Let’s be real.
The term “niche site” kinda dropped off years ago.
But every now and then you’ll hear it again–usually when some blogger reports earning $97,540 from a relatively small and site.
So are niche sites dead for 2020 and beyond?
What about “authority sites?”
What the heck is E.A.T. for SEO–and why should bloggers care?
How important is niching down in 2020?
Jim Harmer from Income School is here to help us sort all that out!
What’s the difference between a niche site and an authority site?
Pete: [00:20:00] What is a niche site or authority site or if there’s a distinction at all, what is your context there? What does that actually mean now.
jim 2: [00:20:20] Where your question is, is going, is what I agree with. I don’t think that there’s really much of a difference between a niche site and authority site, but for context, a niche site is something that’s just a very narrow topic. I, you know, maybe. This is something like, uh, you know, TIG welding stainless steel, and it’s just all about how to do TIG welding.
Right? Um, whereas maybe an authority site is just metal work, , in general. And so, you know, the same principles apply. There are benefits and drawbacks to small versus big topic for a website. , I think this is more something that internet, the marketers want to talk about and really. Both ways can work fine.
The same principles would apply. I wouldn’t really even do many things different.
pete 2: [00:21:03] so my next question, I’d be curious to get your thoughts on. Let me give you some context. It, I was going to say our niche sites dead. That seems like a very like, buzz word
jim 2: [00:21:15] Yeah, it’s a good question though.
It’s a good question and I might kind of say yes, honestly, and here’s, here’s why. . With Google, they’re really focusing on EAT expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in SEO. Like you hear the Google engineers, if a Google engineer gives a speech, tweets, anything, everyone in this office is tuned in.
We hear every word we want to know. , and they talk pretty often on the Google, Google webmaster, Hangouts, etc. All they talk about for the last year is EAT. That’s it. That’s what they care about in SEO right now. They care that you are a trustworthy source of information. And so because of this emphasis on EAT, , and you as the author being a reliable person to talk about this topic, .
It takes a lot of work to establish yourself as some kind of authority in a space. And when I say authority, that is going to scare some people off saying, Oh no, I’m not in authority and quilting that I’m blogging about, so I can’t do this. No, you can get experience just through doing that thing. You don’t have to have gone to school for quilting.
Right. , and so that’s totally fine. Not a problem. They just want…
What Google wants is when somebody Googles. , what should I do if my left arm is, is tingling and I’m having heart palpitations and I’m short of breath? They don’t want to send you to a blog to some energy healer that wants you to roll metal balls around on your Palm and, and do Juju stuff.
They want to send you to a blog post that’s saying you’re having a heart attack. Call nine one and go nine one one and go to the hospital right. That’s what Google’s terrified of, is that they’re sending you to a good, reliable source of information, and this is true in every niche, but especially those that are medical, financial.
Anyway, the reason I set that context is if you’re going through the work of establishing yourself as a reliable source of information, why would you ever have reduced yourself to just TIG welding.
Why can’t you just choose a name of the website that’s just welding fanatics.com and then you can talk about TIG welding as your major topic if you want, but by just calling the website, welding fanatics.com instead of, I love TIG welding, then now you can expand as your site succeeds.
You could pivot if your content is not succeeding, etc. So. Uh, I would actually steer people away from this concept of the niche or, or micro-niche site, and instead of like S, at least with the name of the blog, go a little bit broader, something that still makes a visitor feel welcome, that like, Hey, this is the source for me, but go a little bit broader so that you can expand so that you can pivot.
What has Jim’s team done on their sites to build E.A.T?
pete 2: [00:24:07] Okay, so this is a great point. I’m really glad you brought this up. Besides just the name though, like obviously a bunch of people listen to this podcast. I already have a blog. , I’d be curious to hear how you, and specifically like the income school team or whoever have responded to that, is there anything else you’ve done on your own sites, whether that’s your main site or niche sites or whatever, , in response to this, like how else besides like a name, is there anything else you’ve done to kind of like, make that.
Uh, but better for EAT. What’s the word I’m looking for here? You know what I mean?
jim 2: [00:24:42] Yeah, absolutely. So the first niche site that I built was about pontoon boats. I wouldn’t build that site in 2019 2020 I guess that’s 2020 now. , I wouldn’t build that, that site today. I would build. Boats. I just decide about boats or maybe fishing, and I have content about boats. I wouldn’t build a site just about pontoon boats anymore.
I could have a ton of content on that, etc. So that’s one way that we have implemented is just getting a little bit bigger of a topic that we’re making a site for. Because somebody who is an expert on pontoon boats could also be pretty believable if they’re talking about a bass boat. Right. And so in terms of EAT, I think it’s a good.
Good choice to go as broad, um, on your topic as you think you could gain credibility with Google for that topic. So I think that’s the biggest way that we’ve, that we’ve implemented in our actual business, but it also creates a lot of problems for someone with a business like us. Two years ago, we set out on a mission to just create blogs like crazy.
Right now, our portfolio is loaded. We have. Outdoor troop and in Bora pets, and nobody tells you their niche site names, by the way, here you go. We’ll tell them to you. We have niche sites. Oh, we have outdoor troop and embara pets and camper report and dirt bike, planet, et cetera. Um, and we were just, , we had an office of 50 writers who are just mass producing blog posts.
And it was an awesome strategy for two years ago when we began, uh, today. I would not approach it that way because those authors know nothing about this topic. They have no EAT. Now. We’re focused on going much slower, going after bigger keywords and absolutely crushing every industry we were in with the absolute highest quality content, rather than the most volume so that no blogger can keep up with our volume.
pete 2: [00:26:40] Sweet. I’m having Spencer Haws and the podcast and like two weeks or something like that. I’m going to do the same thing to him. I’d be like, no, you need it. You need to like tell me the URL. I like each one of your, your niche sites.
jim 2: [00:26:50] You know, most of the people in the industry are very reputable and aren’t going to lie to you. But we have had a couple people, I, in fact I know of specifically who have YouTube channels and stuff who are saying things that they don’t actually even own sites. They aren’t even creating niche sites. Uh, we interviewed someone, Ricky and I did, and after, after the recording was over, um, like we said, so.
You know, we’re off the record, like, what are you working on right now? And he just told us, he said, you know, since Amazon changed its affiliate program, I haven’t really even been able to make money with niche sites anymore. So, , I, I’m not really even doing it. And we’re like, you’re, you’re business is teaching people how to do this.
Right? It’s crazy. But there are definitely those out there.
pete 2: [00:27:36] rock on. More power to those people. Good Lord, that makes me angry. So I want to talk about niching down and niche down. The riches are in the niches. I swear if I hear that phrase one more time, I’m going to explode by the way. , I want to hear it from Jim’s mouth though. How would you, because everything you just said about broadening your scope, about broadening your niche even, and not necessarily that you have to produce.
Content across like more categories that you don’t feel comfortable about, but specifically for branding and specifically for like, I’m going to say like the avatar, like those people might be interested in different kinds of boats, not just pontoon boats or whatever. How do you respond to like these notions that bloggers probably hear all the time, which is like the riches are in the niches, niche down, niche down, niche down.
How do you respond to that?
How much does “niching down” actually matter anymore?
jim 2: [00:28:27] Well. So I think there’s some value to it as long as we implement the advice correctly. So if I’m starting a brand new website, let’s say I’m writing a about, um. Oh, I had a photography blog for many years. I actually sold it a little bit ago. I sold that business a couple months ago. Um, but, uh, let’s say we’re doing wildlife photography.
We’re talking about, so if I were starting today, a brand new website about wildlife photography, the last blog posts I could ever recommend for you to write is best wildlife photography lenses. Don’t do this. , you’re a brand new website and there are behemoths in the industry who have a decade of, of history with SEO and millions of people going to those sites who have also written that blog post.
You’re going to get crushed like a bug if you write that. And so in terms of the. Content, the specific articles you write, I think there’s some value to the riches are in the niches. Don’t, don’t clot your ears. I just said it. Um, I think there’s some value to that in terms of the topics. Frankly, I think the reason that people say niche down and niche down again, is you’re hearing this from people who are successful in an industry and don’t want competition.
They’re like, you sure I did a site about general photography, but no, no, no. You should do. Wildlife photography in upper Northwest Maine. Right. Um, um, so I’ve been, sometimes that’s the, that’s the reason we hear that. . I think in terms of selecting the size of your niche, the most important thing to me is could I get to $100,000 a hundred thousand people a month coming to this site if no, unless it’s a very easily monetized double niche.
It’s. Probably too small for me personally to get excited about that industry. Um, so if there are 100,000 people who are going to be Googling that stuff this month, and you think you could get to your site, then I say, cool. Now that’s, I think, an important number. Uh, I had somebody who was making a website about.
Yellowstone, , and I don’t know what today his numbers are, etc, but I said, I think it’s too narrow. And so we started looking at some numbers, and I don’t, again, I don’t know the specific numbers, but let’s say there were 2 million people that go to Yellowstone each year. And I said, okay, how many of them are going to be Googling.
Okay. You know, specific questions about Yellowstone before they go, that isn’t going to be answered by the national park website itself. , or many of the others. And anyway, we broke this down and we said, well, all your traffic is going to come from the summer. And unless you have 100% market saturation, you can only expect about 50,000 people a month.
And I said, let’s just size up from Yellowstone to national parks. and I think for him that was a very important decision because otherwise you put a ton of work into Yellowstone lover.com and in the end you find that, dang, it’s just, it wasn’t quite. Big enough to bring in the kind of income that I wanted.
Now, obviously that’s just an example. I could poke holes in it myself, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Here’s a confession…
I have tried to start journaling several times, and I’ve failed each time.
However–I’m also obsessed with maxing out my personal productivity.
So when people like Matt Ragland reach out and tell me I can see benefits from bullet journaling (or other similar exercises), I listen.
Spoilert Alert:
Ever since recording this episode w/ Matt–I HAVE JOURNALED EVERY DAY IN 2020! Wooooo go me!
Also, a weekly “productivity planni
Below is the transcript from today’s show! Want to download the full transcript as a PDF? Click here.
Pete: [00:02:56] Matt, welcome back to the show.
Matt Ragland: [00:02:58] Thanks Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here again
Pete: [00:03:00] Okay. We’re recording it this to save time. Yeah. All right.
Matt Ragland: [00:03:04] tell them that.
Pete: [00:03:06] Oh, well, that’s okay. I’m all about radical authenticity and transparency in this brand, so, you know, I’m just, I’m a lazy podcaster. I did change headphones, so it might as well be like a whole new session. No. Uh, so last time you were on here at 20 minutes ago, we talked about planning specifically, but something I stink at and, and relatively clueless about to which you are apparently a.
Master from what I hear, at least gaging by some people we both know, and your YouTube channel is journaling more specifically bullet journals. I don’t even know if that means, by the way, I’m going to ask you in a second, and or productivity planning. So a bunch of people know what planning is, how much people know what productivity is, but could you like define or help us understand?
Like what do you mean when you say productivity planning?
Matt Ragland: [00:03:58] Yeah, it’s a great question. And you can think of it really in like its simplest sense of saying that I. Intend to, I’m planning to be productive or productively planning, but it’s really like I’m planning to be productive with the time that I have. And there are a bunch of different elements that go into that.
So I’m going to break down each one. Add, like it’ll tell you how, how I think through it. And a really simple acronym that I have for this is just ACE, so a, C, E, and that stands for awareness, clarity, and execution. And the way that I think through that is first and foremost, I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with.
I know I did four years of a, like. Like I wanted to get this thing done, but like I got to the end of the day, end of the week, end of the month, no progress or very little progress based on what I planned. Even on doing so way to productively plan or plan to be productive is by building an awareness of the time that you actually have available.
And you can do this by just doing it. Probably just a couple of weeks, or even just a couple of days of reviewing time that you’ve, recent time that you’ve had in the past, and then previewing time that you. Yup. Assume that you’re going to have available in the future by doing that re and preview. Then you can kind of look at it in this point.
You’re raising your awareness of the time that you believe you have available. Now, I do recommend that people spend, if they really want to get serious about this, spend a few days, like literally tracking your time, like in 30 minute increments, and that will. That will really, really raise your awareness of the things that you actually spend your time on.
The next part of
Pete: [00:05:52] can I make a quick comment? I’m sorry. , I just finished writing a freelance article for Fiverr on like time-tracking and specifically like devices, software and stuff like that. And so I pulled a bunch of people, I just wanna share this really quick, and I ask people like, what is. Uh, the best way to like get started or what did I ask?
What are some common mistakes that beginners make? And I pulled like 50 people. The overwhelming response to that was like, stop trying to like over-complicate that and just grab a piece of paper and a pen and just write down what you were doing. Like you don’t need the fancy apps, so you don’t need to like spend money on toggle or rescue time or tie Miller or whatever yet, if you want to, great, go for it.
But you don’t need any of that. Just like a piece of paper. Start trying to become aware of where your time goes. Okay. Sorry, I interrupted.
Matt Ragland: [00:06:37] Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I’m really glad you brought that up because the way that I teach time-tracking too, like people from a YouTube channel or my email list is just that like using an index card or a say like pocket sized notebook and I just write down. In Rose, the hours of the day that I’m awake, and then another line down the middle, and I’m basically just writing it in 30 minute increments.
This is the main thing that I’ve spent my time on. Like say for example, people I like, say I wake up at five or six, usually one of those hours, and normally what I’ll just write in that six to six 30 is like coffee read or journal. And people be like, Hmm. And you know, they just, you know, some like minor trolls online.
I’m like, well, what about your shower? Do you go to the bathroom? Like, stop, stop. And so, but what I
Pete: [00:07:29] How many minutes
Matt Ragland: [00:07:30] Yeah. And, but what I mean by that is don’t, again, don’t overcomplicate. Even like a simple, like pen and paper tracking, just gotta write down or like, I don’t write down, like spent seven minutes making oatmeal.
I write, you know, for 30 minutes we made breakfast and spend time together as a family. Or it might just say breakfast, whatever. But by doing that, the other, and the other thing that’ll be is that you can really feel when you’re lying to yourself at that point. And if you write down like spent time with my family, but you were just looking at Twitter on your phone the whole time, or seeing where the latest college football recruits have committed.
Not saying that I’ve done that from personal experience, but you’ll know like, Oh gosh. Even if you still lie to yourself by writing it down, you’ll know and you’ll know that if I can be focused on my family for this stretch of time, then it’s going to be easier to feel good about focusing on another project that I have coming.
So yeah. That is the awareness piece of understanding the time that you have available. The C is for clarity, and that’s where we get a little bit more into planning out. We’ve talked about this in the past episode, that kind of like 70, 20, 10, um, and now Alesis of where your span of. What projects you need to spend your time on.
And so that gives you a lot of clarity with the goals that you have, the systems that you need in order to implement them and for, for achievement of those goals. And then the E part of that is for execution. And so what we’re doing with executions are saying like, okay, I’m aware of the time that I have.
I’m clear. On the things that I need to do and the, and then I need to be able to execute on those tasks, on those tactics that I have set out. And a lot of that is just being able to stay focused, remove distractions, and keep like consistently kind of reviewing and previewing your days and weeks so that you make sure you’re staying, you’re staying on task.
Pete: [00:09:33] I, I’m really glad you brought up that last word, reviewing that. I was going to ask about that. If you have any system in place or habits or whatnot to actually doing a little bit of retrospective, not just for analyzing, like just how you spent your time. , you might look at, I’ll try and tracking report or go back and look at your piece of paper of like how you spent your days, but also like judging the, the C and the E like, okay, what race was I spending my time on?
How did I execute this for soap? Do you have any like systems in place for that?
