Liz Germain is a YouTube PRO and a repeat guest on the show! We first met when I was speaking at an eCommerce event held at the YouTube LA Offices.
Liz is responsible for well over 200 million organic views on YouTube and has worked and consulted with some of the top influencers online today.
Here’s a look at what we cover:
- The three types of content you should create on YouTube and how to approach each.
- How search-driven views only account for less than 10% of total watch time on the platform.
- The 4 phases of creating a massive following on YouTube.
- The metrics YouTube cares about and you should obsess over.
- How YouTube ads and YouTube organic do NOT mix, but how you can still leverage both for growth.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Transcript:
Brett:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we have a return guest. I've been looking forward to this podcast episode for three plus years, and it's finally here, and I'm excited, and you should be excited as well. So we have one of the foremost experts on YouTube organic growth. If you listened, if you've been a longtime lister, you'll remember her first episode. I've got Liz Jermaine on the show today. She's the CEO and founder of Vidfluence and the creator of the Channel Amplifier Program. She is a superstar. She's helped a ton of names that you would know that we can't necessarily mention on this podcast, grow their YouTube following, and we're going to talk about how you can do that by following these tips and these pieces of advice, the sage wisdom that Liz is going to lay out here for us. So with that intro, Liz, welcome to the show. How's it going? And thanks for taking the time.
Liz:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me back. I always love to come and talk to especially e-commerce brands because I feel like YouTube is often an untapped market, so I really appreciate you bringing me back on.
Brett:
It is untapped. Yeah, so we, as you well know, and as most listeners know, we focus a lot on YouTube ads, and I love the YouTube ad space. It's continued to grow. I think it's an opportunity like no other in the ad space, but most e-commerce companies aren't doing that either, and they're certainly not investing in the organic side. But there have been a few occasions, a few occasions we had one and still have a barbecue client, and they invest in organic content, and then we also run ads. We keep them separate, which we'll talk about later, but the combination of the two is very, very powerful. And so we're going to get into that a little bit today. So Liz, give us your background for those that don't know, how did you become a YouTube master?
Liz:
Yeah, great question. So I am a YouTuber, first and foremost, and happened been for a very long time. My very first channel was in the health and fitness space for women. So we sold a bunch of digital products, membership sites, meal plans, guides, things of that nature for workouts and lifestyle for females all over the world. Really at one point we had over a hundred thousand women in those programs from 32 different countries around the world.
Brett:
Cool. Is that channel still active? Are you still actively posting there?
Liz:
I have not posted in over two years, but it still brings in leads. It still brings in absence revenue, and that's one of my favorite things about YouTube organic is that when you put the videos up that are the right types of videos, they have the potential to continue to produce results for you even after you stop posting. So I have direct firsthand experience with that, and that's really how I got kind of my initial YouTube entry point. But that's certainly not the only channel that I've worked on at this point. We've helped, oh gosh, I don't even know, probably several hundred other coaches, experts, influencers, authors, speakers, all kinds of people, even e-commerce brands, real estate agents, lawyers, I mean, you name it, there's probably a vertical for you on YouTube. And at this point I feel like almost like an encyclopedia of strategy based on industry because the patterns themselves will reveal themselves over time on what works and what doesn't work.
And so it's been a really cool evolution journey from going from health and fitness space just for women to expanding out. The second channel we worked on was in the van life space, and that channel grew significantly faster, not making all the beginner mistakes that we made on the first one. And then from there, we've helped all kinds of different people in pretty much every industry you could think of. So yeah, YouTube is the place to be, and part of that is due to what I've seen and firsthand experience is that evergreen nature of high quality content.
Brett:
Yeah, I love that. Good quality YouTube content just gets better with age, it grows and it can continue to get views and drive action For years and years, and we were talking a little bit before you record, I I'm posting more often on social, so if you want to follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram and YouTube shorts and stuff. But I have a lot of friends that post on TikTok or run TikTok ads. And what I always hear is, Hey, you just need to commit to 37 pieces of content per day on TikTok. It's going to explode for a half an hour and then it's going to die. And of course I'm exaggerating, but that's sort of the way it works on TikTok and Instagram in some cases where they are just content hungry. And yes, some content may really take off and reach a lot of people and it drives impact. No doubt, the lifespan, the of that content is quite short. So talk about that a little bit on YouTube and then how would you compare YouTube to other social platforms? Not that you have to pick one, but why should we be motivated to invest time in YouTube versus maybe some other social platforms?
