YouTube could perform literally for years. Where we all know that a video on Instagram might only perform or on Facebook or whatever else might perform for days or weeks if you're lucky. And on YouTube that's not quite the case. That's just at least the experience I found.

B

Yeah, two things that you said there that are really worth reinforcing is that the longevity of a piece of content on YouTube, specifically long form, I mean, it could be, it could be decades. I mean, if you go, if you go into YouTube search and you type in how to unclog a Toilet, the number one video ranking in search for that is probably like 17 years old. And this guy who made this video 17 years ago is still reaping the benefits of that.

A

It's probably Roger Wakefield. He's been on my show. He's like, he's like this huge plumber on YouTube. But. Yeah, exactly.

B

And so like, I mean it's, it's a pretty significant distinction, but at face value, it doesn't seem all that important. If you're providing value and you're saying, like, I'm going to make a how to video, how to solve this problem, how to become better at copywriting, how to, I don't know, put up vinyl siding. Like those videos, they may not perform well on day one or month one, but leave them on the platform for long enough, as long as they're halfway decent, people will find them. That's another thing too, as you mentioned, intent. Like, people go to YouTube because they want to learn something, because they have the patience to sit down and watch a 10, 15 minute video. Whereas short form content, you're absolutely right. People just want to kill time. They're not interested in the creator necessarily. They're not interested in buying necessarily. They're just interested in having a laugh.

A

This is just to drive this point home. Literally in an hour and 10 minutes, somebody is coming to my home because where I live there's a bunch of trees behind my house and I'm in a relatively new home and my downspouts are full of leaves.

B

I.

A

So I'm thinking about getting these gutter guards. Anybody who has trees around knows what they are. So guess what I did. I went to AI and I recommended a bunch of people. And then it recommended one guy and I filled out the form and the guy contacted me and he said, you're not going to believe this, but I used to listen religiously to the social media marketing podcast. And while I was listening to the podcast, I decided to do a bunch of gutter reviews in my garage and I ordered 40 different gutters. And as a result of what I did on YouTube, I now have gutter business across Ohio and also Tennessee and all over the country now. And literally out of the blue, people come to me and literally he's coming to my house directly as a result of YouTube. But the reason why he got listed inside of the AI search algorithms in this particular case, Gemini, was because of his YouTube videos. Okay? So people don't even think about that extra layer that the stuff that you create on YouTube is also feeding into the AI models. So, folks, I literally have a guy coming to my house who grew a business on the back of YouTube and literally happened to listen to the show. Talk about meta. Okay, that's crazy town. So now I just had to share that story full circle. Yeah.

B

Yeah, that's amazing. And it, it shows the scale that we talked about a moment ago. It's like he's not just limited to providing services in his local geo, he's now, you know, expanded.

A

Exactly. Now that we've made the case that no matter what kind of business you're in, there's really opportunity here to create videos on YouTube that can help business, where do we start? Because obviously if anybody's been listening to the show, they've heard a million different interviews of all the different YouTube experts, but maybe they just haven't heard Ty's perspective. So where do you think we should begin?

