Gary Leland Show Episode 8
This week I interview video expert Jeremy Vest of Vidpow.com talking about optimizing YouTube – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com
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Gary: Jeremy, thanks for joining me today. We will be talking a little YouTube and I can’t think of anyone who would be better to talk to about this subject than you. Could you please tell us something about your site Vidpow?
Jeremy: Sure, great to be here. The idea behind Vidpow is to teach the average marketing person, someone who has never really used YouTube before, the ins and outs of what happens after the camera starts rolling. What do you do then? How do you grow your subscribership? We have monthly online conferences and weekly online courses all taught by 50 of the best people in the world, superstar YouTubers or just huge people in online marketing. We have gathered them all and made a pretty neat thing. We have been in business a few months but we are one of the largest, if not the largest, online video training company.
Gary: Where Vidpow may be new, you are certainly not new. You have done this for quite a while. Could you please give a couple of examples of companies that you have or do work with on their YouTube campaigns?
Jeremy: Unfortunately I can’t say most of them because we are the back end of the channels, but I can say that I have worked with over 20 of the top brands in America. We helped Adobe launch Adobe Television with a company called xTrain in 2008; we also created the first videos for the books for dummies, and work with a lot of really large companies right now. Unfortunately I can’t really say the names, but if you think of the top 20 or 30 brands that is where the clients are.
Gary: I actually attended one of your conferences and it was pretty cool because the people running the conference used my site as an example and critiqued it for me so I learned a lot from that experience.
Jeremy: It is pretty neat. The cool thing about these online conferences is that they are online as well. Probably 80-90% of our viewers watch these conferences on their own time instead of in real time. The benefit of real time is that you literally get full access to these guys and if we are not able to answer your question right then and there, we are sure to get you an answer. You’re literally in the room with people with up to a couple of hundred million views and more. They didn’t get that success by being pretty; they do know what they are doing.
Gary: I thought you did a great job of making sure that all of the questions were answered. You guys had taken notes on them to make sure they got an answer. Now let’s move into talking about YouTube to help us sell physical product. How can we use YouTube to help us sell product?
Jeremy: First let’s talk about the whole philosophy of how video works into online marketing. If a picture is worth 1000 words than a video is worth 1 million words. Is there a better medium online to promote a product or service? Most of the time there really isn’t anything better. If you have a really clever info graphic or single graphic, obviously you can still capture people’s imagination and get them through the funnel to become a sale. The reality is, video is the most powerful online medium. If you think of that in terms of selling a physical product, how else are you going to show off the great benefits and features of your product? I will give you an example. I worked with a local company here in Dallas called Wasp Barcode and we got their channel up to 1.5 million views. They sell barcodes, barcode scanners, barcode printers, and we came to a point where on of the biggest lead sources was YouTube. A lot of the examples I use most of the time are these huge brands that I work with that get hundreds of millions of views, but the reality is everyone can benefit from YouTube, you just have to understand how to do it. Taking this old school style of company and making YouTube its biggest lead source in company history was not an accident or good luck. It was strategy and a comprehensive plan. It took a few years, but we got there. I think a lot of people look at YouTube as the last social platform, but did you know that YouTube has eclipsed Facebook in the US as the biggest social media platform? 18-36 year old males now watch YouTube more than they watch television – all of television. I still can barely grasp that statistic; I grew up in the television world. The world has changed and television will not continue to be the force that it has been over its years of existence. One of the things I like best about Gary and his channel with over 2 million views, is he does a good job but he doesn’t worry about quality too much, he just gets in there and does his thing. People have this notion that they need to have a $3,000 camera and all of this editing equipment, but the reality is that people procrastinate so much that Gary will get another million views before they even turn on that expensive camera! My suggestion is just to do stuff, test and learn from your mistakes and experiences.
Gary: I am definitely a big believer in that. I tell people all of the time that they just need to do it and to not wait.