Liz:
Yeah, that's a great question. And this comes up a lot with potential people we're looking at helping is that question of do I go on TikTok, do I go on reels, do I go on YouTube? So just know if you're struggling with that question. You're definitely not alone. I may be biased in sharing my experience, but just based on all the data that we look at and also the several dozen high level clients that we get, it's one of the first things that they'll tell us is we don't know anything about YouTube or how to do it. However, we have noticed on our sales calls, on our conversion landing pages, on basically all of the sales transactions that we have, whenever we get someone that says they found us through YouTube, it's the easiest close of all time. And I think that really speaks to the power of people's time investments that they spend watching long form video.
And this has become really interesting, especially over the last year with YouTube launching shorts, right? So YouTube now also has its own version of the vertical short form one minute or last videos. However, I think there's a lot of buzz around shorts out there in the YouTube space, and there's not a lot of practical strategy that comes with it. And so before we jump into choosing specific platforms, first and foremost know that if you do YouTube long form videos first, you will also be able to segment that out and repurpose it for at least half a dozen different platforms. So you can pull the audio and have it be a podcast. You can pull out many clips from that episode and have those turn into TikTok or reels or shorts. You can take the transcript of it and create a blog post on the websites.
There's all kinds of stuff that you can do. So one of my favorite things about YouTube specifically is if you can figure out how to overcome the barrier to entry of having to learn long form video, it can have a trickle down effect on all the other platforms. Because if you do that the hardest thing first, we can then segment that out and repurpose that content pretty much everywhere. Now with shorts specifically, it's important to also know that even though there's all this buzz, like, oh, just do shorts, just do shorts on the back end when we're looking at the actual data, and also when we consider what YouTube as a business actually wants, YouTube makes most, I think it's like 97% or more of their revenue through selling ad space, correct? So what
Brett:
YouTube, yes, descriptions are just a tiny, tiny fraction of their revenue. Tiny, it's all ads, basically.
Liz:
All ads for the most part. And so what YouTube wants out of short form video creators is essentially to be able to double dip on the ad revenue that they're able to earn and that the creator's able to earn by supporting the viewers on the platform in an even deeper way. So now we have the concept, and this is something that even if you've heard about YouTube shorts, a lot of people haven't also heard that you can actually remix segments of your long form videos and post those later pulled out directly from a long form video. And a remix is slightly different than a standalone short in the sense that it is better aligned to what YouTube as a business wants to increase the ad revenue that they make as a company. So when you pull a remix short out of a long form video and you repost that later, that will have now a little button if someone discovers that video on the short shelf that will have a button that will link them directly back to the long form video that it was pulled out of.
And this is really ideally what YouTube wants out of its creators is that if you are doing short form video, if you can figure out a way to embed high quality shorts into the long form content with this specific intention to pull those shorts out later as remixes, you'll have a what's now considered a new traffic source essentially for long form content. Because the reality is, and you can think about your own user experience on any of the platforms. And when you are in that endless hamster wheel scroll, how engaged and how much are you actually paying attention to the creators that pop on your feed with short form video, you're not really spending a significant amount of your time to get to know them. A lot of times too, I talk to some of the best TikTok organic growth strategists in the world as well, and they say it's great for size and for speed, but it's not great for loyalty and connection and people even knowing what your name is, they might remember what you did, but they're not going to remember who you are.