B

Yeah, I think, you know, you can do like the entertainment angle, you can do the legacy angle, but. And you could do like the money making angle. I, I come from the business lens and I think about it really in four steps or four phases. This is obviously the most important place to start, is defining your goals. Like, why do you Want to do YouTube? Is it to expand a current business? Is it just to, you know, upload funny video of your cat being weird at home? You know, is it to leave a legacy? Like, you have to kind of figure out what your main purpose and your mission is once you kind of figure that out. And then it's coming back to who are you serving the actual specific person the psychographics, the avatar, the icp, whatever you want to call it, so that you can speak to that person directly. Because one thing on YouTube and I see a lot of people struggle with this, is ambiguity is like the biggest killer of channel growth. The more specific, the more niche you can be with solving a problem and just being like hyper specific in your titles and your thumbnails in your actual transcript, the further you'll get. Because the algorithm knows everything you're saying in your video and it knows everything about the preferences and the viewing habits of the people logging into YouTube. So it's going to direct that specific piece of content to the exact specific person. So goals and mission number one, Number two is your avatar and what you're going to help them with, right? So this is all stuff that you would do well before you even think about recording a video. This comes, this is like all pre production, right? And then step three is just start making super simple videos. And the reason I, I say just get going is because some people will spend months at the starting line and they'll just get in their head. You know, perfectionism sets in, especially for midlife folks who, like I mentioned earlier, might have, they might be really good at their day job or in their past career and they have this like confidence that they know what they're doing. But the moment they try to do social or try to do YouTube and do content, it's like, you know, getting on a bike for the first time when you're four years old. It's terrifying. And so that's why I say just get those early reps in. You know, even if the videos are hot garbage, which they very well might be. And I would encourage anyone interested to go watch my first handful of videos and just see how terrible they are. But you got to get those reps in because you got to, you gotta chip away at those nerves. You gotta chip away at the lack of confidence. And that way, you know, like I said, your true person comes out. Once you, I think, get around 15 videos or so, once you feel like you've got your workflow a little bit dialed in, like you're not so nervous now getting in front of the camera. At that point, I would take a hard pivot away from focusing on reps and quantity and focusing more on the quality. And again, this comes back to more pre production work of studying YouTube as a platform, trying to figure out what's, how does this platform even work? Because a lot of people just think of it as a place to go to upload videos as a creator, but it is so much more than that. Video is just the key element. But there's so much in the periphery, so much in the orbit that needs to get ironed out before anyone's even going to want to watch your video. And so when I'm working with my clients, a lot of what we work on is ideation, trying to figure out what are the topics that we should even be talking about. Because not all topics are worth making videos about. And early on our intuition is not great. And so oftentimes we have to like, think more deeply about does my audience actually care about this topic or is it something that just I care about? Right. And if we keep our audience front and center, that's going to give us the best chances of success. But then after the idea comes, the title, comes the thumbnail, and I like to lump in topic, title and thumbnail all together. And I tell my clients that that is 80% of the game. Right? That's where you want to spend most of your time. And then filming and editing comes off the back of that.

A

Okay, so let me just reiterate what I heard you say and then we'll dig deeper into this pre production concept that you've been talking about. Number one is what is it you want to achieve? What is that mission? Why are you even going there in the first place? Right? And obviously many people listening to the show are working for a business or have their own business or want to go off on their own. So ideally in this case, there would be some sort of business objective. Like I Hope to use YouTube to generate qualified leads, or I hope to attract clients to me that I can turn into consultant gigs, or I hope to sell widgets, this, or sell my knowledge or teach people this thing, or just to leave a legacy. Right? Literally, I know a lot of things and I just want to go ahead and create great content and leave an impact on the world. Right? Then the next question is like, who is that target audience that you're serving? I'm speaking to marketers. Marketers, you know this. But sometimes we ignore this. Don't say everyone because it's if you're for everyone, you're for no one. Right? And what you said is to be specific, but not just be specific in your head. Be specific in your titles, be specific in the language you put inside your thumbnails and be specific in the words that you speak. Because all those things as we're going to learn kind of, kind of somehow impact the algorithm's ability to know who to get that video in front of. And then you also said start simple and get your reps in, which I love. Right? It's like if you want to run a marathon, you got to start running around the block first, right? And you're going to get some of that, those reps in. You know what most marketers are doing manually? Ad creative, writing the copy, coordinating with the designer for the images, waiting on video edits, managing revisions, every campaign, every, every cycle. I wanted to fix that for our members. So on July 16th, I'm bringing Caleb Cruz to teach inside the AI Business Society. He's going to show members how to build personalized AI pipelines using Claude code that runs the entire creative process on its own. Copy, images, video, revisions, all customized to your brand. And you don't need to be a coder to do it. I'll be in the room for the entire session. I'm in every session. And I can tell you members are going to walk away with a clear, buildable system that they can put to work that very same week. If you can't make it live, the full recording and resource kit will be waiting for you. Transcript, slides, key takeaways, the whole shebang. This is what we do every month inside the AI Business Society. Come and see for yourself. And don't miss this training. Join@social mediaexaminer.com AI again socialmediaexaminer.com AI okay, let's dive in deep on this concept of pre production and let's go into, you know, I know you have a lot to say here, so let's just assume everyone who's listening has done what we just talked about and they're a little further down the trail and now they're ready to kind of figure out some sort of a system or a workflow. What, what do we want to talk about there?