Jeremy: Go to youtube.com/softball. Why is Gary successful? What is the trick behind that? The reality is, he is creating stuff that people want to see. The number one mistake that people make on YouTube is that they go create a video around their products or services. Let’s face it: unless if you are really attractive, famous, or funny, no one is going to care about you. Instead think about this: what if you made content that people were actually looking for and created it in a fashion that people like to watch. For example, if you have a spinning logo for the first 7-8 seconds of your video, people are going to leave because people do not like to wait. Get to the point quickly, make sure your eyes are well lit because people engage with your eyes, make sure people can hear your voice, and if you have something good to say that actually helps someone else they are going to stick around and maybe even subscribe to your channel. If you do that a couple of more hundred times and you will start to see results from that effort. Gary would you agree with that?
Gary: Some of my shows are quick to the point, like the shows where I am trying to sell something and I have a product review. My other shows, like the hour-long shows, have about 8 seconds that is nothing special; it’s just fan build up. If they are watching that show then they know what is coming, they know what to expect before their actual content begins. I do believe that it has a lot to do with your content to be honest. If you have an hour show and your fan base is looking to learn something that they know is free, then 8 seconds will not turn them off. It is like the price they pay to get free information.
Jeremy: You’re absolutely correct. Now for someone who has never heard of you before, that 8 seconds could be the difference in whether they stay to watch or not, but there are two schools of thought here. If you have subscribers, it is a different story. If you don’t have a lot of subscribers, then you do need to be quick and to the point. Maybe at the end of the video or somewhere in the middle you try to drive those non-subscribers to the hour-long show. There is a different mentality between Gary’s hour-long show and how to throw a softball. If you are specifically looking for something than you have to get to the point. How long your video should be depends on how long you can engage someone. The videos Gary has on specific items are around 90 seconds, which is a great length and his longer shows are a whole hour. Use YouTube analytics to figure out when people are turning off your video and that will help you find an appropriate length. Most people can’t engage over a couple of minutes, but if you are really funny, entertaining, informative, and engaging, then you can throw out the rules. If you are trying to get people interested in your product, make it interesting, make it short, and make it to the point.
Gary: In all of my hour-long shows, I am only on there for 90 seconds to a minute, and then I cut off to a seminar I recorded. The people who are going to watch these know that it is a seminar and will not be 5 minutes long. The reason why they come to watch is to hear an Olympian talk about how to hit the ball, so I am on the screen for about 90 seconds at the beginning and 30 seconds at the end thanking them and asking them to come back next week.
Jeremy: That’s brilliant. There is always a time and place to do long format videos which has been something that YouTube likes and there is a new ranking algorithm factor that shows that time watched is the number one ranking factor on YouTube. That’s why I’m telling everyone to start as long as you can engage someone because that’s the number one ranking algorithm. There is also a ranking for how many videos they watch from your channel and how many times they come as subscribers to your channel. The amount of videos they watch and the number of times they come to your channel every week or month does matter. Overall view duration of all of your videos is a big deal. The ranking algorithm does seem to favor how many times your channel is visited. Having one video a week is very important. There are 3 types of content you should do. The first is about your products and services, your CEO, etc. The second is how-to tips, which is what people will look for and you can answer people’s questions. The third type is the viral video. Now you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than creating a real viral video. Create something that may go viral, but if it doesn’t its not a big deal. For that reason, I would create 4 or 5 videos and put them out one at the time. As a small business owner on YouTube, I would shoot one video per week and try to legitimately help people instead of shouting my product information from the rooftops. Quite honestly this is a new school format where you don’t have to tell people to buy the product; in fact, people do not like getting sales pitched to death. If you show a cool product with a different use for it and show it against the competitions model of the product, people will be more inclined to buy. If you just tell people how cool it is and don’t visual show them how it can and does work or you are boring and lame, then rethink your approach. Try to be as entertaining as you can, get to the point quickly, do it often, find out what your audience wants from you, and be at the heart of it. If none of that works, there are a million strategies you can use. One I would use is Ad Words for video.
Gary: Let’s slow down. I know Ad Words very well and used it to the point where I was spending $10,000 a month on them. I don’t use them any longer and my business is up due to the YouTube and social media. At 10 cents per ad I wouldn’t have a problem going back into this. I didn’t realize that there was an Ad Words for video.