Matt Ragland: [00:10:04] Yeah. the biggest one for that is just like a simple series of prompts. And you kind of brought up too, that I use already as like, you know, what did, what did morning Matt intend on doing and was I able to execute on that throughout the day? And yeah, that will, I’ll say this also too to the listeners, is that right?
Even, you know, for me, you know, again, radical transparency.
The more that I do it, the better I get it. Kind of understanding what I’m actually able to do in a day. And like when you start doing this or low and you’re going to be like, I’m going to knock out these five to seven things, and then you do like two or three if that, and it’s good to do two or three, but you feel bad.
And so what I do with this prompt is I look at it, you know, I review it and I think to myself like, okay. Why did I not get those five to seven things done? Especially if they’re like pretty core things, like not just like, you know, maybe you know, unload the dishwasher or you know, something else. It may not take a ton of time
Pete: [00:11:06] it takes me a lot of time, by the way,
Matt Ragland: [00:11:08] Okay.
Pete: [00:11:09] lots of kids at home. It takes me a lot of time to do that. I have to plan that
Matt Ragland: [00:11:11] that’s fair. That’s fair point. That’s fair point. But I’m reviewing and I’m looking at it and the important, like same mindset for me is that I’m reviewing it not as a judge, but as an observer. So I’m not sitting there like, why was in I able to do this? Like you were bad. You are not as productive.
I’m just kind of re I’m observing myself throughout the day. Again, kind of going back to that awareness piece a little bit, but I’m just observing myself throughout the day and being like, Oh, well morning Matt thought he could do this, wasn’t able to do all those things. What were the reasons? Like, well, yeah, I actually didn’t have as much time.
As I thought I did. So I need to like be a little bit better with my awareness of the time I have available. Uh, what is very common is that I either get really into a task or something just takes longer. And so I need to be able to understand, again, be clear on the time. That the time that something’s going to take.
And so that review and preview, cause then I can go into the next day as I’m previewing the next day at this point and think to myself, okay, I actually can probably only do two or three things, two or three main things really well. What do those need to be. Can I block out some time for them? Do I need to like change my environment in a way to support focus and remove distractions so that that ACE kind of method of awareness, clarity and execution is how, like I productively plan for the days, weeks, and months.
Pete: [00:12:45] I love that. I have a few comments. One, it almost seems like the AE and ACE awareness is probably like the one thing that most people are kind of. Not missing, that’s not the right word, but they too like gloss over a little bit, which is interesting to me. I actually, I’d forgot about this until your, you were just talking last week I had the like the longer we do this, like once every couple of months, my number two, my integrated Reyna, we have like a three or four hour call and we like just do like some longterm planning and visioning and stuff like that.
After that, like a day or two later, she sent me a Voxer message, like a voicemail and she was like, Pete. I am going to create a doc that I humbly request you fill out. And it was literally called things you do, things you do. She wanted me to like break out all of my tasks, like for the blog and for the podcast and like email marketing and like customer support and like everything she wouldn’t have know all the things I do.
So we could break out like roughly how much of the, uh. Roughly how much time do these take? Does Pete really need to do these tasks or can we get rid of those? Or like vice versa, or like what is that? And now that I think about it, I’m using air table. By the way, I struggled to kind of define a good spot to like put it because a Google doc wasn’t quite enough air table.
, let’s just awareness and it’s been really helpful to go through that process. So that’s one last point. And then I want to move on to bullet journals. The C, , wait, why aren’t F ease execution a is awareness. What does he stand for? The actual word. Clarity. Okay. We kind of went through that really quickly cause we talked about it in the last episode and I would highly suggest people go back to that because just knowing what to spend your time on, I feel like there’s also like another humongous battle.
So I think that’s worth going back and checking out.
Matt Ragland: [00:14:36] Yeah. One, one quick addition to that because I you, you’re right. We talked about a lot more in the previous episode, but another kind of a system or like way of thinking about how to, how to get clear about the kind of projects or tasks to spend your time on is, , Jim Collins has a similar, like his is in 70 20, 20.
His isn’t 70, 2010 but he has one for 50 30, 20. That is also really, uh, applicable to creatives. And he says that he has to spend 50% of his time on creative on his creative projects. So whether that is writing a new book, this is the author of good to great and several other business books, but it has to be on something writing or creating a workshop or training program.
For his, you know, for the clients that he has. So 50% of his time, , has to go towards those activities. Uh. 30% needs to go towards researching the content and systems and strategies that then like inform the actual, like 50% and you can, you can look this up. Uh, it’s pretty, there’s several articles on it.
So just in case I’m like paraphrasing some of it, but then 20% is like all the other stuff. So. Managing it like the managerial, like admin tasks. And so as you’re thinking about, again, like what do I need to spend my time on? And it could, that can also shift based on where you are. I know for me early on, and still kind of to this day, I spend more like 60 70% of my time on trying to create content because that is like the lifeblood of, you know what, what I’m doing outside of my main, my main role with Podio.
Pete: [00:16:21] So really quickly, I kind of want to dive into this. I’m such a noob when it comes to journaling. I want to give one confession and then want to ask you what is a bullet journal? For those who don’t know my confession, and this is good context for you to have, Matt, and as I asked these, I stink at journaling.
I stink at it. What I eventually ended up with that has been helpful for me personally is, and a bunch of people will kind of talk about this as well. I don’t, I don’t, it’ll do the morning routine thing. I don’t do much in the mornings at all. What I’m really good at is thinking through how I want my day to go the night before.
So I literally open up my calendar and my to do list right before I go to bed. , and I’ve watched people say like, you know, avoid that right before you go to bed. No, I need that. And I want that. I look at all my, like. Podcasting, interviews like this and my, like other meetings or whatever, and I looked down at my to do list and then anything on my to do list, I literally get rid of, I push it to the next day if it’s not done yet, or I reschedule often the future, or if I did it, I check it off or whatever.
So I end each day with zero things on my to do list. Even if I just pushed them off. It feels good, by the way, when you do that, it feels great even if you just like push it off. , and then I like just go through mentally my entire day and that’s pretty much, yeah. That’s it. And then I hit the ground running like the next morning or whatnot.
I’ve tried journaling at night. I’ve tried journaling in the morning. I’ve tried doing it digitally through some different apps. I’ve used OneNote, I’ve used, um, bear is my like writing app. I use that from time to time. I’ve tried like physical journals, like leather-bound beautiful. I’ve even like spent money on it.
So I would like do it more, that sort of technique. And I failed at it. So I have two questions in here, but the first one is. Very specifically. What does bullet journaling mean.
Matt Ragland: [00:18:07] So bullet journaling is a term and a method, uh, coined, created by writer Carol, who is a designer in New York. And it literally is, you know, like the bullet point that is the bullet in bullet journaling and basically, and there, there’s a. It was kind of like a whole key or legend of like different signifiers that you use again too in a signify what something is that you’re writing down in your bullet journal.
And I actually, I think bullet journals sounds better than bullet planner, but that’s like, and people use it for different things. But I, I actually use mine as a little bit more of like a bullet. Planner, because what I use my bullet journal for is basically when you create a little bullet, you’re saying like, this is a to do item.
And when you ask writer why you chose the bullet instead of like, . A box or like a circle that you could check off for a to do item. He would say that, um, he, that the bullet was just faster and easier to create and he wanted to do that. So it’s as simple, it’s as simple and nontechnical as that. But when you complete.
When you complete the task, you basically then put an X through around over that bullet to show completion. And if for you, let’s say like just translating this to what your current evening routine is. So as you’re, as you do things, you’d go through and you put an X over those bullets. If you want to push something off to the next day, then you would basically create a like right facing angle bracket that shows you’re migrating it.
Moving it, pointing it to that next day. And then you’re just, and then just kind of go through everything that you had. The way that I use a bullet journal usually is that I’ll have two sections for each day. And the top section is any time specific agenda items. So whether that’s a meeting like our, uh, or you know, an interview, something that has a specific time to it, I write those down at the top.
Cause those are most important to me. And I’ll get to the digital aspect of this in a second. But then after that I’ll start to write out like. The three to four bullets, you know, main tasks, any sub tasks all go in underneath that. Um, where people mainly think about journaling or even like keeping a diary of like, this is what happened today and this is how it impacted me and this is what I feel about it.
I don’t do a ton of that in the bullet journal, and if I do, it’s usually just like just a hyphen dash to indicate a note. That’s the signifier for note and I’ll just write down usually like one or two sentences about recording or documenting the day. I don’t often talk about like my feelings around the day or I don’t.
If I do, that’s not a requirement. My only like. Job or rule for journaling or documenting for the day is to write one or two sentences about what happened or, and all I have to do is say, what happened? I don’t have to say like, what happened and how did you feel about it? If I have something that I feel about it, then I’ll just write that down.
But, , that helps me be more consistent with bullet journaling, with planning, with the, Oh, keeping a diary, if you want to call it that, because it’s not just like. Here’s my diary entry, or you know, like Austin Kleon has a really good term for this as well. He calls keeping his log book, which is basically a very similar thing, and it’ll just say, like, when picked up, my kids had an interview with Pete know, did this, you know, did this work, you know, responded to all of our customer emails.
You know, did the, did those things read a book, had some tea, went to bed
Pete: [00:21:55] What would you say the why don’t we just, I guess just answer personally actually as go say like what is the big benefit to doing this, but actually be a little bit more curious to hear like for you personally, if there was like. An aha moment after you started doing this consistently or whatever that you’re like, Oh wow, this helps me do this, or this helps me be better at this, or this gives me, what does that, what has been the biggest benefit for you personally?
Matt Ragland: [00:22:22] without a doubt for me. It helps me stay more focused and be clearer on the tasks, on the projects that I’m working on. My ability to be distracted online is very high, and I think one of the things that’s interesting that normally will surprise people that do see and consider me a, you know. Relatively focused, you know, task-driven person is how easily distracted I am.
And so I will do it. Writing down, writing down important details in the bullet journal helps keep, uh, helps me keep my head out of my apps. And really focus on the actual work that I have to do. And so that’s the biggest, that’s the biggest thing for me. I’ve also just noticed over the years, and maybe this is just confirmation bias at this point or placebo effect, but I know when I’m brainstorming and note taking, especially, I’m much better.
Going at that from an analog method than I am like typing. Like even if I’m T cause if I’m just sitting down and it’s just me, it’s that you like single singular focus on like an object. If I’m just writing things down, that’s the only thing I really have to do. If I’m taking notes or writing something on, you know, on the computer, I can always like feel kind of distracted.
And go like, it was like, ah, let me just check Twitter real quick. Oh, let me see. Like, you know with what the sports news is and like, that’s so easy. I have to like end another like kind of little point of this is if I’m really like seriously doing this all, I’ll have set my phone somewhere else. If I’m really, really serious about it, I’ll take my Apple watch off too.
And this is, this is a part of like. Improve, like using your environment to affect the work that you want to get done. And so you’re just like kind of removing, removing those as prompts and temptations.
Pete: [00:24:23] So it’s funny you mentioned that. I have always been the person that goes back to doing things digitally. I think part of it stemmed from, I really just enjoy it, like I love the scalability and I love cloud backups and all like all
Matt Ragland: [00:24:36] yeah, absolutely.
Pete: [00:24:38] And what I eventually figured out was actually something that you kind of just said for me.
On my laptop. I’m looking at my like MacBook pro right now. I am super focused on this thing. Like I don’t, I don’t, I don’t immediately go over to Facebook or Twitter. My emails kind, kinda like the iffy thing. I could very easily type out GM and go over to Gmail pretty quick. But other than that, like I’m, I’m generally focused what I’m here for me, it is my phone.
Like I, if, if I can reach my phone, like if I just have it beside my laptop at the coffee shop, I’m constantly picking it up. I’m like, pick it up. Oh, okay. Slack, Twitter, Facebook, all the other stuff. I keep it in my bag whenever I’m like out. I work at coffee shops primarily. Uh, so for me it was just knowing like, it’s not necessarily like analog and digital.
It’s like I do fine on my laptop. I do great. It’s when I have my phone anywhere within reach, I like suck, like picking it up, like all time. So I just think that’s a process of people figuring that out. .
Matt Ragland: [00:25:32] absolutely. And I do have like different kind of like systems or frameworks for what goes in the journal versus what goes into digital, you know, a digital app. Because I, I mean you mentioned bear before. I use bear use air table. I use notion, um, you know, like there is, I still probably spend the, like definitely spend the majority of my work on online.
And so I, but to me also like there is that makes those analog experiences all the more, all the more powerful for me
Pete: [00:26:08] Hmm. That’s interesting. Do you buy a journal that is specifically like a premade predesigned like bullet journal or do you have like a blank one that you just like put stuff on.
Matt Ragland: [00:26:20] Yeah, that’s a great question. So there is a bullet journal branded notebook, but even it is very, it’s very minimalist. It’s very sparse. It basically just has like a couple of pages to talk about the method. And then I’m like an index, which is basically the table of contents for. For the bullet journal is you can write in like, this is where I started talking about January, or this is where I brainstormed this product launch that we’re going to do whenever it might be.
, there are, and so to me, there are kind of two different types of journals, planners, and one is the very unstructured, which . In its essence, a bullet journal is very unstructured. It’s whatever you want to make of it. , and then there are a series of more structured like goal or habit centric journals or planners like self journal from best self, Michael Hyatts, full focus planner.
Um, there is also the clear habit journal from Baron fig and James clear. And so. There’s kind of two different things. It really just depends on how unstructured or specific your particular style is versus like, okay, I want to be really goal focused or I want to be really habit focused for the next, you know, three to six months.
So if you’re doing that, then something like the full focus planner or the self journal self planner are really great options too.
Pete: [00:27:40] Okay. You mentioned the method, by the way, which I don’t want to talk about right here. Actually. I think one, we probably don’t have enough time, and then two, I feel like w Y, w. O, you are literally holding up a book on
Matt Ragland: [00:27:52] Yeah, there’s a, there’s a book, so if you want to know a little bit more about this writer or bullet journal does have a pretty solid YouTube channel. He’s starting to post. They’re more, but it gives, it serves as a good intro. But then there’s the bullet journal method book, which is really good. It’s actually, it’s better than I thought it was going to be.
And, uh, just because it talks like kind of the mindset behind what the bullet journal method is and like being a practitioner instead of just like going to more mindlessly going through the bullets.
Pete: [00:28:23] I was actually gonna throw out your own YouTube channel, but you know, that’s, that’s fine too. If you want to
Matt Ragland: [00:28:29] I also have a YouTube channel
Pete: [00:28:31] you do, and you’re talking about bullets or lying a lot. Um, okay. Those were all great. And I’ll tell you what, where were we before I let you go? I know you’ve got to go here in a second.
If you had one video. That you wanted to appoint people to. I’ll link to it in the show notes and from the podcasts description notes or whatever. Do you have like one video that’s like a start here sort of thing that you point people to.
Matt Ragland: [00:28:53] Yeah, I’m glad you’re asking. And by the time this episode releases, I have a couple. So if you go to just youtube.com/matt Ragland, you’re going to see a bunch of bullet journal specific videos right on that front channel page. But, . I’m about to release my first video in the bullet journal basics series.
And it’s going to be probably 10 10 to 15 videos that go through December and probably into February, 2019 into 2020 that are, cause I did a how to start your first bullet journal at the beginning of 2019 at the beginning of this year. , but that even that one was a little. Still a little too broad.
And so these are going to be really specific, really tight, like five to seven minute videos about specific parts of breaking down the bullet journal
Pete: [00:29:42] Okay. Oh, I love that. And I’ll just come back in and pull those links because this will air, I guess, after you start that. So that’d be nice and easy. So you already threw out youtube.com anybody heard of it? youtube.com/matt Ragland. R. a. G. L. a. N. D. did I get that right? Yeah, Matt Wrangler. Uh, I don’t know why I was thinking that with two GS, just one GT people, Matt Raglan.