B

Yeah, so this is the most important part. It's a combination of things, right? It's under the umbrella of just studying YouTube. And so the first thing is, you know, coming back to the avatar and understanding what are their needs and wants, what are they afraid of, what are they worried about, what keeps them up at night, what are their desires, what are their outcomes or the transformations they want? And then you think about those things and say, okay, if I were to try and solve a problem for my avatar, what would the problem be? And then how would I solve that? Right? And it hopefully is just a couple of words like in, in the case of my channel, I help people start, grow and monetize on YouTube so I'm thinking to myself, what's a problem that my viewer has? And it might be the audio quality in their YouTube videos is not great and they don't know how to fix it. They're, they're brand new to audio so they don't have any background. So my idea for my video might be something as simple as how to improve the audio quality in your YouTube video. That in my mind is the question they might want to, they might be asking. I would then go to a tool like Vidiq, which is a great YouTube growth tool, it's free to use and you can do keyword research in there and you can type in, I don't know, something along the lines of how to improve audio on a YouTube video. That might be a very long tail keyword. So it might not yield good results, but you can fine tune it and narrow it. And really for any niche you can think of, there's going to be certain keywords that people are interested in and you can go to Vidiq to evaluate are these keywords remotely interesting to people. And it'll tell you the monthly search volume. And that's a good way of just measuring different keywords against each other to know what's the right way to talk about this topic. So that's the, probably the first area I would go to is Vidiq. And then off the back of that I would do a very similar search right into YouTube search directly. So just right on the YouTube homepage at the very top, there's the search bar. Type in the thing that you're thinking about making a video about and then you're just going to go through the list that you get served to ask

A

yourself, wait, when you say get served, do you mean like as you type one word at a time, it wants to auto fill the next word. Is that kind of what you're talking about or the little drop down list that shows underneath it?

B

Yeah, you can do some of that. I mean, I usually don't use autocomplete. I usually just type in the full keyword.

A

Okay.

B

As I've been using it in fitiq. But I know some people will recommend letting letting auto fill give you a gauge of what people are interested in. So that's a good kind of advanced tactic.

A

Okay.

B

But ultimately once you get a list of videos after you've typed in that keyword, you're looking for the number of views these videos are getting. How old are the videos? Is there, are there recent videos on the topic? Are there just too many videos on the topic. And that will help inform you who you're competing against. And at that point you're kind of like looking at, looking for outliers, right? And if you have the Vidiq browser extension installed, Vidiq, again, free tool. It's amazing. It will help you understand for any video that you're seeing on YouTube, it'll help you understand is that video an outlier for that channel? Meaning has that video dramatically outperformed the average of the other videos on the, on that channel? So hopefully that makes sense. And when you find these outliers, what you're thinking to yourself is, okay, this video is special. It got, got a lot of views relative to the channel. And so let's try and figure out what made it special. And you can look at the title, you can look at the thumbnail, maybe you can listen to the first 15, 30 seconds of the hook. And when you do this enough times, again, studying, right, you start to see patterns, you start to see frameworks, you start to see the same types of things show up over and over again. And then you kind of reverse engineer that for your own stuff. And that's going to make your content stand out way more. So I know it sounds a little convoluted, but it's ultimately just psychology. That's really all YouTube is. It's human psychology figuring out what are the things that make people click, what are the emotional triggers that get people to click, what are the high interest topics that get people to click. And it takes time to develop the skill of seeing those patterns. But that's ultimately what we're doing in pre production because we don't want to spend 15 hours scripting, filming and editing a video if the idea wasn't going to perform, you know, to begin with. So it's kind of the opposite of what a lot of people instinctually think they should be doing. So that's something I help my clients with quite a bit.

A

Question. Let's say we've got this phrase, right, that we think we want to do a video on and we were on YouTube on our desktop and we type it in and we look at the videos that come up and let's say we've installed the Vidiq. I'm pretty sure that's what I have as well. But what are we looking for? That would be a signal to us that there is something here. Like give us a couple of things to be looking for.

B

Yeah, I think it's probably more, more recent videos, to be honest, because certain topics are going to be a little bit dated. So if I have a client who's looking and they're doing this outlier research and they come back to me and say, hey, I found these four videos that are validating the idea. If they're from like five years ago, I might be like, well, it may just have been relevant five years ago. Right. And things, things sort of change. So if we can't find recent videos that have performed well on that topic, then we might discard the topic completely.