Jeremy: We are going to have courses on this on the site. There is an Ad Words for Video on Google Ad Words and there are a couple of different types. The first is called Pre-roll, which are those ads that have the “click after 5 seconds” option that everyone is trying to take as soon as the timer hits 0.
Gary: You know I actually watch those to help the person out. I think of it as my way to pay them for the free information they are providing me with.
Jeremy: You know the really cool thing about these 30-second clips is that if you don’t watch up to a certain point, people don’t have to pay you for that view. I have had campaigns where we have had 1 million impressions but only had to pay for 140,000 views.
Gary: So it would be good to have a 60 second one then and get all of my info I want out there?
Jeremy: It is actually a better idea to have a 27 second one and if they don’t watch it 100%, then you don’t have to pay. It’s 30 seconds or 100% to have to pay for the ad. So what I do is a 20 second one with a 5 second in slate and that in slate, which is the subscribe button and other videos they can go watch. What I would do for this specific one is to have an in slate that has a logo that they can’t click on, so they click off and go to another video before 30 seconds so you don’t have to pay at all.
Gary: That’s just in regular Ad Words?
Jeremy: Yes it is. And the other kind is called in display. If you use the search function on YouTube, you can display ads on the search results. On the actual videos of softball for example, you can show up on the right side as an ad. These perform better for me and are keyword centric, so if someone is looking for left handed batting techniques, you ads will come up.
Gary: Is there a way to advertise in ad words and have it appear in the regular search results on Google?
Jeremy: Yes, you can specify that on the actual ad words or YouTube’s ad words for video, you would cross breed those. I wouldn’t combine them though because they are two different platforms. I would have normal ads running on Google and your YouTube ads running on YouTube.
Gary: I was thinking of my 90 second clips on the Fastpitch.TV store where I talk about a product and tell them where to go buy it, If they were searching that item in the regular content you would have other names and my video because I am probably the only person with a video.
Jeremy: In the last few months, I don’t know why or what happened, but you may have heard of Google Authorship. You used to see a lot of video thumbnails on Google and we are not really seeing that anymore. Google kind of just took that out of the algorithm.
Gary: Well that is really great to know about the ad words because I had not messed with that at all. Great tip on the pre roll as well and putting the slate on the end because the chance of people making it to the end is slim.
Jeremy: In fact not only is it slim, but they are pre qualified. Now if they are going on your landing page, they are pre qualified because they want to see your products.
Gary: Do annotations work in pre rolls?
Jeremy: No, but the pre rolls work as a link to your website or landing page so you can click on it and go straight to the page.
Gary: Can you take a look at the annotations on my page and let me know what you think of those? I have them on my product review videos for the duration of the video. Should I have them up the whole time? Is the purchase annotation in the right place?
Jeremy: I have a couple of suggestions for you. First I would move the purchase annotation to the top left because we read left to right, top to bottom. The eyes naturally go that direction. Also, when you hover over the “click here to purchase” the background is black. I would change that to a red, orange, or yellow color because then the annotation will be shaded that color which will make it stand out more. The next thing I would do is not have the annotation up there for the duration of the video. Have it pop up for 10-15 seconds and then disappear for a few seconds. That way, it will catch the attention of your audience and hopefully create more business. The last thing I would change is what your annotation says. Using the word purchase is very intimidating and final. Instead, use phrases like “learn more”, or “save 20%”, or “free shipping”. If you make the annotation less intimidating it will also most likely get more clicks.
Gary: Well, that is some great information I will have to fix those right away.
Jeremy: I also am looking at your Meta description and you only have one line – purchase the zip board at URL. You need to give them a reason to look at your site. Maybe have some nice copy in the 5 lines before the show more button with the URL being the last thing they see before having to expand the section. You have to tell someone why they should click the link and go to your site.
Gary: I thought that being simple would get people to visit my site. Thanks for the extra tip there, it should make a big difference. Thanks for coming on the show today, there was a lot of great information given today. Be sure to visit Jeremy’s site vidpow.com and watch these courses and conferences.
If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com
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