, other than that, you’re, I think at Matt Raglan on Instagram, Twitter as well. Is that right? Okay, cool. Well, Matt, I gotta let you go. We’re out of time here. I just want to thank you for coming on. I’ll point people to the YouTube channel and, uh, I appreciate you. Thanks man.
Matt Ragland: [00:30:21] Yeah. Thanks, Pete. Honored to be here!
A few months back, Evan Porter had a rough morning.
Over his mornin’ joe, he was doing topic research for his blog and came across another blog with some great content.
A little TOO great…
Evan found another blog stealing his exact content. Word for word. Showing ads. Without his permission.
Although I sincerely hope YOUR blog content never gets stolen, one never knows.
In this blog podcast & podcast interview (with Evan!), we’ll take a look at what you
You can use a tool like BuiltWith to dive in behind-the-scenes and figure out what hosting provider the website is using.
If you find one, try reaching out to the hosting company (explain like you would have in the previous two steps).
4 – Send a DMCA TakeDown Notice
DMCA = “Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”
Per Wikipedia, this DMCA is a law that “criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works…In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet.”
In other words, this is the “official” thing you do if you find your content has been stolen.
Pro Tip: Your content is technically copywrited when you publish it!
I discuss this, and a lot more legal issues, in my “How to Blog Legally” post–but your content is actually yours from a legal perspective as soon as you publish it.
Of course, you CAN file on Copywrite.gov for additional protections.
For more info, go read that post above.
Though this didn’t quickly work for Evan Porter’s blog, this is still my official recommendation.
Aside from being what the government wants you to do–this also appears as more “legal,” if that makes sense.
A few weeks ago, reader Amanda (from Millennial Traveller) emailed me asking a bunch of questions about starting a podcast.
It proved the PERFECT opportunity to record some beginner podcasting FAQ (frequently asked questions, FYI).
So we did!
Also, don’t miss this YouTube video! I launched a podcast–from scratch–using ONLY FREE TOOLS–in about 20 minutes 🙂
I mostly made this to show off just 👏how 👏stinking 👏uncomplicated 👏
A podcast “host,” (an online service to store your audio files and publish them on the internet)
Your voice
That’s the minimum. Check out my FREE podcasting webinar training for more (includes a podcast launch checklist for everything you need to launch your show!)
How much does it cost to start a podcast?
It depends on how much you’re willing to spend!
You can easily start a podcast for free using an app like Anchor.fm on your smartphone.
If you’re looking to go a bit bigger, you can pick up a great USB microphone and one year of podcast hosting for around $100 total.
The average cost to starting a podcast is probably between $100 and $300.
Is there FREE podcast hosting?
Yes, and it’s 100% awesome. Here’s my video on that:
What equipment do I need for a podcast?
Watch this video, for one:
For two–let’s keep it real simple:
My current setup
At a minimum, you’ll need access to a microphone and recording device. This could simply be your smartphone or computer with built-in microphones, or an external microphone plugged into your smartphone, computer, or other digital recorders.
Typical podcasting equipment includes:
A microphone
A recording device (often your computer using a DAW (digital audio workstation) like Audacity)
Necessary cables (USB or XLR)
Mixers (for multiple mics or mics with XLR inputs)
Pop filters or wind screens for your microphone
Foam sound paneling (to put on your wall to reduce echo)
As short or as long as you want it to be, and it depends on three things:
your topic,
your audience (will they listen to a 75-minute show?),
your show format
My suggestion is to really think through the show format and layout, and don’t worry about how long! That’ll take care of itself (just don’t waste people’s time).
What are some handy tools for podcasting post-production?
You’ll need
a tool to edit audio (Digital Audio Workstation, or DAW),
Auphonic (and FixMyLevels and Buzzsprout’s Magic Mastering tool) are all tools that can fix and polish your raw audio on autopilot!
Highly recommended (I use Auphonic, which is free for 2 hours a month!)
Where do I upload my podcast?
You’ll sign up for a podcasting “hosting” service. These companies will store your audio files and publish your episode & show details to an RSS feed, which is used by podcast players and directories to play your podcast.
Example hosting companies:
Libsyn
Podbean (What I use and my recommended host)
Buzzsprout
Anchor.fm
Once you’ve uploaded your podcast audio to your host and published it, you’ll want to connect your RSS feed to podcast directories:
30 days before your “launch date,” publish an “Episode 0,” i.e. a short introductory episode explaining who you are and what your show will be about!
A day or two before your launch date, publish 1-3 episodes! It’s nice for listeners to have a few episodes to listen to right off the bat.
Other than that, some podcasters prefer to launch with even more, or at LEAST have 5-10 additional episodes already completed and scheduled out for the first few weeks/months.
That takes off a ton of pressure to get your podcast LAUNCHED, then immediately go back into content mode. Eek!
How much money do you make from podcasts?
If you’re just getting started, you likely won’t be making much at all!
A podcast that has roughly 1,000 downloads per episode might reasonably expect to earn between $15-50 an episode with a typical sponsor. (Industry standard CPM is between $18-30, i.e. “cost per 1,000 downloads”)
Larger podcasts with thousands (and millions) of downloads often take on multiple sponsors, with multiple ad reads during their shows, increasing their earnings.
However, it is totally possible to monetize your podcast in month one!
I did (for $50), and my friend Carrie monetized her show early as well.
Y Combinator is a famous startup accelerator that has produced companies like Stripe, Dropbox, AirBnb, Instacart–and Nate Matherson’s LendEDU.
There’s obviously a ton more to that story (which we explore in the podcast), but LendEDU has since grown into a lucrative content business (i.e. a blog).
We chat:
Why you need to diversify your traffic sources
Nate’s experience “pivoting” his entire business model
What’s working in SEO right now (and w
Y Combinator is a famous startup accelerator that has produced companies like Stripe, Dropbox, AirBnb, Instacart–and Nate Matherson’s LendEDU.
There’s obviously a ton more to that story (which we explore in the podcast), but LendEDU has since grown into a lucrative content business (i.e. a blog).
We chat:
Why you need to diversify your traffic sources
Nate’s experience “pivoting” his entire business model
What’s working in SEO right now (and what’s not)
and more.
Enjoy!
Listen to my episode with Nate Matherson from LendEDU:
Today I’m speaking with an SEO & digital marketing LEGEND, Glen Allsopp from Detailed.
Yes, I’m a megafan and totally nerded out just speaking with him 🙂
In this episode (and curated transcript below), we chat about:
What Glen learned having reviewed 500+ websites(!)
The future of SEO link building (and how Detailed might help us with that)
How to use design & copy to “position” your blog for the “right” readers (to hit your goals)
w
Glen: Pete, thank you for having me I really
appreciate it!
Pete: It is absolutely my pleasure! I’ve actually
been looking forward to this for a long time Glen. I have. In case you haven’t
been able to tell via my e-mails–speaking of which–I thought we would kick it
off with this:
Pete: You did one of your first podcasts in a couple
of years yesterday. Yesterday the day before and for what it sounded like when
we e-mailed with each other–you’re like, really fired up, Like almost excited
to come back on a podcast. (Not necessarily my podcast), but excited to do
podcast again. So in general like what’s what’s got you all jazzed up?
Pete: A specific topic or something happened or you
just enjoyed it or you know–what’s going on with you lately?
Glen: No–definitely yours also it wasn’t just about
doing a podcast, I was excited to chat with you. Finally after all this time.
Glen: So as as I’ve seen you before the show I’m not
really a I’m not really much of a podcast guy I am flattered whenever I get
requests but I consider myself a writer. That is how I get my ideas out to the
world and and Yeah I finally agreed to do… It’s been about a year and a half
since I last did an interview. I finally agreed to on a few days ago, we did
it, and they just it was awesome it went really well. I was really happy with
it so I thought All right let’s let’s keep the ball rolling.
Pete: Glen I have like OK, I have way too many
questions.
Pete: Let me just get that out of the bag. I actually
didn’t have to do any research for my chat with you today is just because I
feel like I’ve been following you legitimately as a fan. By the way so kudos
thank you for doing what you do. By the way but I have a question. I’m like
dying to ask you…
Pete: A month or two ago or maybe this was like three
six months ago. I don’t know maybe you can tell me. I discovered an email you
had sent out through Detailed which I want to talk about, Like a lot later by
the way I’m super curious–Detailed.com…
Pete: I saw this email and it was like you were
asking or you were taking Web site reviews like many Web site reviews mini web
site audits. I think it was free at that time? This was like several months
ago. I could be wrong, but I was like it was like a couple of days afterward
and I was like Oh he’s already got you know the slots filled up or whatever.
Pete: So two weeks ago you sent out another one that
I took you up on. I was like “oh! He’s do these again!” You were
charging like 40 bucks or something like that. And I was like “Oh this is
cool Yeah I want Glen to like look my site!”
Pete: So my question is: Aside from adding value to everybody on your list who signed up to do this well what is your primary motivation. Is there like a secret marketing thing that I don’t know about. I was like How does he do this. I can only assume you had a pretty good response for people who want you to do this. So my question is like why why are you doing that stuff? I’m Uber curious.
Glen: So yeah. Great question. Dang you really we’re
really getting right into it from the start. I like that.
Pete: I couldn’t help it. I was like I saw you doing
this. I was like I have to know like what he is up to–this is so valuable I
had the figured out yes.
Glen: So it all started I think about 18 months ago
was back in 2017. I had been working with this dog shelter I went to see them
in person in Thailand, and they just do incredible work, but they’re also
struggling financially.
Glen: And I was supporting them but I thought you know it’s maybe not enough. Maybe there’s more that I can do kind of maybe I can get the idea out there about supporting dog shelters in Asia or around the world and I thought why not just review websites on screen and charge people?
Glen: It was literally just five dollars. I will
audit your Web site, three to five minutes. And I reviewed by 200-250 websites
there & I was doing about 25 videos a day. It was pretty insane. I was
losing my voice but I really enjoyed it.
Glen: It was interesting. And then I took a break. So
that was about 18 months ago. Then at the start of the end of 2018 the woman
who I worked with I worked with…a man and a woman who kind of ran that
operation…I won’t go into their story too much but one of them went off and
did her own thing And I had a great connection with both of them…So I thought
OK let me do it again I will I will up the price a bit and then I will support
this new charity.
Glen: So I did it again at the end of 2018–start of
2019–so they were ten dollars this time than up to the 50 dollars. 100% of the
m oney went to charity. We did more than two hundred–raised more than two
thousand dollars which is awesome. And a lot of people actually said “Hey
can I donate privately?”.
Glen: And that was really really nice– but something interesting was that because my business with Detailed is that I get to work with a lot of big companies. (We do ongoing SEO when we do kind of once-off SEO), and folks are saying OK this video is great but can you do more? Like what else do you have to offer? Can I buy another video? Can I buy a longer video? Actually, that was the biggest problem. It was three to five minutes. And as you know I did this for your Web site of ours is just three to five minutes I would have lost a lot of things that I shared with you which you are hopefully useful.
Glen: So we did another 200 or so. And I was I I just really enjoyed that. I like dissecting websites and picking them apart and but I didn’t feel right upselling on top of that.
Glen: So people were saying can you do more or you know will your company help our company do SEO services. And I felt really wrong that I had done this thing for charity and you know and I was maybe going to make more money outside of that it just didn’t feel right. So this latest new effort I up the price up the length of them. And if anyone was going to ask me “Hey do you work with. Could you potentially help our company. Could you potentially do SEO for us?” I wouldn’t have that weird connection of. Well I was doing this for charities so that doesn’t feel right. I was doing this I did actually make a donation for charity and these ones again. But yeah I didn’t feel that weird disconnect if it were to happen.
Pete: First of all–yes I watched the video you made
already and was furiously taking notes. I was actually eating lunch while I was
watching it. OK crap I can’t do any of this like right now but I was like
fiercely taking notes like stuff to go back and implement so I love that. Thank
you.
Glen’s lessons learned from reviewing 500+ websites
Pete: So I don’t even know how many hundred Web sites you of included in that story like 500 maybe like over the past couple of years or whatnot?
Glen: That’s yeah. Like 500 Yeah.
Pete: Well first of all that’s insane. Second of all
if you were to write like a list of call blog post like “five common
mistakes I’ve learned from auditing or looking at like 500 bloggers and e-commerce
companies or whatnot.”
Pete: What would some of the common mistakes be?
Pete: It could be like design. It could be like user
experience it could be SEO related. What’s the common stuff that you you’ve
seen a lot happen over the past two year?
Glen: That is a great question.
Glen: I’m actually preparing a Reddit post for that
I’m not I’m not very involved in the Reddit community but I think a headline
like “I reviewed 500 new Web sites and video here are the 10 things
everyone’s doing wrong” so I kind of have this in my head already so
that’s a great question so just a pretty face this. A lot of the Web sites that
ask me for feedback are e-commerce stores.
Glen: Ironically a lot of SEO companies–a big percentage of SEO companies want to know how well they ask your company Web site is doing. And Amazon affiliates. That is huge. That is by far the biggest majority. Those who put out articles on the 10 best massage chairs the 10 best razor blades for man whatever it is. That is the the people who are ordering reviews. They want feedback but also a lot of huge companies. I got to review literally billion dollar brands which is pretty insane to me I’ve I’ve worked with seven and eight figure clients with my business but never a billion dollar companies. And that happened doing these videos.
Glen: So the most common thing so there’s a lot of basics I always check. Do you have a favicon? Is your Web site secure? Is it easy to see who is behind the Web site and more importantly is it easy to see what the Web site is about?
Glen: So going back to the Amazon example someone
will have. Here are the 10 best massage chairs. And they also have what is a
bad example. Here are the 10 best football boots and it’s the same person
(soccer boots I guess you call it) than the rest. And it’s the same person
writing the same too and you’re thinking Well really should they really be
focused on you know advising on both of these? Is it really their speciality should
they hone in on one thing? That’s pretty important.
Glen: But the two most common ones is that bloggers try to be very creative with their headlines which is what everyone reads. You go to a website. Yours is great. I don’t know what the exact wording but it’s basically about “profitable impactful blogs” like you know exactly what the website is about as soon as you get there…
Glen: A lot of people say something and they try to be creative and clever–but you still have no idea what the website is about.
Glen: So they say “simple without the complexity” of something you know this isn’t an exact example but you still have no idea. You have to read the small font under the headline which is a massive wasted opportunity. That headline is what everyone’s going to read. That is your chance. They are basically saying “you have five seconds.” Hook me in. Give me this headline that’s going to talk about my pain points my problems bring me into the page and 99% percent of people waste that opportunity in my opinion. [27.0]
Glen: So that is a good one.
Glen: And then the second one which is really common and it tends to do with opt in form so everyone wants to know what the website is about and they want to collect emails from their website as well. And what a lot of people do around they opt in forms as they say “sign up my e-mails, join my newsletter, get my latest updates,” and there is no there is no focus on the person.
Glen: Everyone knows this is news that because you’re
asking for their email address. There’s a big forum that says email submit a
join again that is your opportunity to talk about what is the benefit of
getting the email. So get more search traffic be more productive and run faster
jump higher. Be able to dunk on your friends whatever is the benefit of being
on your email…
Pete: I’d sign up for that email list by the way.
Glen: All right exactly. So yeah you got to have that
pain point or that focus on them not just “hey join my newsletter–it has
to be about what is the person going to get from giving you that email. It’s a
big missed opportunity.
Pete: So one thing I found kind of refreshing but
also really surprising about the review you did for my old site. I was kind of
going into it like “Ok this is Glen. He’s going to dive in and it’s going
to be like a bunch of like technical SEO stuff right off the bat or
something.”.
Pete: I really wasn’t knowing what to expect by the
way but I didn’t expect the design and user experience–for lack of a better
term and really know what else to call that for a blog–I was expecting that
right off the bat.