A

Oh, okay.

B

So the age of the video itself, I think is important. Vidiq also lets you see if a video is performing well over time versus just having an initial spike and then flatlining. And so if you see that kind of steady up into the right graph, that is a good sign that is evergreen, meaning it's just residually getting views, you know, over maybe many years. Right. And that could also be a good sign that the topic is worth pursuing because it's showing that people have persistent interest in this topic. It's not just like a one and done trending viral thing, if that makes sense.

A

Yeah. So I think what I'm hearing you say is, look, it could be an old video. If it's a really good video, you know, it might show up at the top because it's darn good. But, but below it should be, you know, the top 10. There should be some that are more recent videos which will be a signal that there's enough interest in this topic that maybe we could create a video on such topic and it might perform well. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

B

Yeah, exactly.

A

And then what do we do with that? Like, how do we think that through? I mean, like, you know, in light of that, we're not going to copy them outright. Right. So how do we add ourselves into such a topic?

B

Yeah, and this is a tricky gray area. And probably for anyone who's, who's been doing YouTube, who's doing some of this research, as I've mentioned, you've probably found in any niche on YouTube that people just copy each other all the time. And in some ways it's tolerated and almost accepted. But I understand, especially for me and for other midlife folks who've probably developed, and this isn't to knock younger people at all, but if you've gotten to your 40s and beyond, you know, you've probably developed deeper conviction in your, in your ethics and your integrity. And so you're, you're probably not keen on copying other people. But I think there's A difference between blatant copying and stealing of other high performing titles and thumbnails and ideas versus emulating. I think emulating is smart, especially when you don't have the skills. Because in the process of. And I've done this on my own channel, by the way, if anyone's interested, there are some videos on my channel where I have. I follow this exact process where I will go out and find a video that has performed exceptionally well, maybe from like a year or two ago, and I'll ask myself, am I in a position to make this exact video, but from my own experience. Okay, and if I am, then I'll basically kind of reverse engineer the script. Like how did he structure the script of this video and what, what would I like about it? And then how do I apply that framework but include all of my own personal experience that nobody else can talk about? Right. So it's me, my story, my analogies, my experience, my perspective, but it's just using someone else's script structure. And then I borrow the same title and I make a similar version of the thumbnail. And that has performed quite well for me on one or two occasions. But in the process of doing this, in the process of studying that outlier, you tend to learn a lot more about what makes a good YouTube video. And so that's why I encourage the process, not for the immediacy of potential virality, but simply for the learning that comes along with the deep study, if that makes sense.

A

I love it. Do you have anybody that you've worked with that you could share an example of how this worked?

B

Yes. Okay, so I have a client or one of my earlier clients, his name is Kevin, he's got a channel at AskPapa. We were studying his niche and we were studying like, what are some videos that are performing quite well in the space that he was trying to target. And he makes content basically to help pre retirees save better for retirement because he had made some mistakes himself and he didn't want other people to go through that. So early on when we got together, he was talking about budgeting and HSAs and different investment vehicles and things like sinking funds. And those videos, they weren't really catching, like people weren't, weren't really watching them. And he started talking about downsizing from a larger home with a mortgage into like a tiny home, shed conversion. And so tiny homes on YouTube are huge. People love tiny home videos. But he was doing something kind of unique. He's talking about a tiny home, but it was like a shed conversion and so we were just doing research on sheds and we found some videos. Another channel, this older gentleman who was in the Lowe's parking lot looking at the sheds, and he was filming, walking around, going into the sheds and like talking about them and like hundreds of thousands of views on these videos. And I told Kevin, I'm like, go to a. Go to a local lot and do the same thing. Like, go, just hang out at the lot, record what you're seeing, talk about the square footage, talk about the pricing, ask yourself, would this work for me? And sure enough, he did that a couple times and it worked really well for him. That helped really ignite his channel. And now he's completely pivoted and kind of niched down into just talking about tiny home shed conversions and then also helping people understand how to buy land that you can put a tiny home shed conversion onto. So it was a trial and error, but it was again, seeing what's working on YouTube, looking for the types of formats that are popular. What do people care about? And then applying that to his own channel.