And so with shorts now on YouTube, we have this incredibly cool opportunity where people can go directly if they liked, especially when it's set up as a remix. If they like that short form content, they can now instantly move into the longer form version of that video and spend even more time with you. And the benefit to YouTube as a business is they can monetize now that short view. And if someone progresses through to continue watching longform, they can also double dip and monetize that longform view as well. And the creator benefits from both of those two. So the other thing with YouTube specifically is that there's all kinds of different ways that you can monetize your content, right? It's not just ad sensee revenue. We're talking developing deeper relationships with people, having those videos due the sales process and overcoming objection process for you even while you sleep. So by the time somebody lands on a sales call, for example, or they land on your product checkout page, they're already pre-sold because they've spent significant amount of time with you prior to actually getting there. So there's all kinds of different benefits for YouTube specifically, but for me personally as a human being, I don't want to have to make 37 pieces of content a day, and I will never do that. I just refused. For me personally,
Brett:
It's a awful, awful, awful way to approach life and business. Just yes, some people love it. Gary V eight to 15 piece of a day, he loves it. It sounds horrible to me. Yeah,
Liz:
For me personally, I just don't like even having my phone when I'm out in the world. So it just never made sense for me. I didn't want to keep up with the rat race of the constant timeline scroll, and I'm all about trying to figure out ways to work smarter and not harder. And in my first business in fitness, when my partner left, my partner was my real life sister, and she got married and decided to start a new business with her now husband. And when that,
Brett:
We'll push up her, I'll just point that out. How could she do that to you? But that's the wake house. Yeah,
Liz:
It was definitely a interesting year, but we're all good now. And it's actually for the way that all happened. It was perfect. However, when she left in that first original business, I had to get really smart because she was half of the leadership team, half of the content team. She basically was my second half in that business. And so when she left, obviously there's this huge gaping hole. And so the first thing I did obviously was go back to audit. Where are the highest number of sales coming in with the least amount of effort on my part? And at the time, we were running all kinds of advertising campaigns. We did Instagram every day. We had Snapchat, we had Pinterest, we had the blog, we had email, we had YouTube, we had literally everything. And it was just not like it losing half that leadership team.
I wasn't able to keep up with the pace of that. So I wanted to look at, okay, we're the highest conversions coming in with the least amount of effort and YouTube and Pinterest were actually the top two for us. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting. I wonder why that is. And that's when I kind of accidentally stumbled upon the power of Evergreen video content. And I've just basically gone all in ever since. Plus, YouTube is the coolest place to be. There's the weirdest, coolest, strangest, most interesting types of people that become creators on the YouTube platform, and I've always really enjoyed that as well.
Brett:
Yeah, it's super, I mean, really anything you're interested in, you know, can go deep on that topic and find lots of experts and find one that resonates with you. And the other thing, and I've talked about this on several podcasts, but YouTube is still growing. I've got a lot of kids, my young kids want to spend time on YouTube. My 12 year old daughter, Maggie, that's what she wants to do in the evening is watch YouTube. She watches on the tv, cause we didn't given her phone yet. She's only 12, but although she protests and says a lot of her friends have phones, but we're standing firm and she's not getting one for a while, but she watches YouTube all the time. I'm on YouTube. My dad, who's 73, uses YouTube to research things and find things. So it's growing. So your audience is on YouTube, and then when you look at all the benefits of that content, having a long shelf life, it really makes a lot of sense.
Now I want to talk about the remix really quickly. So I was telling you before we record, I haven't put as much energy into our YouTube channel as I probably should have. I have started to post shorts. So taking clips from this show, from e-commerce evolution, posting that as a short, some of those have done pretty well. But yeah, I've totally noticed what you said where I've seen this on TikTok or Instagram reels or shorts where you watch something and you're like, oh, that was really cool, but then you go to the next thing and you're like, I don't remember that person's name or what they did or how could I ever find them again? I don't know. So how does that work? How do you make a a remix from a full podcast episode recording or a longer form piece of content? How do you technically go about making that a remix?
Liz:
So to make remixes, you have to do it in the YouTube app. So if you pull up any of the long form videos that you have on your channel and you pull that up on your app screen, you'll see at the very bottom there's a little button that says create. If you click create, you'll be able to select anywhere from 15 to 62nd clips that can be pulled out as vertical video. And so there's an important conversation here and have about timing, right? Okay. You basically would want to have your long form episodes go out first, allow those to do its thing for at least a couple days, usually around three to five days to see is the algorithm going to pick this up and start pushing it out to wider audiences. Now if it does get picked up by the algorithm and it starts being shown in the homepage and suggests a video and all that, we basically don't want to touch it.
We want to let YouTube do its thing and see how high that spike is going to go. Now if it doesn't get picked up, then that's not as important with the timing aspect of it, but essentially once the initial traffic on that long form video starts to level out or even decline, that's the perfect time to blast out a couple of remixes because someone can then discover the content through the shorts feed and then be led back into it. And sometimes that can give it an additional, it's almost like taking out the paddles if you're a doctor and you just give a little heart shock to the patient on the table if it starts to level out. Okay, great, let's roll out some remixes, see if we can get some of that shorts traffic in there to give it a second wind. So all of the remixes right now, and by the way, this is all very new and it's rapidly changing.