Pete: And so I can I guess I could be a little bit
more specific.
Pete: So there’s a part on my homepage where I am
linking to some of my bigger posts and like trying to funnel people to trying
to help people find like the categories that they might want to read more about
as it’s like kind of hideously ugly like everything’s kind of squished together
the format is not right. It’s the themes like built in home page thing. So I
just haven’t updated what not. And so you took like one look at that and you’re
like “OK this is a good idea here but it looks bad and it’s like kind of
hard to navigate” and all this other stuff.
Pete: So my question for you is–Oh–one more thing.
Pete: You had also mentioned this word
“professional” when it comes to how a Web site looks how it feels. My
question is how important is it for…I’m just going to say bloggers but what I
really mean is anybody really trying to grow an online brand whether they’re
going to monetize with products or it’s e-commerce definitely probably more
important but even bloggers…
How important is professional-looking design? For SEO or otherwise?
Pete: How important is it to have a great design and user experience and look professional?
Glen: Yeah. Makes the most sense. The great question.
I actually it was literally last week I read a study about this. It was done
over a few years I believe. And what they found is that the more attractive a
website was the more usable and the better user experience people mocked as
having even if the actual user experience was terrible. So even if it was hard
to find things even if everything was just not where you wanted it to be–as
long as the Web site looked good people actually rated it as being a lot more
usable and user friendly–which is which is pretty funny.
Glen: There are there are cases. Now I have a history
of this. I do a lot of split testing and has a lot of landing pages sales pages
opt in forms. There are cases when uglier pages do work better. I cannot just
say always make your website look pretty always try to make it the best. There
are cases where everything just over the top just everything trying to vie for
your attention actually does work better. It’s not always but it certainly is
an option so we can’t rule that out.
Pete: Can I ask a question about that?
Pete: The first thing I thought of when you said that
was, OK. I’m going to go ahead throw this company under the bus. I apologize in
advance…
Pete: If anybody likes click funnels or the other.
OK. So I use Thrivecart. I’m pretty happy with Thrivecart. But there’s several
other checkout page software that is just like filled with huge flashing you
know up sell segments of the page boxes right. Like add ons. All this other
stuff like tripwire offers. Like it’s just huge and bright and ugly and my
opinion from a design perspective…I really don’t know where I was going with
this. Is that what you see? What pages worked best as ugly right. I’m just
super curious.
Glen: I think it depends on the industry. So I think
so. Good one I reviewed this Web site the other day. It was I won’t say the
name just in case they don’t want to share but it was about how to find the
contact details of any celebrity. And it was very flash to you is very
Hollywood and it wasn’t modern it wasn’t attractive. No one would look at the
Web site and say oh yeah this was just created like you’ve got a great
designer. No one would say that but because of the niche contacting a celebrity
that kind of flashy Hollywood theme was just perfect. It just fits so perfect.
I said I’m not a huge fan of the design but please don’t change it I think it
fits your website perfectly. And it’s just a perfect match. I think it can be
very niche specific.
Glen: I think if you have a very tech savvy audience you’d like you do, bloggers looking to build websites, SEO, e-mail lists. They are the kind of people who would appreciate an attractive Web site if you are teaching people how to do gardening knitting. Maybe those audiences don’t care so much. They just want to know that they can find information and actually those audiences hate change the most, so you know you redesign something they can’t find it anymore and drives them a little bit crazy so yeah I would say it’s very niche specific for that.
Pete: That’s a good point. OK. I’m struggling now,
where did I interrupt you? lol So sorry Glen.
Pete: Podcast 101 over here. Yeah. So I was asking the general question–How important is it to really have “good design, good user experience, that sort of stuff, look professional.” [9.8]
Glen: Okay. All right. I’m back in my flow and ask I know the answer lol.
Answer: What do you want to have happen?
Glen: So the big thing for me is that design you have
to think about what do you want to happen?
Glen: So when I come to your website for the first
time Pete you either want me to give you my give you my email address maybe
share the website probably unlikely the first time someone visits because they
don’t know your value, but I’m sure you wouldn’t be against that or sign up to
your podcast on iTunes or wherever it is. And that is kind of your ideal thing
for the first second someone comes to your website the first actions you want
them to take you want the e-mail address or you want their subscription on a
podcast at the very least to be cool of they you know bookmarked it and
potentially came back later.
Glen: So the important thing to think about is–does your design help those most important things happen?
Glen: So if I go to convert kid for example who sell
you know these news you know you can build your own newsletter and they help
you send the e-mails. They don’t like they want me to read their blog post sure
but they would much rather I sign up for a free trial account and gave that
thing a try. So if that design is not focused on getting me into that funnel
it’s kind of a wasted opportunity.
Glen: So a good example of this is I’ve always wanted
my home page to be just focused on my blog content like “hey here is what
I write–come and check it out. And then if you like it then give me your
e-mail.”.
Glen: And I actually find it was ten times better. I
get so many more options where my home page is focused on. “Here is just
one unique angle and you’re not going to hear about elsewhere. Can I have your
email address?”.
Glen: “Forget forget the 500 articles I’ve
written about SEO and marketing. Here’s just one idea. I want your e-mail
address please don’t pick anywhere else in the page.”.
Glen: So the most important thing is to know what is the conversion you want.
Glen: So Pete if your sole focus is on podcast subscriptions your entire home page should be built around that testimonials. How many five star ratings you have on the different platforms and then huge buttons. You know I subscribe on iTunes and then subscribe on what is it called stitcher. It really depends on what it is that you’re hoping for people to do. But the design should be so simple and so easy to understand that it’s a no brainer for readers to go and take those actions.
Pete: I’m like furiously taking notes here lol.
That’s super relevant I love this. I think that’s actually a great tip in
general.
Pete: By the way–this could be a little awkward–I
straight-up stole…I mean not borrowed either. Like I sort of stole a few of
your design trends on Detailed.com and Gaps.com
Pete: Specifically the content. The no side bar.
Pete: First of all you you were the first to pioneer
that by any means, but like a year or two ago a lot of the sites I look up
to–they were getting rid of their sidebar and I landed on like Gaps.com a year
or two ago when I read the first two three years ago when you first started
Gaps, I landed on that and I was like This is slick. This is what I want. So I
immediately like went and stole it. So sorry. 🙂
Pete: I tend to appreciate your design specifically
detail like the pixel theme and the purple colors is just like it’s like spot
on like, I just loved it. I’ve always looked up to detail and gaps for that
stuff. So kudos to you.
Pete: Thanks for that! So let’s transition to talking
a little bit more about the actual product/service of Detailed.
Pete: I am really curious. It looks like it might be
a few things and I was hoping you could give us a little bit of clarity on
exactly what Detailed.com Is and what it isn’t and then how we might use it. [00:18:50] So give
us the backstory of how Detailed came to be and then maybe we can dive into some
use cases? [9.1]
Glen: Sure so my journey started 13-14 years ago. I
was 15 years old. I had I had just bought some turntables I thought learning to
deejay would be the coolest thing ever. I just bought some turntables and I was
and I was going through the websites by learning how to DJ. There was a lot of
deejay forums out there and I thought why don’t I just build my own website.
Why don’t I just build a deejay website so I can I can be the owner I can be
the ad man on the forums and I can control how everything looks and all that
kind of thing.
Glen: And some guy he messaged me out of the blue he
said this was when MySpace was huge and he said hey we’re building this thing.
“My DJ space.” Do you want to be involved? We can kind of team up the
whole three of us?
Glen: So I got involved in that with them and I
started trying to promote the website and very very quickly. I was literally
15-16 years old. We were ranking first page in Google for DJ forums, DJ
equipment. The book DJing for Dummies came out and you know the popular for
Dummies series and they talked about us in the book and it was it was
incredible. Like oh my God. How how did this happen?
Glen: And I was just fascinated why I hadn’t really tried to rank the website and you just kind of happened. I was trying to figure out why why are we getting this search traffic. How did that happen. So I set up a Web site called ViperChill.com. I was 16-year-old, Dodge Viper was my favorite car from the game the PlayStation game Gran Turismo. And I just set up that websites a terrible name looking back but a lot of people seem to remember.
Glen: But yes so I was just I stopped caring my deejaying I just I have four eyes I have 400 vinyl records sitting in my bedroom and all I cared about was making websites and ranking them on Google so everything I was learning I started writing about it everything every little thing and I was just putting them out there on the vibe your website and I desperately just wanted to do SEO. That was it I just wanted to get clients. I put up all these services pages anything people said do you do this. I said yes. It didn’t matter what it was I would figure it out I’d offer it as a service. And unfortunately very few actually got in touch.
Glen: I had I think my best month was about a
thousand dollars in the first two years I had one person pay me eight hundred
dollars and another one two or three hundred dollars. And that was it.
Glen: So two to three years went by and I just could
not get anyone to pay me.
Glen: So long story short I had quite a few
successful years in between. But they had absolutely nothing to do with doing
SEO or for other people. They were building my own websites ranking them
building my own blogs building my own software. I had some pretty successful
WordPress plugins in between that and in about 2014 2015 I finally figured it
out after all of these years I figured out what it takes to get SEO clients
that pay you a lot of money. This is this is when you don’t have offices and
you don’t want to meet people in person.
Glen: So this is when you’re just doing it purely online and the solution for me was that you have to focus on something.
Glen: So the thing I said to you before is people
would ask me do you do this. And I would say “yes” that actually made
them not want to work with me because it just seemed like I’d do everything and
I focused on no one. And as soon as I really honed in on specific services and
specific industries I started attracting a lot more clients. Finally having
success. So I think 2015-2016 we had me and my business partner Diggy my best
friend Dutch guy we had our first seven figure you’re offering SEO services and
this came this came two years after finally figuring out how to sell SEO–so it
was I had I was I fell in love with it. I failed to sell it for years. I gave
up for about three or four years finally figured out what it takes to sell it
and then we just went on to some really really quick success.
Glen: And so the problem with ViperChill was that I
was writing about everything I was writing about SEO. I was writing about how
to get cheaper clicks when you were on Facebook ads how to get more e-mail
subscribers what to do on Pinterest or Twitter or whatever was popular at the time.
And I just didn’t feel like I had a focus which was ironic because I just
realized I’m now making a great amount of money because I’m focusing yet my
blog is just on every topic to do with internet marketing and making money it
doesn’t make sense.
Glen: So I set up a set up Gaps, and the idea for Gaps was to just focus on online success stories and then later the idea for detail was to just focus on SEO because I did not want the problem I had with ViperChill shows people would come because they loved what I wrote about Facebook ads and then my next article would be about SEO and then half the audience just didn’t care about it at all, or those who came for SEO would hate when I talked about getting more email subscribers. So I really just wanted details to just be about SEO and that’s kind of how that came about.
Pete: So when you started all this and they kept coming to and asking “Do you do thisDo you do this?” You said no more often.
Pete: What was it that you said yes to. Like what was
the renewed focus for clients specifically?
Glen: So the renewed focus was actually specific
service. So I was very very much focused on Link building. I said I don’t do
content I don’t do onsite SEO. My primary focus is link building–if you want
links I can help you, if you want anything else. I have 20 other people I could
recommend or the other angle that we took is that we set up Web sites targeting
different locations.
Glen: So for example we had an agency targeting Singapore. So we said we work with companies in Singapore. If you are anywhere else in the world we don’t want to work with you but we are figuring out Google for Singapore. That’s where we had been many times. It’s also I think it’s the most expensive place in the world. So there’s a lot of companies with money to spend and we said you know if you’re in Singapore we will help you. If not we’re not interested. And then the people who are in Singapore they see that they see their focus on your website. They instantly think this is the agency for me.
On positioning your blog & message
Glen: For example, if I said I help bloggers who are
just starting out making their first 500 dollars a month online some people
would love that. Yes that’s me. But you you’ll be oh well I’m a bit past that
now it’s not the one for me but if I said you know you’re a blogger you’ve been
around for a few years you have thousands of listeners but you’re not quite
where you want to be. Maybe then you would feel Oh OK. These are the guys I
have to talk to.
Glen: So it’s very much about positioning yourself so that when the people come to you, they feel like “Oh that is all they are focused on. This is the agency for me.”
Pete: By the way literally somebody from my
mastermind group Voxed to me. I don’t use Voxer or not by the way I use that as
like a common term but I realize like not a whole lot of people know what that
is.
Glen: I’ve never even heard of it.
Pete: It’s like a it’s like a walkie talkie Messenger
app. So it pretty much like replaced email and slack and text messaging for my
quote unquote online friends like people my master my group buddies stuff like
that. Yeah it’s pretty handy.
Pete: Anyways I had somebody literally came and said
the exact same thing to me. I was asking about like this funnel I have set up
and they came back with like okay who are you serving?
Pete: Like is it new bloggers specifically?
Pete: In general I think this is a great question to
ask oneself. Anybody listening to this like who exactly do I serve?
Pete: Do I serve this audience or this audience like
maybe you can serve too. Probably not. You probably have a much better chance
at just serving what like you said. So that’s good.
Pete: So many questions circle and I could go a
number of ways. So let me lay out the bullet points that I wrote down right
here that maybe we could just go back individually and talk about and one to.
The future of link building
Pete: How can Do You Even Blog listeners readers, etc., get value out of Detailed? [6.2]
I want to get a little bit of clarification on exactly what detail can provide. Sure. And then I thought we might come back and talk about some SEO factors–specifically maybe backlinks.
Pete: But as far as Detailed.com, how can I or how
can anybody listening to this come onto the site, and besides the content which
I love, how can we how can we use the data that you provide?
Glen: Sure. So when I when I launched detailed the
whole idea was it was first is gonna be focused just on SEO and secondly–so
what I what I started out I said I told you the first success for me was saying
“Hey I just do link building and then that is it.” And everyone who
wants links to kind of knew what I offered and when they needed it they would
come to me over the years.
Glen: Link building has changed dramatically. So I
was building PBNs before Google had ever mentioned PBN ever so before they ever
said or we wouldn’t do that or against that. (That is the short version of that
is building your own websites that can link to other websites of yours to make
link building a bit easier.) I always knew everyone always knew it wasn’t you
know totally white had a totally legitimate. But Google had never said anything
about it. So I wanted to I wanted to have that going but also kind of adapt on
the sites over the years I’ve just been involved in so many different link
building tactics and always. First of all making sure I always do them for
myself first and have success with them. And then secondly seeing if there’s an
opportunity for that.
Glen: So I tried to be early I always try to be early
with what is coming next. And I think the most important thing for anyone
because a lot of people–you for example Pete you would not buy a PBN link for
Do You Even Blog. You would think well I’m building up this brand. I’m trying
to do everything legitimate. I don’t want that. You probably wouldn’t buy a
paid land you probably wouldn’t care by directories submissions or you know if
someone said I can get you 100 guest posts and they will all link to this page
you maybe think that’s a bit too much right.
Glen: So I was thinking ahead. So this was almost two years ago now. What are people going to want in the future?
Glen: And for me there was no question about it–it was about building genuine relationships. People you can help, people you can reach out to, building those relationships, and then links and linking to each other comes as a byproduct for that.
Glen: So I was dead set on the idea that Detailed
Pro, and this is the whole reason I bought the domain name, I was dead set that
Detailed Pro was going to be the future. This is how link building is gonna be
done in the future. People are going to care less about PBNs, less about buying
things less about gas posting even though that can be done in a legitimate way,
and they’re going to care so much about the relationship side of things.
Glen: And I’ve had a lot of success. I don’t know
why, but I’ve had a lot of success talking to people who normally wouldn’t talk
to me.
Glen: So I’m fairly I’m fairly anonymous and what I
do online but I’m somehow able to get the connections and phone calls with
people who would normally you know I would never imagine would give me the time
of day. So everything I did to make that happen I put that in a Detailed Pro so
that other people could do same. And that was pretty much the idea behind it.