A

Love it. Love it. Okay, so we're talking about pre production here, which really is before you hit record. Is there any other pre production stuff that we need to talk about before we get into the actual production side of things that we haven't addressed?

B

No, I think it's. We have to really just wrap our minds around where to spend our time. I kind of hinted at this a bit earlier. Intuitively. We think script, film, edit, and then we kind of like after the fact, come up with a title, after the fact, come up with a thumbnail. And oftentimes when we do that, we're. I think we're just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. And again, when you're brand new, that is perfectly fine because the idea is we want to reduce friction and get as many reps on the platform. But at some point, if you're serious about growing your channel, you have to make a conscious decision to say, I'm going to front load. Like if I have 10 hours a week to work on YouTube, I'm going to spend six of those hours just studying, like going on YouTube and learn and learning what's working, writing out five, 10, 15 different titles for this video, writing out, you know, three or four different concepts for the thumbnail, looking at vidiq, looking at YouTube to understand is the topic even worth pursuing? And when you spend your time there and you get closer to what your viewers actually want, then even if you make a mediocre script and a mediocre video with a mediocre edit. You're going to see outsized returns because the idea was sound to begin with. So it's flipping, it's flipping where you spend your time. Again, 60 to 80% of your time should be spent on pre production. That's my humble take and I'll die on that hill.

A

One of the things that I'm sure some of my listeners are thinking about is, hey, couldn't AI help me out a little bit here? And as you were talking, I was thinking about Google's Notebook lm, which not everybody is familiar with, but you can add YouTube videos into Google Notebook and you can have it reverse engineer kind of what's happening with those videos. Have you used any AI tools at all to help you at all with any of this kind of stuff? I'm just curious.

B

Yeah, Notebook is amazing for deep research. I found I haven't used it for the use case you've you just mentioned. But a couple of my more recent videos were more data driven, where I'm talking about like monetization and statistics. And my first thing is let me go to Notebook LM and ask it to do deep comprehensive research. Because what it'll do is it'll go out there and find all of these journals and articles and like, you know, look for like messages from CEOs of like Google and YouTube and then it'll compile all that and give you like an executive summary. And then I can ask it like, what are the main threads here? What are the interesting statistics, what's counterintuitive? And then that becomes the meat of the video and I can just take that into whatever writing tool I'm using. But it's amazing for deep research, so I love it for that. I've recently been using Claude quite a bit for ideation and scripting. Claude actually has a connector to Vidiq, which is interesting. So now you can be in Claude asking it to do the keyword research and it goes out to Vidiq and does that keyword research.

A

Wow.

B

So that's pretty neat. And yeah, ultimately I think Claude does a really good job of ideation. Like you can have it interview you to pull context out, for example. Because if you were to just give any of the AI tools a prompt and say, hey, write a script for me on this topic, it's going to sound like AI and it's going to give you something super generic. So before we even sit down to think about a script, I ask the AI to basically Interview me. It's like, here's the core topic. Ask me a ton of questions about all of the things that I think about this. My stories, my experience, my perspective, my analogies, my metaphors. And then when it grabs all that context, it can figure out the story beats. And at that point, you're so much closer to a coherent script for the video.

A

Well, and folks that don't know this, I have another show called AI Explored. And one tip is when it interviews you is to ask one question at a time. And the reason why that's so important is because it will inform its next question based on what the answer is that you give it. And that is something that is super, super powerful. Okay, so we're transitioning over to the production side of things. So you've already kind of started a little bit into some of the work that's involved with production. But let's just say we figured out our topic. We know what we want to do a video on, and we're about to start to think about what. What's involved, what do we need to be? Where do we focus? Where do we start? There. On the actual creation of the video.

B

Yeah. For folks that don't have any background in video whatsoever, I would just start with your smartphone. And it doesn't matter what kind of smartphone you have. I have made over 100 videos with my iPhone 15 from a couple years back, and it works great. I would recommend if you have natural light coming in through a window, maybe with a curtain to diffuse it a little bit, soften the light a little bit, then you're in good shape. The really only thing I think people need to invest in early on, maybe from day one, is a good microphone. I sort of got lucky. I. I made an educated guess on day one and bought a podcasting mic, which I've been using ever since, and I love it. I think it was, like, the best purchase I've ever made for my YouTube channel.