YouTube is working on the interfaces for being able to edit more engaging shorts, clips and all of that. So I only anticipate this getting better and better over the years because as of right now, reels and TikTok absolutely win as far as editing features in app. However, YouTube won't be far behind and it is something they're investing a lot of time and money into. But where it stands right now, it's super easy. You just have to go into the YouTube mobile app and pull out any long form video and you can grab those 15 to 62nd clips and re-share them as a remix to help give new life to an old video.
Brett:
Super cool. Love that So much. Excited to try it on this end. And I really also love that the way you frame that, Hey, if you can learn to make that long form content and learn to make that well, then with each time you do, you'll have six to 12 pieces of content, maybe more that you can share in a variety of other places and really get maximum leverage out of that. But can you describe what is longform content on YouTube? We talking eight minutes, we're talking 20 minutes, we're talking an hour. What is long form content?
Liz:
Yeah, so I would classify, it really depends on first and foremost who the audience is, right? If you have a podcast channel, your standard is going to usually be for full length episodes of long form videos. It's usually going to be anywhere from like 45 minutes up to even two hours or more depending on the structure of how your normal episodes go. But I would consider long form video to be anything that's typically between four to 20 minutes long unless you're in an interview type capacity and you're creating that specific type of video format. Short form, of course, we all know it as vertical video, usually it's no more than a minute or two long. For YouTube specifically, there is a 62nd max on that. So it could be argued that anything long form would be basically anything over one minute. However, the reason I don't say that and I start at four minutes is because of what YouTube cares about most, which is total watch time spent on the platform.
So when it comes to your job as a creator, the more that you can align yourself with YouTube's business goals, the better you'll be rewarded. And one of their main things is to essentially increase the amount of time. This is what built all the different algorithms, all the AI on the backend. It's all built to keep people on YouTube and to get them to come back tomorrow for as long as possible. So with long form content, I would say we really are looking at the starting frame of reference point is like four minutes all the way up to unlimited, several hours at a time. There are also, depending on the audience, if you have an audience that is into meditation and spirituality, I've seen creators put out eight to 10 hour videos that are just audio recordings or meditation, high frequency sound healing type of things. So there really is no upper limit on the length of long form videos, but I do personally believe that the four minute mark is really when we start to move into long form because of the thing that matters the most on YouTube, which is how do I keep people on YouTube for longer
Brett:
Total watch time, align your goals with YouTube's goals and good things are going to happen. I love it. So let's dive into what are some of your top tips? So if I want to grow my organic presence on YouTube, where do I start? What are some of the top tips that you recommend?
Liz:
Yeah, so I think it's really important as we were discussing before hopping on here to understand the difference in traffic sources. So when we're looking at YouTube specifically, and this is a concept that YouTube introduced to me after they studied several of the fastest growing, highest engaged channels on the platform, they essentially came up with a framework of the patterns that they found in the content those creators were putting out. And it really comes down to most of the fastest growing heist engaged channels have three main types of content or videos on their channel. The first is help content. So that's like the how-tos, the tutorials, the listical videos, the frequently asked questions that the target customer or the viewer has about a specific problem or challenge they're facing in their life. Then we have hub content and hub content is really the meat and potatoes of fast and very profitable YouTube growth Hub content is the repeatable series or formats that you put out on the channel.
So this is if you think about your channel as a TV show and you're the host of that TV show, these are the episodes that you're known for. So if we look at that in the context of even late Night talk show host for example, they have an interview format. They have a live performance format, and they typically will also have some kind of like a standup comedy format. That's what we mean when we're talking about hub content. It's these repeatable formats or repeatable series on related topics that you can essentially turn a never ending series of related videos that keeps the viewer watching and it's kind of what you're known for. It's your bread and butter. And then the last type of video that they discovered were is something we call hero videos. So these are much more designed for eliciting emotional connection with a viewer taking a stand on controversial or polarizing topics, really the why behind the brand, the soul behind the brand, why are you doing what you're doing?