Glen: It wasn’t about buying things from anyone it
wasn’t about swapping links. It was how can you serve this person even if you a
nobody–everyone has some value to give someone else.
Glen: So how can you serve this person in your
industry who you think probably wouldn’t give you the time of day, but I’m
going to show you actually there’s something you can say to anyone that will
make them listen and interested in you. And that was the whole idea from the
program.
Glen: I’m gonna be honest I thought this was gonna be
a multi-million dollar hugely successful thing. It’s been live for about 18
months now. It took about nine months to put together. We haven’t we we talk
about more than 4000 websites and now there’s more than a million words of
original unique written content and a huge focus of my time has been educating
people because so much of people’s time now they’re still thinking about PBNs
and guess posts, paid links, link swaps. So I’ve spent so much time on
education it it’s it’s been successful it made all of the money back that I
spent on and it’s profitable but it didn’t blow up into this huge thing. But
that was the whole idea behind it.
Pete: [00:31:19] Ok, you can feel free to say “I don’t wanna
answer that” if you want to, but why do you think that is? Why do you
think it didn’t blow up so much? [7.4]
Glen: I think because especially when it comes to
things people want they want it. They want to spend money and know what they
are getting for that money.
Glen: So if you want to buy guest post you say okay I
spent three hundred dollars. I got one thing or I spend a thousand dollars and
I got four links. I think everyone is in that mindset now and because with
relationships there are no guarantees. So I could become your best friend that
could help you with every aspect of your web side but you still might never
find the opportunity to talk to me and talk about me on Do You Even Blog. So a
lot of people they think oh well that’s just such a waste of time I could have
just bought links and done it quicker. So I think people are as with any area
of life people are looking for the quick win. So the you know the pill that
helps you lose 10 pounds in a week or you know whatever makes you look better
or prettier or makes you richer.
Glen: I think everyone’s still too focused on the
quick win.
Glen: But I do see that slowly starting to change
especially in the world of SEO where you don’t want to lose your rankings. You
don’t want to get penalized. You’ve put so much time and money into a website
you’d rather do things the quote unquote wide had a legitimate way. So I think
people will slowly come around much that I just think I was a bit early to the
market.
Pete: I am with you by the way.
Pete: From from my mouth to God’s ears. Please let
you be right.
Pete: Let me give you a background, I want to hear
what you think about this.
Pete: So my take on this has always been I can’t stand
producing I’m going to talk about content specifically as opposed to link
building. But in general, I have done numerous competitor analysis, competitor
reports, keyword research and seen a lot of content, keywords that I might want
to target as well.
Pete: And I look at I don’t like I don’t wanna do
that content like just I want to talk about “make money online” or
“is this survey company a scam.” “Can you actually make money
via swag bucks” or I don’t know just a whole bunch of like crappy content
that people were actually searching for. It’s just not what I want to write
about that some of my competitors are, right?
Pete: So I started Do You Even Blog after like 40 or
50 other Web sites and blogs I’ve done that were 98 percent failures–for a
host reasons I won’t go into right now. I’ve talked about it before on this
podcast–but I sort of do even blog is like you know what effort.
Pete: I I just we’ll talk about what I want to talk
about and I want to just like have casual conversations like this via podcast,
like I just want to do what I want to do for once, and you know hopefully it’ll
work out.
Pete: So I have always had this thought of being not
only white hat but just doing things though the way I want to do it and what I
struggle with this one to get your opinion on–and what I struggle with is
watching other people. I won’t name names and it’s not like they’re doing
anything bad or illegal or immoral or even black hat, but they are just willing
to produce content that I’m not willing to produce or they’re willing to do
some marketing strategies. Like I said they’re not necessarily black hat or
wrong. But that’s I don’t want to do.
Pete: And I see those people experiencing growth…
Pete: So that’s like hard for me to kind of wrap my
head around and what I keep telling mysel–I promise I’ll let you talk 🙂 I’m
going to keep telling myself things like stay the course, build the business
you want to build, build the brand you want to build, and it will pay off in
the end.
Pete: Do you think that’s true.
Glen: I like to think so for the most part yes.
Glen: So you can you can write a lot of things that
you care about, but it doesn’t necessarily mean other people will of course.
Glen: Can I just give one can I give one very specific
example real quick is pretty pretty perfect for this?
Glen: You know I wrote it I wrote an article a few
years ago about three four years ago was called “How 16 companies are
dominating the world’s Google search results.”.
Glen: And I basically showed how there are a lot of
brands who own a lot of other brands.
Glen: For example Conde Nast owns about 20 Web sites
that always take over Google search results. They owned all the magazines they
took all the magazines online. You search for best skin care tips and it looks
like you’ve got a really varied search results page. There’s 10 different Web
sites on the search results but actually seven of them are owned by Conde Nast.
So I did this huge deep dive like Verizon they own tech crunch and all these
other Web sites that all seem separate and independent but actually they’re all
owned by the same people. I did this huge deep dive. The Web was talking about
it. I got more traffic to that article than ever.
Glen: People still talk about it today. But if people
don’t share it it’s gone.
Glen: So that the thing I never did with that article
is I never focused on any keywords that people might search for.
Glen: It’s not Evergreen. So a few years later it’s
not actually as relevant as it was when I wrote it. So I really wanted to share
it. It got people talking but unless I keep talking about it. It’s had its day
and it’s gone. So that is the kind of thing. I love writing but I also have to
keep in mind I’m going to put so much effort into this but it has a shelf life
of a few months and that’s when it comes to building a business. It’s not as
useful as it could be.
Pete: Yeah I like that. That’s a good example too.
It’s fascinating by the way I talked to a guy named Grant Sabatier who runs a
millennial moneydot.com just used to do a SEO back in the day for a bunch of
college textbooks company. This was like 8 10 years ago or whatnot had massive
success there he knows this stuff and it comes to SEO. We were talking about
that just a month or two ago. He’s like more and more companies are buying up
blogs–just really taking over. Exactly like you said. Worrisome on one hand
but that’s cool.
Glen: And they share they share the keywords with
each other. So hey we’re ranking for this. There’s no competition. Let’s let’s
publish a similar article on the Web site we own and take over all the search
results.
Pete: And and link back.
Glen: Right. Right exactly.
Building a brand people want to click on in Google
Pete: So let’s talk a little bit more about SEO factors.
Pete: What do you think the future looks like? I mean
we are talking about a little bit of what we what we both hope the future looks
like specifically, but in 2019…
Pete: What do you think the people who are really
getting ahead on a white hat basis specifically are doing well? What factors
are they focusing on?
Glen: Yes. So I think the important thing is if you can build such a brand where people search for something and they’re actively looking at the domain names in the search results waiting for your website to show up so they can click on it.
Glen: That’s that’s when you have it made.
Glen: That is when it matters. So if I search for
made another best CRM software and I don’t see HubSpot a Buffer as someone
talking about it and I go to page two specifically looking for those two
websites, so I know that I trust the authors. That’s when you’ve probably
figured it out.
Glen: So that there are exceptions. There are incredible web sites that I’ve been hurt badly. I don’t want to be negative. It’s actually think we’re in a great position right now. There’s more people online. There’s more people with computers. There’s more people searching Google. There are more ads than ever before in Google search results which is a bit of a shame. But but yeah there’s more people searching there’s more Web sites there’s more people spending money online.
Glen: We’re in we’re in a great time economically it might not last forever but everything is great. I certainly don’t want to be negative but yeah the people who are doing the people who are going to dominate over the next few months specifically focusing on white hat side of things are the people who are building brands around an industry.
Glen: So Vice search for “ClickFunnels
review” and I see 10 results. But I see Do You Even Blog then I see and I
like “OK I want Pete’s thoughts,” if you can have that in people’s
mind because you build a brand that is trustworthy and people care for. I think
those are the websites that are going to get results.
Glen: So for example right now I feel like this has
probably been happening for a year or two maybe I’m too in the Internet
marketing and online make money bubble but I feel like people don’t really like
when they see Entrepreneur and Inc and Forbes–like for the last five years for
this has had a huge overly ad before you can even see a search result in this
celebrity world variety do that you click on variety and a search result you
have to wait and watch an ad for 20 seconds before you can go to their their
article and I think eventually if if Google is ready to use their own search
engine those things are going to be they’re not going to work so well anymore.
Glen: So if you are in the mind if you can get in the mind of people searching for something and “oh I wish this person that I care about has written something on that topic, I’ll click that one.” I think those are the people who are going to dominate going forward.
Pete: I think that’s actually fantastic.
Pete: Just yesterday I was googling “how to make
French toast.” I know how to make French toast. To be fair for everybody
listening to this. But I was specifically looking to try something new in
recipes or whatnot so I did what everybody would do, I went to Google and I
typed in “French toast bread” or like “how to make French
toast” two separate Google queries, and by this point I do a lot of
googling for recipes I know I wasn’t necessarily looking for a specific name
brand to click on but I was definitely looking for those to avoid.
Pete: There are like three or four common, you know
huge, by the way, recipe sites that I just can’t stand because it’s 850 words
of content with seven ads and between there before I even get to the recipe,
and it looks terrible on mobile because they’re still cookie disclaimers that
pop up all the time for some reason, I use the brave browser. Maybe that’s why.
Pete: But’s it just. I know what to avoid.
Pete: So my question is: what practical stuff do you think people can take away to their own blogs that could help them become more trustworthy and authoritative and build that more personal brand that people will want to click on?
Glen: Yeah absolutely.
Glen: I think a lot of it comes down to just really
caring about the topic. I think if you if you’re writing something just a
writer and just a rank for it I think that comes across. But when it’s
something you are really passionate about then I think that shows through.
Glen: As a good example I don’t watch cooking videos
at all. I do not cook at all. But there was there was a video I watched
recently it was I think was from BuzzFeed food or whatever they call our brands
and it was this girl shoes from Singapore originally and she wanted to make the
the the food the cookie the pineapple cookie that she remembers when she was a
child and you can just see that passion come across. There was no doubt she was
so desperate to provide so much value in this video and finally nail the cookie
and show people how it’s made.
Glen: And I think like when a when I create an
article about the “16 companies dominating Google” I think it just
comes across I don’t care about ranking. You have to keep in mind your
audience.
Glen: We have a tech savvy audience so you start
putting out there. You know “this company review” or “this
company review” and everyone sees you’re just going for affiliate
commissions. You know you have a tech savvy audience they’re going to pick up
on that.
Glen: So what do I think my audience pick up when I write something that isn’t here to rank?
Glen: It’s just I want to share it with you and I
think people appreciate that.
Glen: So first and foremost you have to care about
what it is that you’re writing about.
Glen: My strategy these days because I actually
wrote–I kind of regret I wrote so much content that was just focused on what I
wanted to write. And ironically as an SEO blogger it was never focused to rank
for something. So what I my personal strategy is these days that I wait till
there’s a topic or an angle I can take on a topic that is so unique and so
interesting–and then I will try my best to keep that you know legitimate and
authentic–but also kind of word some keywords in the titles, into the headlines,
so focused on what you want to talk about, but don’t neglect that six months
from now when it’s not on your email list when you’re not sharing it on social
media you can still be getting people to come and read that because you
actually put a keyword in the headline that people might be searching for on
Google.
Glen: A good example of that is I recently had the
opportunity to share a really really good case study on my website.
Glen: This guy Sumit. He reached out to me privately
said Glen I’m making up to thirty five thousand dollars a month. My web site’s
18 months old. I’d love to share the story. Now I know my audience and this is
all from search engine traffic. I knew my audience was going to go wild for
that and they would talk about it and they would love it and they would
appreciate that I shared it. But a month down the road two months down the road
everyone’s gonna forget about it. It’s gonna be sitting on page two of my blog
no one’s going to care about it. So I made sure I put a put a few keywords in
there and it ranks now number one in Google for “expired domains
SEO.”
Glen: So most importantly write about what you want
to write about. Don’t just think of the search engines first.
Glen: I think that comes across in anything that you
put out to the world.
Glen: But yeah don’t neglect that it will die. You
will stop sharing it. People will stop talking about it in a social media. They
think everyone else has seen it already and done.
Glen: Don’t neglect the SEO side of things as well.
Pete: I think that’s good advice. This just randomly
occurred to bit and have this written down.
Updating and refreshing content for SEO
Pete: How do you feel about re-releasing old content?
Pete: Like literally going back and…it could be
updating, refreshing, but also changing the dates it was published in
WordPress. How do you feel about that?
Pete: Should that be like common practice or is that
really not necessary?
Glen: It is so incredibly valuable right now. I can
not overhype it enough.
Glen: I have a document in front of me it’s literally
just called “Google freshness” about every experiment I put together
on changing the dates of articles and how the search traffic changes. I think
one of the biggest missed opportunities right now in a lot of bloggers and Web
sites is that they still have titles referencing 2018 or 2017 in search
results…or actually a com thing people do is that they put 2019 in the
headline but the date, you know the little gray date that Google put next to search
results, that they haven’t figured out how to update that.
Glen: They don’t know how to do it. So there’s a bit
of a disconnect between people searching and not clicking on their results. And
I found that just changing that not only could improve rankings, but it can
massively improve improve click through rate as well.
Glen: So the search engine side of things. Absolutely
huge.
Glen: There are as far as just you know general
people coming to your Web site and people coming to your community. I am working
on an update. I know I keep using this example but the “16 companies
dominating Google,” I can’t just add I just can’t just edit that article,
I pretty much have to write the whole thing again because it’s you know it’s
three years old and the search results have changed massively.
Glen: And actually Verizon and Conde Nast they
actually own ten more companies than they did before. So it has to be a brand
new article.
Glen: But yeah absolutely if there are if there are
things you think…first of all the most important thing to do is if you’re not
sure if you should update something if it’s just for SEO purposes. Go to the
search results, is Google rewarding and ranking recent content?
Glen: So is the content that is showing in the top
search results for the terms you want to rank for. Has it been updated
recently? Do they have recent years and the title tags? Or is Google you know
very stubborn for example signs of a heart attack in the health space. Google
don’t want to show week old content for that they want to make sure the people
who might be having a heart attack are going to get valuable advice.
Glen: So some industries brand new articles ranked
very well some don’t at all. If you care about the SEO side of things go and
look at the search results.
Glen: But as a going back to what I said before if
you feel it needs updating if it’s something you care about something you want
to share with the world that’s going to matter.
Glen: And we were talking about headlines earlier and
saying you know you’ve really got to focus on your industry. I think you have
to be very polarizing as well.
Glen: So some people have to think “God I hate
that they went back and updated that why I already read that I don’t want to
read it again” because there’s going to be some people who think “I’m
so glad I’m so happy they updated that article. This is the person I’m sticking
with.”.
Glen: So you almost have to be polarizing at times
and just focus focus on yourself first of all.
Pete: It’s funny how…Well I’m just speaking from
personal experience here….
Pete: It’s funny how we kinda discount the benefits
of that sort of stuff.
Pete: For example I have I don’t know actually
exactly how many blog posts and podcasts I have on do you have a blog right now
but it’s it’s over 100 hundred less than two hundred I think over 100 some 120
maybe.
Pete: Not only do I have like old content that could
definitely use like a little refresh, but actually just have like broken stuff.
Pete: Like one of the articles you looked at in the
video was from May 2017 or July 2017 or something like that, and it had like a
ConvertKit link on there. I haven’t used ConvertKit in like nine months or
something. I just haven’t gone and updated it and I don’t know why exactly, but
probably because it’s not at the forefront of my mind. I’m not seeing that as a
high ROI activity on my time when in truth it very well could be. Especially if
it continues to pick up traffic via organic or or otherwise.