A

Go ahead and say which one you're using.

B

It's the Shure MV7 plus, which is a podcasting mic. It's less than 300 bucks. Honestly, it's overkill. But I didn't know any better, and I just bought it.

A

Yeah, explain how you're doing that. If you're filming from your phone, are you plugging it into your phone, or are you in the same room and you're plugging into your computer? Explain how that works.

B

Yeah, I mean, for. For a lot of my videos, my phone was on a simple tripod, and it's usb. And the mic is usb, so the mic plugs right into the phone. It's like the most, no fuss, no frills way of recording a video.

A

Wait a minute, how does that work? Because phones don't have USB ports on them. USB C. Oh, USB C. Okay, so. Oh, so what you're saying. Oh, okay, hold on a second now, like, dots are connected in my brain. So the newer iPhones. Yeah, because I have a. I have a 12 Pro. I don't have the newer ones. They all have the USB C ports, which are those skinny little ones. So what you're saying is that you can get a microphone with a USB C plug on it, and it will plug directly into your phone?

B

Yeah, 100%.

A

Wow, that is super cool.

B

Which is kind of crazy, because you think, like, a nice podcasting mic, you're going to use an XLR cable. Right. But I mean, the technology is so good. It's still not going to sound as great with, like, XLR into a dedicated, like, sound card or audio device. But it gets the job done. I mean, again, I've been doing this for almost two years. A hundred of those videos were done with this mic plugged directly into my smartphone. And that was pretty much it. Nowadays, I have a different camera because I've upgraded, and I just plug my mic directly into my laptop. Usb. Right into the laptop. And whenever I need to record audio, I'll just load up QuickTime. That's basically all I'm doing.

A

So in that case, you're recording your audio source to your computer, and you're also recording your camera source to your computer in this particular case. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

B

Camera to the SD card?

A

Okay, got it, got it, got it. So, folks, just so you know, when you do something like that, you can just clap your hands a couple times, you know, and that'll create an audio peak that will allow you to bring the audio and the video together in some sort of a tool. But before we get too into the tech, I want to back up on the outline a little bit, because you mentioned very early that the first kind of 15 seconds of the video is what we should study, and there's a lot to that. Can you share some tips on these on the hook? Because I think that's perhaps one of the most important things that we probably have to dial in once they start watching that video. Right. Is the hook.

B

Yeah, the hook is super important. It's really what sets the stage for what the viewer can expect. And so, in my mind, I think of there's really two to three main things you really want to get right in the hook. The first is at some point, you need to call out your viewer by name. Meaning, like, when I make a video again, coming back to my channel, I help people grow a YouTube channel. So a lot of times I'll start my video by saying, if you're trying to get more views on YouTube, you know, when a viewer hears that as the opening line, in their mind, they're thinking, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. Right. So they know that they're in the right place. Right. And then I like to layer in something that might be a little bit counterintuitive or something that might kind of leave a curiosity loop in their mind just to get them thinking a little more deeply about the topic we're going to approach. Sometimes we can layer in credibility the thing that we've done, the thing that they want to do as well, so that they know that the person they're going to be hearing from in the video is worth their time. Right. So that's something you see a lot of business folks do is when they start their video. Alex Hormozi is famous for this. He'll start his video and the first thing out of his mouth will be how many businesses he's owned, how many millions of dollars he's made. And yeah, it sounds a little arrogant, but I'm 100% listening because this guy knows exactly what he's talking about. So that's the credibility angle. And then it's kind of setting the stage. It's just letting the viewer know. So in this video, we're going to talk about the four things you need to know to accomplish X, Y and Z goal. Right? Letting them know the format, like the four. The four things we're going to talk about so that you can accomplish X, Y and Z goal. Tying it back to their desires or their. Their. Their outcomes that they want. It might sound a little convoluted, but when you think about it in these sort of sections, it's not all that difficult. It's just coming up with unique and novel ways to. To say it differently in each video.