Why does this matter in the world and how can we take somebody on a hero's journey where the first half we're kind of highlighting the problem and pouring salt in the wound. Midway through the video, we have some kind of a turning point realization and call to action to join in the movement to change it. And then the last half of the video is giving them action steps and more of the inspirational hopeful, okay, now let's go out in the world and make a difference. So when we're looking at the frequency and timelines for when and how and why to post these different styles of videos, health content is really great in the beginning because it's again, how-tos, tutorials, frequently asked questions. It's also really great for e-commerce brands specifically, but health content usually is going to rely on YouTube search traffic for the most part, right? Right. It's like the specific keywords that your customers are searching for around things that they're struggling with and they want to solve in their life. Now, the challenge and the limitation of just focusing on search strategy on YouTube organic is that search views as a whole on all of YouTube every single day account for about seven to 8%, definitely no more than 10% of total views that happen on the platform daily. Whoa. So then the question is where I thought it
Brett:
Was, I had in my head that it was something, I thought it was more like 50%. Has it just been on the decline in recent years or I said another longer move had? No, it's just,
Liz:
Yeah, it's a good question. I'm not sure that it's necessarily declining. It's pretty much always been that way. It feels a lot louder and a lot more significant. I think this is at least my personal take on it because that's what everybody talks about. You think about YouTube and you're like, oh, it's a search engine, it's owned by Google, blah, blah, blah. So there's a lot of content out there that really is pushing SEO and keyword research and all of that. However, it does have these limitations, and I don't think that's necessarily a decline with search traffic specifically. It's just kind of always been that way. It's just that the people doing SEO strategy tend to also be putting out a lot of the SEO content. So it's what you kind of first are exposed to when you get into the YouTube world, and same thing happened to me, I didn't even know that there were other available options.
It could help grow the channel significantly faster and with much more loyalty and higher engagement using some of these other traffic sources that really focus on optimizing for that hub content. What are those repeatable series that will bring people back to YouTube and keep them watching longer? So with search as a whole, all the total available views on YouTube, only less than 10% come from search traffic, which begs the question, where's the rest of the traffic coming from? So the other thing to pay attention to is the recommendation traffic sources. And this is really what YouTube's algorithms are built to do, is to support high quality content being pushed out to the right audiences. So if you think about YouTube channels as a whole, channels are designed to serve a specific value proposition to a specific audience. So when you start mixing all different kinds of formats and there's not really a core parent topic, we start to see obviously engagement and reach decline in that type of a scenario.
But when we're talking about YouTube recommendation traffic, this is really the sweet spot for people. If you want to grow fast and you want to pull in the right types of people, you have to learn how to optimize for YouTube recommendations. So what does that entail? First and foremost, we have the YouTube homepage, who doesn't want to hit the YouTube homepage, but the homepage also includes a subscription feed too. This is in your analytics. This would be called browse features. That's kind of how they classify it. If you're in your YouTube studio, looking at your data browse features includes YouTube's homepage as well as the subscription feed, which is essentially a secondary homepage just for the channels that you're already subscribed to. So that's the first and really biggest and probably easiest recommendation traffic source to crack into is the homepage traffic. But then we also have suggestive video, and you've probably seen this even when you're watching TV with your girls or YouTube TV with your girls, at the end of every video, yeah, you'll see the creator's end screen where they might have a couple related target videos linked up there for you, but at the end of that, YouTube will also tell you, Hey, this is the next best video to watch, and then it will just start auto-playing it.
This is very similar to how even Netflix works. If you finish a movie on Netflix, what does it do? It puts, there's three other recommended movies right below there. So suggestive video traffic also includes the sidebar if you are on desktop, the videos that YouTube's recommending for you based on what you're currently watching. And then if you're on mobile, those suggestive videos will be right below the video that you're watching. So homepage traffic as well as suggestive video traffic are really the secret keys to the YouTube kingdom, especially if you want to grow fast and you want to grow a really big brand, that is what you really need to figure out how to crack into. And it really comes down to a couple main things we have to consider the viewer's journey. So step one for the viewer is do they even see your video in one of those three traffic sources? That's called an impression. I probably don't have to explain impressions because you have a very smart audience that's called an impress. Yeah,
Brett:
You talk a lot about ads. So impressions will make sense for sure. Yeah, and I'm really glad to bring this out cause I'm assuming there's quite a difference between optimizing to be discovered in search on YouTube, the organic search results and optimizing for YouTube recommendations. So yeah, I'd love to hear this. So we're thinking about the viewer's journey continue. Yeah,
Liz:
So phase one is getting the impression in one of those three spots, and you're absolutely right. Optimizing for search is very different than optimizing for recommendation traffic. However, there is also this third crossover spot where you can optimize for all three, and that's really my favorite spot to be because that's where we see insane exponential results. But from the viewer's perspective, first and foremost, do they even see your videos pop up in those recommendations or in the search engine results page, if they're searching for a specific keyword, you don't have direct control over whether or not YouTube gives you those impressions. But what you do have direct control over is step two, three, and four for the viewer from the viewer's perspective. So let's say they do see your video in those impression spots. The next phase, and this is arguably the most important and biggest opportunity that you have, is the click through rate.