Glen: So you could also do what Pat Flynn did–he
basically did a self audit of his Web site and then he made content out of
that. So you could make a podcast episode saying here’s what I went back and
changed. Here’s what was important to me to update.
Glen: I’m sure they’ll be valuable.
Pete: Taking notes. Writing that down. Steal Pat’s
ideas 🙂
Pete: I don’t want to take up too much your time–OK
if I ask you just one or two frequently asked questions that I tend to ask a
lot of people?
Glen: Sure as this is this is something you want me
to quickfire?
Pete: Nope.
Pete: Who are you learning from right now?
Glen: A guy called Nick Eubanks.
Glen: Nick is basically–I run an agency that is you
know my pretty much my sole focus I run into a marked agency. Nick also runs an
Internet marketing agency incredibly successful offices a lot of team members.
Glen: I still love following the old guys Pat Flynn.
I’ve been following Pat for more than 10 years we’ve been talking and he just
comes out with this thing on Kickstarter a brand new stand, tripod.
Pete: SwitchPod, right?
Glen: Yeah he just somehow manages to reinvent
everything he touches seems to be a huge success. I still love following his
story. Yeah. Those two people are hot hot on my mind at the moment.
Glen: And there’s a guy called Brendan Hufford. You
actually had him on not too long ago.
Pete: Yeah totally cool guy.
Glen: Yes. So Brendan was a student of mine who was
not a student, so I have a product I’m not going to try to pitch anything. I
have a product by building a marketing agency and I’ve been running this for
about six years now. Brendan never boarded but every year he followed my–you
know you put out those presale videos you give value but you hope that people
will still buy the program. He only watched the give value stuff and he never
bought anything for me and he had a lot of success with that and I just love
his positivity and his focus.
Glen: So he’s not some huge rock star. But I love
that he was on your show and he’s he’s also someone I enjoy following as well.
Pete: Do you know Jason Zook?
Glen: I do. Yes.
Pete: Jason. Actually I can’t remember which way it
was either Brennan recommended know Jason or not no no. But I’ve known Jason
for several years. I think it was him that introduce Brennan to me and I liked
that they both kind of shared the same…I guess you could call it a branding
mentality?
Pete: They are both really skilled in kind of
standing out and holding their own ground as far as a brand that kind of gets
noticed and makes people laugh and smile and you know people love that they
love to stick around for that.
Pete: There’s like a 60 second promo video for
Brendan’s SEO thing that he’s doing right now–think he’s launching a course in
the back it and I’m actually not sure–but was like 100 days of SEO or
something like that and I saw promo video and twitters like the 15 20 seconds
maybe and he didn’t even talk about the product at all lol.
Pete: Like it was just some quirky humor thing that
people were still like sharing and kind of laughing about and I was like
“I like that.” I love this guy like I just appreciate that sort of
humor branding and positioning and all that great stuff. So that’s cool.
Glen: Can I give a quick quick should out for Jason?
Because I actually have no connection with him at all. I followed what he’s
doing but I’m on Gaps, I did it was about a team about two years ago, I did a
case study where I said I’m going to build a website in 28 days and I’m gonna make
money, and I used a pseudo name.
Glen: It was something Musk, Austin Musk literally
like Elon Musk.
Glen: So I asked people “I’m about to launch
this podcast will you sponsor it?” And a lot of people said no of course,
they like who the hell is this Austin musk? I got a lot of jokes about Elon and
the podcast wasn’t alive–but Jason, not knowing it was me in any way
whatsoever, he actually agreed to sponsor one of the episodes so I will always
appreciate that and give him credit for that.
Glen: That was a very cool thing he did for a
stranger not knowing what was going on.
Pete: So yeah I remember I remember that you were you
were reading blog posts in podcast format or something like that?
Glen: Yeah. That was it. Yes spoken growth was the
name of the the whole angle and we.
Glen: Yeah in 28 days we made no huge amount of
money. It was 450 dollars we made in the 28 days using no name in a brand new
website.
Glen: And yet Jason was fifty dollars of that.
Pete: I love that. I like Jason. He’s a great guy.
Okay. I’ll let you go here in a sec. But one more question.
Pete: [00:54:01] You can just respond instinctively asses to everybody
maybe you’ve heard it before but what is one thing you wish other bloggers
would stop doing immediately? [9.2]
Glen: Stop thinking that you cannot talk to some of
the people that you think you can’t.
Glen: All right Pat. Jason. Brandon. Whoever it is.
And stop thinking you don’t have the value to connect with someone.
Glen: I can I can pick up a total stranger off the
street and they will send you an email tomorrow and you will respond even if
you’ve never heard of the name. There is some value you have that is incredible
to someone else and you don’t have to think of yourself like I’m just starting
out. No one’s going to care. That is not the case.
Glen: There is something some story, some part of
your life where you can provide value to other people and they will care about
what you have going on.
Pete: I love that. And so that actually ties back
around nicely to kind of promote what you know you don’t want to specifically
give a pitch…but I have just a really cool feeling about all the stuff I see
on Detailed and I have for like a year now.
Pete: So where can people go just to learn more follow
what you’re doing if they want to try it out for themselves where would you
point people?
Glen: Sure. So I don’t have anyone who checks my
inbox for me or anything like that so if anyone wants to reach out directly
Glen just one ‘n’ I hate being called Glen with two Ns.
Glen: Glen@detailed.com. Email me and I answer all my
emails, I will not pitch anything if you have any questions about anything
we’ve talked about but yeah otherwise.
Glen: I’m very proud of the newsletter we have on
Detailed. Our column we have a Facebook group for SEOs which we also find on
that newsletter, and that’s my primary focus.
Pete: Well Glen but thank you so much for taking the
time whoever you are.
Pete: I enjoy what you put out for sure content wise.
I’m looking forward to see where this goes. Detailed.com specifically but
everything you do for the most part. So yeah I mean thank you so much for
coming on I appreciate you.
Glen: Piers thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
What did you think of this chat with Glen? Please drop me some comment love below!
Today I am stoooooked to bring you the incredible story today behind Chasing Foxes.
Silas and Grace Moser (the two bloggers), have managed to build up a HUGE blog in just over a year, and I really wanted to find out how they did it!
A little over a year ago, Silas and Grace were unsure of where their lives were headed…working in stressful jobs, desiring travel, wanting to create something to enable that lifestyle…..the usual.
Fast-forward a year later…and
Today I am stoooooked to bring you the incredible story today behind Chasing Foxes.
Silas and Grace Moser (the two bloggers), have managed to build up a HUGE blog in just over a year, and I really wanted to find out how they did it!
A little over a year ago, Silas and Grace were unsure of where their lives were headed…working in stressful jobs, desiring travel, wanting to create something to enable that lifestyle…..the usual.
Fast-forward a year later…and their blog is receiving over 2,000,000 page views a month and generating solid income (which will surely grow exponentially for a while. They’re only starting year two…)
How on Earth did they do it??
Stuff we talk about?
NOT niching down(!)
How new bloggers underestimate the hustle required
Talking to significant others about your blogging passion
They’re delightful people (as well as brilliant and super hardworking I might add), and I KNOW you’re going to get some golden nuggets of blogging wisdom from them. I love their story.
We hear this all the time in the meta-blogging world. We’re told to niche down 3 times in order that we might find a audience to connect to.
Here’s why this is generally true:
It’s easier to “stand out” in a very targeted niche (because there is less competition)
Here’s why this MIGHT not be true at all:
Blogging, side-hustles, and online business does have a “numbers game” element.
Silas and Grace have taken to a broad “lifestyle” niche, including travel, money, blogging, food, etc…and are doing so for a numbers game.
They aim to reach the maximum amount of people possible, and intend to convert those website visitors who have multiple lifestyle interests in common.
For example, I like reading about personal finance, digital marketing (I.e. how to blog), AND travel. I’d totally land on ChasingFoxes.com for a travel related article, and click-through to a personal finance related article.
If you’re good at driving traffic (which having several sub-niches lends itself to anyways), then this approach could totally work.
“Could.” Not “will.”
2 – Blog growth takes a lot of work
When we talked about joining Pinterest group boards, Grace casually mentioned she spent a number of days JUST reaching out to group board owners. She couldn’t even identify how many boards she’s a part of…because it’s dozens and dozens, if not hundreds.
This is a key ingredient to their massive growth….and it didn’t come easy.
That sort of effort takes a lot of time, and it’s tedious.
How many times do you read an article on Pinterest marketing…and not take action on it?
Or take action on it…but just a little? If a course says “join 50 group boards!” How many do you actually join?
How much free time do you spend blogging vs. watching TV?
All these questions boil down to “How badly do you want it?”
Silas and Grace wanted it bad.
{{{{Speaking of blog growth, DYEB has a lovely course on Pinterest traffic. It’s a simple email course for beginners-intermediate folks…which you can opt into below.}}}}
3 – If you plan on spending time on your blog, clear it with your significant other
This is important. Your spouse (or boyfriend/girlfriend) should 101.5% be on board with your blogging efforts.
If you have a full-time job, you might be blogging at night or on weekends…when you otherwise might be sending time with your family.
This can be a tough thing for non-bloggers to understand, so it’s vital you sit down w/ your loved ones and explain to them why you’re doing what you’re doing.
9 times out of 10, they’ll totally support you, but you should present your case anyways (they’ll also just enjoy learning about something you’re passionate about!)
4 – Spend more time on your headlines (tired of hearing this yet?)
Silas and Grace made a dedicated effort to analyze Buzzfeed and Upworthy headlines, learning what worked and why.
Who does that??
We all know headlines are important, but the truth is we all still skimp sometimes. (I totally do).
Can anyone here tell me the purpose of your blog post headline?
To get the post read?
To make you look good?
NO.
***
The purpose of your headline is to get your first sentence read.
The purpose of your first sentence? To get your second sentence read.
This is copywriting 101.
***
(Also, Grace and Silas took it to yet another level…they didn’t just choose 1 headline. They chose 5-6, and ABCDE and F tested them via different Pinterest images. Smart!)
Want to step up your Pinterest marketing game with a free course?
Want to drive massive traffic from Pinterest?
This is a FREE 7-day email course covering everything I’ve learned from interviewing Pinterest giants like Michelle Schroeder, Rosemarie Groner, Chasing Foxes, Kate Ahl, and more.
Spencer Haws (Niche Pursuits) is an OG PLAYA in the blogging world.
He has an incredible track record of building up blogs for affiliate income (both old school niche sites, and “modern” niche sites–i.e. normal blogs 😎)
He also has a WEALTH of experience driving blog traffic across multiple channels (SEO, Pinterest, you name it).
Soooooooo on this episode:
EXACTLY how much should you use keywords in your content (for SEO?)
Why internal linking is awesome &
Spencer Haws (Niche Pursuits) is an OG PLAYA in the blogging world.
He has an incredible track record of building up blogs for affiliate income (both old school niche sites, and “modern” niche sites–i.e. normal blogs 😎)
He also has a WEALTH of experience driving blog traffic across multiple channels (SEO, Pinterest, you name it).
Soooooooo on this episode:
EXACTLY how much should you use keywords in your content (for SEO?)
Why internal linking is awesome & super easy low-hanging fruit
Why you SHOULD seriously look into buying a blog
Spencer’s got me up here absolutely ITCHING to buy a blog and grow it for money. So tempting. Anybody wanna partner up and do this? 😉
Enjoy this chat!
Listen to my episode with Spencer Haws from Niche Pursuits:
spencer: [00:00:00] In the beginning, we could talk about probably a a dozen different traffic sources, right? Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, SEO, traffic, paid traffic, , email, newsletter, traffic, referral, traffic, , lots of different things.
Pick one and just become really, really good at it and focus on it.
pete: [00:03:00] So you have been, quote unquote, retired from corporate America life for roughly nine years at this point. First of all, congratulations. I should have said that. What was the point where you realized you had kind kinda made it, I’m sure you were kind of nervous back when your niche sites were just taking off.
It was like 2011 right? I think I read you
spencer: [00:03:18] yup.
pete: [00:03:19] When did you finally have like a little bit of confidence or when did you feel comfortable that you had done the right thing? Quit the job and doing this whole, on my business thing full time.
spencer: [00:03:30] Well, the niche sites, uh, certainly provided me the confidence to quit my job. But when did I make it? , over the first couple of years of quitting my job, I had created long tail pro. And so a couple of years into after creating long tail pro, we did a massive promotion. And it brought in something like $250,000 in sales in a week.
Uh, you know, my cut was less than that, you know, with affiliates taking their cut, et cetera. But it was like, Holy cow, I think I’m onto something. I think I’ve made it now. , so that, that was a couple of years after quitting my job. Um, that was one of the. Definitely one of the big moments. Um, and I’ve had a couple sentence, but that was probably early on.
Definitely was a confidence booster.
pete: [00:04:23] Okay. Have you ever had like a low point or felt like, you know what, maybe I should go back to working in banking or something? Any times you felt like quitting during that time?
spencer: [00:04:32] , yeah, actually, uh, within the first year of me. Well, it’s always a roller coaster, always a roller coaster. But within the first year of quitting my job, uh, the Panda update from Google came out, and this is only for old school, you know, bloggers or niche site builders that would remember the Panda and penguin came out shortly thereafter, I think it was six months later.
And those had, . Big negative impacts on a lot of my websites. And so that was, that was definitely a low point of, do I try to rebuild this? Um, you know, I’ve lost a lot of my income, or do I buckle down, try to evolve my strategies and, , try, try to work well with the new Google. And, uh, luckily I stuck with it.
pete: [00:05:22] So I’m really glad you did that. That’s the perfect transition into kind of what I want this podcast episode to be about.
I want to ask you about blog traffic. I know that’s super broad, but let me give you some context,
you as well as anybody else who has done more and more. Niche sites, authority sites, buying and selling new blogs in recent years.
I tend to trust when it comes to how you talk about blog traffic and you’re not like this, this, like Spencer who started back in 2011 and he made it big and then he didn’t do anything for like the past five years and just been living on this one big brand that you built like a decade ago. That would be great too.
spencer: [00:06:03] Right?
pete: [00:06:03] me wrong, I don’t want to put those people down, but you’ve also done really cool stuff. In the meantime. Including, Oh, what was I, I was just reading about this in the prep for this interview. I think it was like niche project for, did
spencer: [00:06:17] You got
pete: [00:06:18] You released an update last month.
spencer: [00:06:20] Yup.
pete: [00:06:20] , I was like, Oh man, it’s just like he, he’s still talking about like Pinterest, what’s going on there?
And of course SEO and stuff like that. So let’s start with this, Spencer, for anybody who’s started and 2019, this is January, 2020. So I’m gonna say, anybody who’s started in the last 10 to 12 months. What advice would you give them when they have no idea about blog traffic? These are new bloggers specifically.
They’ve landed on ditch pursuits or they’ve landed on do even blog. They kind of got excited and they started a blog and they had fun, and now they realize traffic is hard and they’re starting to go out there and learn more about SEO and or Pinterest or maybe paid ads. What would be your very broad generic advice for those people?
spencer: [00:07:06] well, as far as blog traffic, I would say pick a strategy and just become an expert at it. In the beginning because there we could talk about probably a dub, a dozen different traffic sources, right? Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, SEO, traffic, paid traffic, you know, email, newsletter, traffic, referral, traffic, you know, lots of different things.
Pick one and just become really, really good at it and focus on it. Probably for your first year, maybe longer. , and, and, and that just depends on, what maybe you’re good at or your personality. some people love Pinterest, right? And so maybe they’re happy to spend hours every day pinning things and, and, you know, sharing and tribes, et cetera.