A

Well, and let's be clear, we're talking today to marketers and entrepreneurs, right? So we're not just creating these videos for fun. We're creating them with an objective in mind. Right. And when Ty said, look, you want to call out the viewer. So if I was doing this, I'd be. I'd be. Be talking to Marketers, Right. For marketers who want blank. Right. Today we're going to cover this topic. Right. And if I wanted to, I could say I'm the founder of Social Media examiner, we've had blah, blah, blah, you know what I mean? And then I would, and then I would say, oh, before that I might say something like we're going to talk about something that everyone is ignoring. Right. Something along those lines. And then we'll get into setting the stage. Right. Because we have to presume that the people that are seeing this video have no idea who we are, even if we're well known.

B

Right.

A

And by the way, Cialdini talks about this, these concepts in his book of social proof. Right. So if you can say something that adds social proof, you've worked with these kind of people, you've done this kind of thing that just gives people a reason to pay a little bit more attention. So how do we ultimately, do we just plant little seeds throughout the video? Like how do we get these videos to ultimately help grow the business?

B

Yeah. So I think from a client acquisition perspective, there's, there's a couple ways to do it, at least in my experience. One is to just directly tell people that you have an offer to help them. So I think of it as like a mid roll cta. CTA is, you know, call to action where you're basically just hinting or explicitly saying, hey. And by the way, if you want to go deeper on some of these topics, this is exactly what I do in my program. There's a link in the description below. So that's redirecting the viewer's attention to the fact that you can go deeper with them in a more like intimate one on one or maybe a group setting. Whatever that, whatever it is, your product or your, your offer is just point them to the description. So that's a, that's a more explicit, overt cta. The more subtle way of doing it, I've started doing this as well, is just making hints in the video that I work with clients. So I've done it several times in our conversation just now.

A

Yeah, I was gonna say. Yeah, exactly. I always advise people that do that to drop those little clues because some of the listeners and viewers are gonna be like, oh well, Ty knows what he's talking about. I'd rather work with Ty than figure this out on my own. What about using the YouTube built in end cards and stuff like that? Do you ever recommend using those cards to point to offers? Talk about that a little bit.

B

A hundred percent. I use end screens differently than pointing people towards my offer. I like to just keep people binging my content because ultimately my, my sense of it is YouTube prioritizes session duration. If your videos contribute to somebody staying on the platform longer. YouTube loves that because they get more ad revenue. So I link my videos together so I never end a video. This is gonna be a little counterintuitive for people. Oh, I don't play any outro music. I don't summarize what we just covered. I don't seem to hint or change the energy at all. I go right from the last piece of value that I'm providing right into another question that can only be resolved by watching the next video. So that will hopefully drive more clicks to that next video, which then gives me another opportunity for a call to action which increases session duration. So it's all the good stuff that YouTube loves. So that's the way I prioritize my. The ending of any of my YouTube videos.

A

I love it. Ty Myers, this has been awesome. And I know people are going to want to follow you on YouTube. So first of all, how in the world do they find you on YouTube? And then secondly, if there's any other place you want them to go to check out any offerings you have. Where, where should they go?

B

Okay, so my YouTube channel, YouTube.comtymyers that's the best place to find me. If you type in ty Myers into YouTube search, you're probably going to find a really awesome country singer who's up and coming. He's crushing it. You might not find me.

A

He's not you, he's not me.

B

Okay, people have confused us before. It's kind of funny. If you type in in the search bar, Ty Meyers YouTube growth, you will absolutely find me. And then all the links to my offer are on my YouTube channel page. I don't do any other socials. I'm on LinkedIn, but I don't really post there. So YouTube is the place to be.

A

And what's great about this is Ty is building his entire Business on YouTube a hundred percent, which is really encouraging to people. There's people that say, oh, I gotta have this, I gotta have that. Well, guess what? Ty's here to show you that. Nope, you can just do it all on YouTube. Ty Myers, thank you so much for answering all my questions today.

B

Yeah, good to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

A

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 7:2:5 if you're new to the show. Be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a while. I'd love a review on whatever platform you're listening on. And do let your friends know about the show. Also, check out my other show, the AI Explored Podcast. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Before you go if you want to stop grinding through the ad creative process manually, the AI Business Society can help. Caleb Cruise is teaching members how to automate the entire process on July 16th. Full recordings and all the resources are included with your membership. Join@SocialMediaExaminer.com AI again SocialMediaExaminer.com AI.