Do they click to watch your video and click through rate is going to come down to three primary things. First and foremost is the topic, is it relevant to the target viewer that's seeing it? And then from there, it's just the title and thumbnail because that's all they see in those impression spots. So getting really, really good at writing insanely clickable titles and creating complimentary imagery or packaging in the thumbnail designs is an absolutely essential skill for anybody that wants to grow their YouTube channel because it's directly correlated to your click through eight. Nice. Now, usually with click through eight, we're aiming for anywhere from seven to 10% is kind of a baseline. The only time I'd be okay with it not being within that baseline would be if the impressions just shot through the roof and all of a sudden we have 10 million impressions, it's expected that that would go down because that means YouTube's actually doing exactly what we wanted to do. It's showing it to wider and wider audiences.
Brett:
YouTube's loving your video and they're showing it to a lot of different places. We see the same thing on the ad side of things as well with you YouTube or with Google Shopping as an example, sometimes you're really insanely high clickthrough rates, but then as Google says, Hey, this is a great ad, and they start showing you more places and more often clickthrough rate comes down, but your overall impact goes up for short. Now I get the title and thumbnail piece. You talked about the topic of the video. Do you just mean what you're making the video about or is there something on the video where you signify this is the topic of the video?
Liz:
Yeah, well, everything you do on YouTube is going to come down to who you're making the videos for. So we have a specific process that will typically take people through where we get really clear on who the avatar is. And it's not that you necessarily have to just choose one avatar and stick with it, although that does help. You can have up to two to three varying avatars, but what they do need to share is core underlying values or psychographic behaviors. So why do they do what they do? What are their fears? What are their triggers? What are their values? What are their goals? Things of that nature are super, super important to break down psychologically for the viewer, and it's probably the same way with ads too, but that's the first step is figure out who you're making the videos for, because then from there, we can essentially pretend to be that viewer on YouTube and create a whole separate account, then start to behave as they would behave, and then study the patterns and top performing content that YouTube does put in those impression spots.
So that's kind of essentially how we reverse engineers starts with who is the person we're creating this content for in the first place, and then how can we become them so we can basically see what they see and then match and mirror our content to follow the patterns in top performing videos or top performing creators on YouTube as a whole. So yeah, click through rate is super important, and we have to have that relevancy factor first because even if you have a great title on thumbnail, if it's not relevant to the viewer you made it for, they're not going to click it anyway. So that's kind of that's, and then YouTube
Brett:
Is going to stop showing it, and then it's just going to die a
Liz:
Switch. Then a it gets buried painful death. Yeah, so that's phase two. Then let's say they do click on it because it's relevant to them and they like the packaging, the title and thumbnail. Then from there, we're on phase three for the viewer is once they're on the video, how long do they stay on the video? Do they leave after 30 seconds? Do they watch 80% of it do what is going on the backend once they land on the video? So really looking at the audience retention reports, and we want to bare minimum baseline 40% retention, if we can get it, can get up over 60, 70, 80% retention, basically doing exactly what YouTube wants creators to do, which is keep people on YouTube. So got it. That's super important to look at as well, is your audience retention reports. And see, just because you a video has a hundred thousand views, that doesn't really mean much if they all left after 15 seconds versus if you had a video that had 3000 views, but the viewers stayed for 85% of it.