That’s honestly not really me. Uh, but you know, right. Right? But at this point, you know, I’m a little more advanced and I’ve been able to outsource some of that, right? So I’m not personally on Pinterest, but I still have a little bit of a Pinterest, a traffic source. Uh, but maybe it’s SEO. And that’s my primary source of traffic for most of my sites is I’ve become really good at keyword research, , figuring out how to write articles so that Google will rank them and you can perform better than others.
Websites that have written on the same subjects. , and so that, that would be my advice is pick a source of traffic and, and stick with it, become an expert at it, and just go all in on that source.
pete: [00:08:43] This, this is totally random and always slightly off topic maybe, but outside of the two of us, quite frankly, who are you learning. A SCO from personally, like is there anybody you still follow now 10 years after being in this game that you look for for like, I’m going to say trending, but like updated SEO strategies and stuff like that.
spencer: [00:09:06] Yeah. Like, I, I read the search engine news. So search engine land or, you know, search engine journal just for, not so much tips, but, , changes, right? Like, I think it was just maybe two days ago, Google announced that there’s the January update, you know, a core algorithm update, right?
So I read the news sources to make sure I’m on top of, you know, Google has announced this. I want, I want to know that, . But as far as strategies, um, there’s a few, you know, if, , Brian Dean or Neil Patel, , Matt diggity is another one. , or, uh, a few other guys that either I’m just connected with.
Honestly, a lot of, or at least a couple of other people that I’m connected with are just on Facebook and private Facebook groups. You know, like, uh, SEO, Facebook groups. , you know, I’ll, I’ll kind of browse there and just, uh, I like to read any sort of case studies or people saying, Hey, I did this and this worked.
, but no one particular source. But, but that’s a few that I, you know, will sort of pay attention to there. , and then a lot of it’s just through my own trial and error, uh, as well that I’m seeing on my own sites.
pete: [00:10:14] let me give you like a little hypothetical here. I want to transition, uh, in just a few minutes to talk about buying and selling sites. And you also have like a new partnership or company or joint venture you mentioned off air. I want to dive into that a little bit too. But before we get there, I would be curious to hear some of your low hanging fruit SEO strategies.
If you were to pick up a new blog today, and let’s say the blogs about a year old, but it managed to generate some decent back links or referring domains, and it’s first year and it’s in a, it’s already in a niche that you kind of feel attracted to or you think has opportunity or something like that.
Let’s say you inherit that. Somebody just hands it to you one day and now you’re looking down the barrel of six months or a year, how, what are some of the things you would do to start building more links or start pumping out content? Or what were some of the standard SEO strategies you would do in that scenario?
spencer: [00:11:14] Great question. Uh, so the first thing I would do is look at the existing content and how it can be updated and improved. So before I’d go and order another 30 articles, I would first look at. What do they have written already on the site? And I would do an a, a complete audit. I would analyze which pages or keywords are ranking on the first page or the second page.
Uh, that’s primarily what I would focus is keywords that are already ranking on the first and second page, and how can I bump them up from position seven to number one or position. 13 to number one in Google. And there’s a lot of different tools that can help you analyze, like on page SEO. Uh, but when it comes down to it, I would look at how are the existing articles competing or compared, .
How, how, how do they compare to existing content out there? So do they need to do, do I need to add additional word count to the articles? Do I need to make them longer? Do I need to add more images? Do I need to include a keywords better in the H two tags? Uh, things like that. So I’d go in, I’d update the content to make it better, longer, and generally a more SEO optimized.
I’ve seen huge gains, , from doing that, , massive gains on articles that can, you know, double or triple the search engine traffic just by going in and adding a few hundred words and optimizing it better. So that would be step one. Step two, I would then look at the internal linking structure of the site.
I would look at, uh, are there well and, and very low hanging fruit is looking at orphan pages. Those are pages on your site that don’t have a single internal link pointing to them. , so I would go in, I’d look at every page that has zero internal links, and I’d make sure that it had at least one internal link.
, and a lot of cases, you know, you’d be able to add three or four or more, just depending on how much content is on the site, et cetera. So I would focus quite a bit of time on doing those two things. And then at that point, I would develop a broader keyword strategy. And start, you know, writing new content, et cetera.
But, but the on page SEO is definitely the low hanging fruit. I’d focus on
pete: [00:13:46] Okay. I’ve got a question. Let me backtrack for a second. So most of my, I love them dearly. Most of my SEO friends who work full time in SEO, they tend to look at tools like Yoast. And rightfully so, probably that didn’t look at Yoast and people, new bloggers, especially trying to get like the green bullets and EOS and trying to, you know, cut down on the yellows and reds and they talk about adding your keyword in the first sentence.
So the first paragraph or the first hundred words, and they talk about adding your keywords and and a bunch of different stuff like that. I would love to give your opinion, Spencer, like how important is. Maybe we could even just break down each of those right there, like do you, do you, do you think it’s still important in 2020 and beyond to include keywords like in the first hundred words or the first paragraph?
How about that one?
spencer: [00:14:38] I do. I still do that. you know, Google is still an algorithm and, they, they don’t read like humans, meaning that they don’t necessarily fully understand content. Right? They can matte, they, they can match based on keywords and perhaps synonyms. But they don’t truly, you know, read an article and understand, right?
They don’t read your best racquetball racquets article and, and truly understand that, you know, this brand is the best one per se. Right. Um, so, uh, I, I do, um, I do think that mentioning in the first a hundred words is important. So right off the bat, they know, okay, this is, this is a core topic of the article.
pete: [00:15:22] let me just curious, do you still use Yoast or do you use Yoast?
spencer: [00:15:26] I do use Yos. Yeah.
pete: [00:15:28] you, okay. All right. Fair enough. How concerned are you over the bullets? I know this is totally like random off topic, but I’m sincerely curious to hear it from different people.
spencer: [00:15:38] when I outsource, it’s a really easy box to check for my writers. Right. , so. I have that as a standard operating procedure that it needs, you know, the green, you know, uh, bullet points or whatever, right? It meets all the Yost criteria. Uh, so I make sure that my authors do that. So it is important. , but, , if there were articles that I was writing and sometimes I didn’t get the green Yoast, I wouldn’t be too concerned because I intuitively kind of understand.
What Yoast is trying to achieve. It’s hard to teach a writer that, Hey, it doesn’t necessarily mean just because the readability isn’t green like I, you know, maybe don’t be too concerned about that. Just generally, these are great guidelines.
pete: [00:16:28] So I actually wrote down on my notes here. Ordering articles. You even said that earlier. I know we’re jumping around quite a bit and I, I apologize, but as somebody who is looking to outsource a few tasks, even in the next like month or two, I’m actually starting with podcasting, outsourcing and editor and so forth, but also SEO and content.
I would be curious, and I don’t know, this is a tough question. I want to ask so many questions, but.
Where do you find your writers, I guess would be a good question. And, or
I’m sure you’ve been doing this for quite a while now. Do you have like a full team of writers or do you still going to like Upwork or are you looking at like the pro blogger job board or still finding people?
What does your team look like there.
spencer: [00:17:18] Yeah. So I do have a team of about five writers right now. , and I found them. You already named it. , Upwork. Pro blogger job boards. I think I’m three or four from the pro blogger job boards. One is from Upwork, I think right now. And then a one is just personal contacts. it’s actually my sister, but I’ve, I’ve found writers through, personal, personal contacts, friends, family, acquaintances over the years, you know, randomly as well.
So.
pete: [00:17:51] A podcast repeats brain is like delayed like two and a half minutes today. Apparently. I’m still tired, I guess, but I’ve found the perfect question to ask you about writers. Now. I should have asked you two minutes ago, but now I’m going to ask you anyways, so. I just explained to you that I’m probably going to be looking for a few contributors in the next month or two for do you even blog and another site, my first niche site in years actually, and
the question is, what advice would you give me?
I haven’t hired a writer. I’m pretty sure ever. I’ve had some contributors, but I haven’t actually hired a writer from any of those places you just mentioned forever. What would be like the top tip or the top couple of tips that you would give me? Just starting out.
spencer: [00:18:33] So I really like, especially for budget options. and somebody. Yeah, that’s the, that’s maybe just getting started out. I found success going to Upwork and hiring an hourly person. it’s very common to hire a writer, you know, on a per work basis. And what you’ll find is that if you’re paying 3 cents, 4 cents, 5 cents a word, you actually end up overpaying a lot of times, because if you can get a writer that, and, and you can find good writers, honestly, for 10 to 15 or $20 an hour.
So let’s say you find somebody $15 an hour, it takes them, you know, call it two hours to write a 2000 word article. Right? That’s $30. Whereas if you know, it’s pretty common to pay four or 5 cents a word, so let’s say 4 cents a word, that would be $80 for that exact same 2000 word article. So you just saved yourself $50, on a piece of content.
And so my advice would go, and maybe I didn’t clarify. Another point is ask for beginners. in the job post, say, I want to beginner, I do not want an SEO expert. If you even mention SEO, I’m not going to consider you. so what you want is somebody like perfect people are college students and stay at home moms, people that are willing to work, you know, for 15 bucks an hour and don’t have a lot of SEO experience or writing experience.
You want to have them follow your SLPs, your standard operating procedures, right? You don’t want him to come in with any preconceived notion of how to rank in Google, et cetera. You just want them to be smart. Writers, you just want them to come in and be able to write, and then they follow your procedures for mentioned the keyword in the first hundred words, or, et cetera, et cetera.
So try to look for beginners and hire hourly instead of per word. That would be my advice.
pete: [00:20:40] It’s so interesting. First of all, I’m gonna let me comment on that. So that’s counterintuitive. I was thinking that’s odd. I would be afraid of the quality that they would give me. But then again, I’ve never done this before. And then I thought about, excuse me, and then I thought about the people who I have worked with.
Again, I haven’t hired a whole bunch of writers, but I, I’ve kind of done that. I’ve found writers to write for me and some freelance clients, and they’ve all been. Experienced SEO literate and I haven’t been entirely pleased, at least from an SEO content perspective. So now I’m like, well, wait, what are my preconceived notions here?
What am I missing? There’s something, right? I’m going to try it this now. Spitzer, I wrote it on my notes. I’m actually gonna do exactly what you said.
spencer: [00:21:28] Yeah. And it is important that you have the, the procedures for them though. Right? So that’s the other piece is you need to think through, and here’s the six or seven steps you need to follow when you write this article. And you need to have that for your writers. Uh, so they can come in and, and mostly just worry about writing, but then they can go through that six or seven checkpoints and make sure they do it according to how you want it done.
pete: [00:21:52] Curious, are your SOPs public information, do you have those anywhere on niche pursuits or otherwise?
spencer: [00:21:59] I, I don’t, , I, yeah, I, I included them in a course that I once taught that I’ve, I’ve shut down and, you know, I’m not selling online courses anymore. Um, but other than that, yeah, they’re just private to me.
pete: [00:22:11] What’s the big deal? There is an article out there I found, I have a book somewhere. I didn’t remember what site it was on, to be honest with you. It was something like how to create. Standard operating procedures for your online business, and it was very helpful. I’ll see if I can like drum that up for the show notes or something.
Okay. Let’s transition a little bit into buying and selling before I ask. So first of all, people listening to this primarily don’t buy and sell blogs, which is interesting, but I’ve heard from a lot of people that they’re, they’re interested in it. that like 0.2% of my audience has probably bought.
A existing site or a sold, there’s probably a few more that have sold their sites, but in general, people are kind of interested in this topic. So before we get into that, give me like a 62nd elevator pitch on your new business. I know you want to talk about it. I, I’m curious to ask you questions about it, but like give us the name, the URL where can find it and w and what does it, what does this do?
Venture. You have
spencer: [00:24:43] All right. 62nd elevator pitch.
pete: [00:24:46] ready, set, go. I’m putting my timer on.
spencer: [00:24:49] It is. So much easier to buy an existing business that’s already making money than it is to start something from scratch. So you could go and buy a blog that’s making $500 a month right now and tomorrow you could be making, you know, $500 a month. A lot of people starting a blog, it might take them a year, two years or longer to get to the $500 a month Mark.
So it, it’s, um. Incredibly advantageous to get into blogging by buying a blog. , it’ll cost you probably less money and less time. Uh, so that’s the reason why you might want to do it now. Motion invest. So motion invest.com is a service, a business that I started with a couple of co-founders where we are buying and selling online.
Businesses on websites, blogs, niche sites, , and so we, so there’s two sides of it. If you are looking to sell, uh, we are a great option because we don’t charge any fees. We will buy directly from you. Uh, we will send you cash quite quickly, right? So it’s fast, close, no fees. Et cetera. We want to buy, we are looking to buy.
, but the other thing, if you are interested in buying a blog, it’s say making $500 a month. You can come to motion, invest.com and we are selling some of our portfolio. Uh, you know, we are constantly buying and selling new properties. So every week we have new listings. You can come and you can buy a site again, no fees, you buying from us directly.
You’re not buying from somebody else. , and so hopefully we’re trustworthy enough that, you know, Hey, we’re going to deliver, uh, et cetera. , and so that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s the quick pitch. If you want to either buy or sell an existing blog motion, invest is a great place to go.
pete: [00:26:52] so let’s talk about multiples as in, usually if somebody is looking to sell their blog and they’re making $500 a month, there is a. Multiple that will determine like the price they can’t get. Sometimes I don’t, I don’t know. Is it like a year, two years? We’ll specifically talk about selling for a second and somebody wants to sell
a, this is, this is tricky because your, your business is built on kind of flipping, but the people out there who want to sell and want to get the best price, obviously, what’s, what’s a reasonable multiple they should expect or they could expect.
spencer: [00:27:27] Yeah, so right around probably two and a half years of earnings, or which equates to 30 times, uh, monthly earnings. Right. That’s, that’s, that’s pretty close. If you were to go to a typical brokerage or something like that, that that’s pretty close to what you could get is take your monthly net income, multiply that by 30.
Okay.
pete: [00:27:49] I’m curious. I have to ask the question. When you guys buy sites, are you doing any work to them? Like you’re trying to like just monetize as best you can so you can increase that multiple for yourself before you sell? Is that what you guys are doing? If you don’t mind me asking.
spencer: [00:28:05] Uh, sometimes, uh, it kind of is a case by case basis. For the most part, we are turning around and selling them quickly.
pete: [00:28:15] Okay, so let’s say. For the people listening to this who might want to buy a blog, what are some things they would look for? They would either go on motion, invest, or if they’re reaching out to friends they have in the community or something. Is there like a timeframe, like this blog has been active for like at least six months, but less than like five years or is all revenue focused or traffic like are you looking for a minimum?
Must have at least. 5,000 page views a month or something like that, or is it just like a gut feeling? Different niches? What are some of the guidelines for buying a blog that then you can monetize better? Or in your case flip,
who won’t be flipping, like monetize that and create opportunity there.
Does that make
spencer: [00:29:02] right? Yeah. So typically the longer the age, the better. Right? So if you can buy a blog that’s 10 years old, that’s, that’s great. Right? So, so age is usually great. And the reason for that is typically authority. So the other thing you want to look at is, , uh, link authority or domain authority. You know, so how strong is the domain?
What type of links does it have pointing to it? If it’s got a lot of powerful links pointing to it, that’s a really good thing. So, look at, back when we profiled domain authority, age and then revenue is a big one, right? How much is the site making every month? And what are the revenue sources? , and there there’s, you know.
Several other points they might look at as well, like how concentrated is the traffic on one particular page? Is 90% of the traffic coming to one article or is it spread out, you know, pretty well. If it’s all coming to one article, that’s, that’s not a good thing. Right. , you know, going back to links, are there spammy links pointing to the website already?
, so you want something that has a clean. Backlink profile. Hopefully a lot of domain authority, uh, is a consistent earner. Right? It’s been earning money, , for, you know, over six months. Uh, would, would be great. And then, then trends, you want to look at traffic trends, earning trends. Is it going up?