That's what we're trying to do and what we're trying to optimize for there. So that's kind of phase three from the viewer perspective of what the creator needs to understand, click through rate and audience retention are two of the most important things that you need to optimize for. But then there's this fourth phase, which is once they're done watching your video, then what do they do? Do they go on to watch more of your videos or do they leave YouTube altogether, or do they just go over to a video that was recommended to them in the suggested up next spot that YouTube put in front of 'em, right? Where does that viewer go from there? And this is a part of YouTube organic strategy that I don't see a whole lot of people talking about really at all. But it brings it back to that importance of hub content and having repeatable formats or series, because you look at the biggest YouTubers in the world, like the Mr Beast of the world, they have essentially four or five main formats that they just repeat over and over with different people or different prizes or different environments.
And that's pretty much it because they have this proven formula of a video that gets really high clickthrough rate, really great audience retention. So if you find that you have a breakout video in those two regards that your audience really resonated with, then the next challenge from there is how do we turn this into a never ending series of related videos? So if you can though you don't have direct control over impressions that YouTube gives you, you do definitely have direct control over the click through eight, the audience retention and the ability to feed those viewers into these bingeable behaviors or rabbit holes of related videos for them. And that's really what we help support all types of creators in doing so that when you optimize those three things, the impressions are guaranteed to go up.
Brett:
Nice. So we're we're launching more with the help content, FAQs, listicles tips, ideas, five reasons why, five things to do, blah, blah, blah. So we're starting with that more often than Knocks, that's going to drive some search impressions and get a little bit of volume and traction for our channel. Then we're going to pivot and eventually do mostly hub content and hero content, or what does that kind of frequency or makeup look like over the long haul?
Liz:
Yeah, great question. So ideally, what we want to have happen from search videos or even from shorts videos is that they find those videos, but then they go on to watch more content on the channel. So we want to see both of those styles of content as a gateway into the repeatable series. So when it comes to, let's say you have your first, it's brand new first day on YouTube ever, you're going to put out 10 videos. Of those 10 videos, I'd probably make sure that at least four or five of them had some kind of keyword, especially if you have products or services or something that you sell on the back end of the channel. It is really important to have that help. Library of Evergreen FAQ's, tutorials, how-tos. So out of 10 videos, if you started with, I'd probably make sure at least four of them are search related, and then the large majority of the rest of them, like five, six of them, would be more focused on recommendation traffic sources.
So right out of the gate, we're doing both, because the cool thing about help content is you can make it at any time. You don't have to just do that in the beginning. And if you only focus on search based videos in the beginning, you may end up pigeonholing yourself into becoming a resource channel where essentially people will get those answers. They might find you through search, they watch that one video, but they got their answers. So there's really no incentive for them to go on to watch more content because they just came to YouTube to figure out how to change attire or how to file their taxes or whatever it is, and they got the answer from that video, and then they're gone. They're going to go apply the answer. So when you only focus on search stuff, you can run into what we call a resource channel, where it's like you may have one video that has a million views because it was really relevant and it's something a lot of people struggle with, but then the rest of your videos are getting two, 300 views, so there's not any crossover between your content because there's no real relationship between you and the viewer themselves.
So yeah, if you were starting with 10 videos, I'd say at least four of 'em should be some kind of search topics to get people in the door, because search is amazing for discovery, but we want to make sure that the bulk of the strategy is focused more on that hub content that has a higher likelihood of being recommended by YouTube. And then Hero videos is really only once or twice a year. This is like if you have a big launch coming up, if you are wanting to do press, you want to deepen the relationship with the viewers that you already have attracted to the channel hub, or sorry, hero content really isn't something that is like you're doing on a consistent basis every single month, because they usually have much more storyboarding that goes into them a lot more time, money, and energy that goes into the production them if you want them to really take off. And they're usually focused more on the emotional aspects of the human experience. How does this practical information or entertaining information also apply to who you are and what you're here to do on the planet? So
Brett:
Love it. Love it. Well have several more things I want to ask you, but we're running out of time. So we got about five minutes left. Let's go a little bit rapid fire for this next section, but mistakes that you see. So you coach a lot of people, you work with a lot of people, you've grown a lot of channels, hands on. What are some of the top mistakes you see YouTube creators make?
Liz:
Yeah, I would say not understanding traffic sources and how important recommendations are for YouTube growth and trying to cheat the system with especially paid advertising. Like, oh, let me just run some ads to these videos. Ooh, that's like, Ooh, it just makes, it grinds my gears when I see that. Okay, yeah, you might get a lot of
Brett:
Views on it, open number of views quickly though, but
Liz:
Yours, so it helps your ego quite a lot to get lots of views. But on the back end, we'll look at the data around it, and it's like we're getting people from the wrong countries. We're getting people in the wrong age groups. There's all kinds of stuff that can go wrong with that. And not only that, the watch
Brett:
Time is not good. The P people are not engaging with the video
Liz:
Usually. I mean, think of it, it's the difference between invitation and interruption marketing. If you're watching a YouTube video and then an ad pops on, you might go through and watch the remainder of that video, but in most cases you don't because it was interrupting your experience, right? You're not leaving comments, you're not watching the increased audience retention, you're not watching significant portions of the video. You might pop on because you were curious, but it can hurt audience retention, it can hurt click through rate, it can hurt engagement, and all those things YouTube's AI will be looking at and basically be like, oh, this video must not be that great, then let's just bury it. Right? So I would say that's one of the biggest things, especially for entrepreneurs and business owners, is trying to run ads to content to build an organic audience. And I just never think it's worth it ever, ever.
Brett:
Yeah. And so do you recommend that, obviously YouTube ads have their place, we spend millions a month on YouTube ads, but you shouldn't really mix your ads strategy and your organic strategy. They can compliment each other. You can take viewed video audiences of people that engage with your organic content, you can target them in ads, but are you typically recommending two separate YouTube channels, one to house your organic content and one to house your ad content?
Liz:
Yeah, definitely. The other reason for that too is to preserve the integrity of your organic data when you're doing analytics reviews, if you have all this paid traffic coming in YouTube on the backend, there are filtering tools and all that, but it's a little, it's kind of complicated to get there, and it's a much more advanced skill to be able to filter out paid versus organic traffic sources and all that. So YouTube's going to clump that all together on the back end of the channel. And especially for the more beginner type of analytics reports, you can filter it out in advanced analytics, however, it just creates an extra roadblock, an extra step to really be able to understand what's working organically for you. So typically we'll recommend that you keep those two channels separate. You have a separate, almost like a dummy account just for your paid advertising, and then you don't really SEO or put that out there at all. It's kind of just like this shadow account, because on the backend with Google Ads, like you were saying, you can still retarget totally the viewers that you get organically even on a separate account. So totally, I just think, you know, couldn't pay me enough to put ads on an organic channel.
Brett:
So we'll keep 'em separate. I am sold on that idea. I really appreciate that. So as we wrap up, Liz, I know people are going to be watching this and thinking, okay, I got to spend more time with Liz. I got to learn from her. I want to know all that she has to offer. So I think you get some free tools, some free downloads, and then also I want to hear about the Channel Amplifier program as well. So where should people go now if they want to learn more?
Liz:
So you can head over for free stuff, you can go over to YouTube growth hacks.com. We have a free little starter guide over there for you. And then as far as getting deeper level support and really learning how to take action on what we talked about today, you can head over to channel amplifier.com. It's a 90 day training program where the first eight weeks, you're essentially going to be going through a whole library of over a decade of YouTube experience and really breaking down what actually matters on the platform for successful organic growth. And then the last half of the program, we do hot seat coaching. So if you need a second pair of eyes on your data, you can't figure out what's going on with the channel, where your bottlenecks are and things like that. It's a really supportive community of other creators, and also you'll be able to get direct access to me in a much more affordable way than working.
Brett:
That is awesome. I'll, I'll lead you. So URLs, one more time to check both those out.
Liz:
Yep. YouTube growth hacks.com to get the starter guide for setting up your channel correctly. And then channel amplifier.com is where you can learn about the YouTube training program.
Brett:
Awesome. We will link to all of that in the show notes, but go check it out. Hang out with Liz, learn from Liz. List your name, ladies and gentlemen, you killed it. Super fun. The hour, or not quite an hour by way too fast. So now we're going to have to think about part three at some point. So Liz, really appreciate it. This was awesome. Thank
Liz:
You so much for having me.
Brett:
Absolutely. And thank you for tuning in. And as always, we'd love your feedback. We'd love to know what you'd like to hear more of on the show, topic suggestions, guest suggestions. We are open to it. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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