Is it going down? , yeah, things like that.
pete: [00:30:30] Okay. It’s such an interesting prospect. Part of me is like, well,
it depends. It would have to be, it would have to appear to be under monetized. I guess I’m thinking personally here, by the way, if I were
spencer: [00:30:42] Right, right.
pete: [00:30:43] a side, I would think like, and these would be under monetized. Elsa is going to take me 30 months to earn that money back.
I need to be able to like leverage that and increase it.
Okay. All right.
spencer: [00:30:53] Yeah. I mean, just, just to give you an example, a concrete example, right, so I’m doing, as you mentioned, my niche site project for on niche pursuits.com it’s a public project where I built a niche site from scratch. It’s been a year and four months, I think since I started it. Uh, the site last month did really well.
It earned $2,300, uh, last month, but that was because of Christmas. If I were to look at the average earnings over the last six months, you know, it’d be closer to maybe $1,200. Okay. Something like that. So if I were, if we take my 30, multiple, $1,200 times 30 is $36,000. Okay. So I could buy a site today making $1,200 a month for $36,000 I can tell you that I’ve spent right around $36,000 to build my niche site from the ground up.
So if I’ve invested, let’s call it essentially the exact same dollar amount, but the difference is. I’ve, you could, I’m putting air quotes wasted. I’ve wasted a year and four months of my time. And so what would have happened if I had bought a year and four months ago spent $36,000, , I would’ve been making $1,200 a month during that year and four months, right?
So what is that 16 months? That’s an addition. So basically I lost out on $19,200 because. For the first year it was making almost nothing.
pete: [00:32:31] I like that. That makes more sense. I like it when you put it in that perspective. That’s a good pitch.
spencer: [00:32:36] So I, I’m not saying it’s forever, like I still just built a site from scratch. Sometimes that’s, that’s a great option to go, but it’s worth considering looking at buying as well. It all depends.
pete: [00:32:49] I tell people this all the time. Part of the reason I started podcast was to get like. Free consulting like other, I was like, send Spencer an email and be like, Hey, can I have an hour of your time just to like pick your brain?
I hate when people use those words and most everybody would say like, no, have zero interest, but started podcasts and like develop some sort of audience and now like, Oh, this is cool. I get to ask questions, learn about Spencer’s new business, and also satisfy some of my own, like,
spencer: [00:33:14] Hundred percent
pete: [00:33:15] yeah, so I’ll tell you what to wind down here. Let’s talk about link. Whisper. Wait. It’s not link whisper or I always want to say that, but it’s the link whisper. There’ll be like the dog whisperer. But with internal links,
spencer: [00:33:28] Just link. Whisper. Yup.
pete: [00:33:30] link whisper.
spencer: [00:33:32] when I first built it, I had just hired a freelance developer to get the initial version up and out the door. Right. So somebody part time, uh, contract work to get the initial version. , and then a couple of months after launching when I saw there was traction.
And it looked like the market was responding that yeah, people like link whisper. They think it’s a good idea. Then I went ahead and I hired a full time developer.
pete: [00:33:57] So. Do you have any, you have any case studies or like success stories? I know it’s a good product. I installed it. We emailed back and forth like a couple of months ago and I, I, I put it on my site. I’ve already optimized a few links because it’s pretty, it’s pretty slick actually, especially with somebody already armed with the knowledge, who knows what orphan content is and knows roughly.
, what their anchor text should be like, where their, what an internal linking structure is, especially somebody armed with that minimum amount of knowledge. Uh, I think it can be extremely powerful. But do you have any like success stories? Did you put this on the niche project? , when it first came out, like th the current project you just released an update on in December.
spencer: [00:34:43] Yeah. You know, I do have, uh, some case studies, uh, definitely some examples of, , sites where I’ve built internal links and it’s, it’s, , seen, uh, big results. One of those is niche pursuits.com. , just generally speaking, you know, I went through several articles. And I, I mean, I could share, you know, 10 different articles I went through and they just saw big jumps just by adding internal links.
, and it’s funny you should ask because just in the last, uh, week, I’ve been, um, updating my niche site project foresight, which is own the yard.com people can go check it out. It’s public, , so own the yard.com. I’ve, in the last week I’ve been. Internal linking. I’ve been using link whisper. So what I did is I opened up link whisper.
I went to the report so I could see which articles didn’t have any links, right? Because authors have been writing a lot of articles over the last couple of months. And I wanted to make sure that all of them had at least one internal link pointing to them. And, , so over the last week I’ve been adding, uh, internal links to those pages.
And I was just, this morning. Looking at my rank tracker, because I tracked my ranks. , this article, one of these articles just jumped 31 positions in Google. It was ranked 32 yesterday and I, I built, a couple of internal links yesterday. Today it’s number one in Google. and then there is a, another one.
That, a month ago, it was ranked 70 in Google. And I, and I built the internal links to this one a couple of weeks ago. that’s why I’m showing you a month ago, but a, a month ago was ranked 70. And today it’s number two in Google. And so, and I, and I have several other examples of just building one or two internal links really can make a difference.
pete: [00:36:38] link was dot com people can check that out. I’ll put, Hey, I have an affiliate link. I’ll put my affiliate link in the show notes too. There you go.
spencer: [00:36:44] Yeah. Do it.
pete: [00:36:46] That’s all I got. Let me ask you one more question that I asked to almost every guest on this show, Spencer, what is one thing you wish other bloggers would stop doing immediately?
spencer: [00:37:00] I think that too many times bloggers will say that, , you know, this strategy is the only way to go, and, and this is what you have to do. And you know. They come off as a little bit arrogant and as though they know everything, I do my best, uh, believe it or not, uh, through niche pursuits to share both my successes and my failures, I try to be pretty open about what doesn’t work.
And so I think that, , bloggers too often just cherry pick and share the good news and don’t share the bad news as well. And so I think that bloggers did a little more of sharing some of the bad news or just. Honestly presenting themselves as, as a real person, I think people can connect and they’ll do a little bit better.
pete: [00:37:46] I love that.
That’s pretty much what I’ve built my brand on. For the most part. I’m banking on you being right, so, yeah, I hope you’re right. Cool. Well. Motion, invest.com link was for.com ms pursues.com is there any place you would prefer people follow you? Social, Instagram, Twitter, anything like that?
spencer: [00:38:06] you know, I am on Twitter, , but probably my private Facebook group. Uh, then private niche pursuits, Facebook group is probably the best place to, um, get my attention. And it also just, there’s a lot of great discussion going on there.
pete: [00:38:22] Alright, Spencer, buddy, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate your time and good luck with your current projects, man.
spencer: [00:38:30] Thank you so much. It’s a, it’s been great being on the podcast, Pete. Appreciate it.
Instagram is TOTALLY that platform that I know I need to spend more time on, but every time I do–I’m wondering if I’m doing the right thing.
This content doesn’t seem to be working…
Stories are fun, but only a handful of people view them…
Literally nobody is finding me based on hashtags, etc.
Whelp, my friend Kaila is an Instagram consultant & strategist (she just got our mutual friend Natalie, who will be on this podcast later this month, to 10k f
Instagram is TOTALLY that platform that I know I need to spend more time on, but every time I do–I’m wondering if I’m doing the right thing.
This content doesn’t seem to be working…
Stories are fun, but only a handful of people view them…
Literally nobody is finding me based on hashtags, etc.
Whelp, my friend Kaila is an Instagram consultant & strategist (she just got our mutual friend Natalie, who will be on this podcast later this month, to 10k followers!)
She’s here to answer ALL of my Insta questions. We cover a T O N of content is this one.
Admit it.
You’ve felt it.
“My audience isn’t big enough yet.”
*shudders
I probably mutter that to myself roughly 3 times a week 😃
The truth is, if you plan on launching an online course (or ANY other products in connection with your blog or podcast), there’s a STRONG argument for getting started today.
For one, the timing is never perfect. Second, make your mistakes now. Third, it takes a LONG time to optimize the product launch process, s
I probably mutter that to myself roughly 3 times a week 😃
The truth is, if you plan on launching an online course (or ANY other products in connection with your blog or podcast), there’s a STRONG argument for getting started today.
For one, the timing is never perfect. Second, make your mistakes now. Third, it takes a LONG time to optimize the product launch process, so the sooner you start the sooner you can optimize.
Today’s podcast guest is none other than Natalie Sisson, who has indeed launched courses. Lots, in fact!
She literally has a course called “Launch your damn course.”
Well, let’s! 👍
How to find the idea (we know how silly hard this can feel)
Today’s podcast guest is Moz.com’s “Senior SEO Scientist,” data and link building nerd, and “great content guru” Britney Muller!
Follow her on Twitter why don’t ya?
This is easily one of my favorite episodes in recent history, especially if you’re into SEO.
We chat about (click to jump to the transcript)
On-page factors that work in 2020?Using 3rd party sites (Medium? Slideshare?) to build links and drive traffic.Content for SEO: How t
What are the on-page SEO factors that matter in 2020?
Pete: A lot of what I really enjoy is how to shape the content that ranks–specifically for on-site, on-page optimization. And then a little bit of keyword and competitive research.
I feel like, but I think this is always been the case with beginner to intermediate bloggers and SEOs–what content do I need to produce?
Like, what are the factors, on page SEO, etc? What is important now, as opposed to five or six years ago?
Britney: Such a good question. There are a million ways to do that.
I would definitely try to root the beginnings of a post concept in some data.
So whether it be Search Console, something you see converting really well for your keywords. And maybe it doesn’t rank as good. That’s one of my favorite go-to’s–you basically export your Google Search Console data and you look at keywords that are maybe at the very tail end of page one or off on to page two, but convert really high, you have these opportunities, but Google’s not surfacing them to their full potential, I would focus on revamping some of those and just providing really, reallhigh–qualityty value. So I’m a big believer of taking the time to create high quality content versus a frequent output of content.
The big opportunity in refreshing existing content.
Pete: Yeah. It’s interesting that that’s the first words out of your mouth are looking at existing content and revamping that as opposed to publishing new content.
Britney: I think that if you’re already an established website with SEO content that does fairly well, like Moz, that is our biggest opportunity is looking at what content previously did well with our audience. And how can or be refurbish it for other platforms. So there’s no reason why a really high like high traffic post can’t be converted into a slideshare. There’s no reason why that SlideShare couldn’t be tweaked and put into a video on YouTube. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have someone just record the audio version, and start to refurbish this to expand your reach and expand that net of qualified traffic. Yeah,
Pete: So okay, let’s say somebody has a post that on page two, or like bottom of page one or something like that for a medium keyword or whatnot. But they have none of that? What’s the little checklist you’ve already mentioned? Like one or two, but why is this important? as well? Yeah. Where would you point folks to go first?
Britney: Yeah, so I might backtrack just a second to sort of paint this full picture. But what I did at my agency that I had spun off and started for our medical clients is, myself and my employees, we would sit down, and we would really work on hard to understand the client, like to understand the website goals, and even the ROI behind that, what are what’s our work going to be measured on. And then we focused really hard on reverse engineering that.
So for an example, we worked with several plastic surgeons, and we discovered that, okay, the funnel is very interesting, someone might consider an elective procedure for years, and then wake up one day and sort of want it yesterday. And from there, they start to do some research. And Funny enough, after digging, and after looking at data and interviewing patients, we did, we discovered that people only search for two things before booking a consultation.
And that was before and after photos, and price.
And so we actually flipped that acquisition funnel on its head. And I said, why would we not focus on that? First? Why would we not try to add content about the range of price for these procedures, and provide custom content on these different before and after photos per se, male in his mid 40s, versus this procedure for a woman and her 30–you can do all this stuff.
And just by that alone, we had been driving just from that work with SEO content alone, we started driving so many leads that they they stopped taking consultations, because they can only take this clinic with up to three months out. Otherwise, everybody was more apt to go see someone else or someone that had more availability. So that in and of itself worked really, really well.
And I think that says a lot about really rooting yourself in understanding what it’s all about, right? What are those goals?
And similarly, we were working with stem cell doctors who would basically use adult stem cells for joint therapy and different treatments. And what we did there was, we discovered, you know, it’s kind of this really confusing space. So we focused on creating content that really simplified it, what is stem cell therapy, what you know, we also create content for alternative knee replacement, therapy, all of these terms to sort of educate the audience.
And then from there, we, we created really simple slideshows, basically decks that we have put on SlideShare. And at the time, it would rank so far above the clients website, that I knew we could leverage that slideshare. com or slideshare. net, or whatever it is. And they got most of their qualified traffic, the stem cell client, from slideshare.
And that was a big kind of aha moment, because it was this really beautiful way of simplifying the complex medical client content, basically, and driving it from there. So I think it’s really just experimenting and seeing what platforms and what content works. For your website that you’re working on.
Using 3rd party platforms to build links and drive qualified traffic to your site:
Pete: Okay, I thought I had another question here. But I don’t think I do. Okay, so that’s cool. jump over to like 2020. that’s currently like mid March or so? Does this still work like skill? Not skills to SlideShare? And just other mediums do? Do those still tend to like outrank your own website? If you did it correctly, and it was a good piece of content or whatnot? Does that still happen? I feel like it kind of dropped off there for a while.
Britney: It definitely has dropped off. I think it really depends on your website and your position in the industry. So that was always one of my favorite hacks, was seeing what platforms are in what websites are ranking so far above you in the space in which you’re trying to rank? And how can you have a voice on there, like even things like Cora, or Reddit, or whatever it is that, is basically a platform above your current position and search, it might be worth exploring to see if your target market is involved there and how you can provide real value.
I would also highly suggest checking out some of Ross Simmons, recent work. He just spoke at search, love and gave an incredible talk about just rethinking content. And he is all for experimentation and trying things out on these various platforms and seeing what works. And yeah, I think he packaged it up in his slide, that maybe we can put in the show notes or something. But I think revisiting the same old platforms, in sort of a new light can bring so much value to a content strategy.
So what he says is–just be a bystander for a while, see what is the most uploaded content in your space on those platforms. His example was read it and he was looking at various spaces. And you can even do like site colon searches within Reddit and see what are the most up-voted conversations that include that website, really cool stuff, and then repackaging and rethinking that same content in a new light, you can do very, very well.
Content for SEO: Package it to be easily consumed.
Okay, so if we were writing an amazing blog post for SEO, on how to produce how to how to shake content that ranks or something like that. So we’ve already talked about a little bit understanding. We could talk for like three hours on user intent, but we won’t, but just understanding the broad strategy of like, what is already working a little bit what can be improved upon, looking at how we can expand into these different mediums that might improve our own rankings, as well as drive traffic to like our other posts or whatnot. There’s anything stand out in this magical make believe blog posts that are writing in terms of actually shaping content? didn’t miss anything?
Britney: Yeah. Okay, I would just say, putting it together in a way that is really, really easy to consume. I think that is really underappreciated
In sort of the digital content realms, as far as just making really, really solid subtitles,
and packaging it up in a way that really makes sense for a reader just skimming it on their cell phone, and providing different options of multimedia. You don’t know everyone’s use case, when they’re on your page, they could be on the bus on the way to work or walking to the grocery store, and they would prefer to listen to an audio version and of that page, or maybe they want to flip through some slides. You know, I think it’s interesting to experiment with repurposing even on your own page to see what’s working with your with your viewers.
The advantages of NOT being an expert.
But I do want to say to it, like, as far as beginners go, I think it’s all too common. Like, I have imposter syndrome all the time. And I think for beginners, yeah. Like, all the time, even now to this podcast, like, I have those thoughts. But I think it’s so important to explain to any beginners out there anyone early in your career, trying to get traction in this space, you have every opportunity, as the “experts in the field.” In fact, you might even have more opportunity than you think. Because so many people that are advanced in the field are focusing on, the pucks go and over here, and they’ve forgotten about some of these basics. There is no reason why you can’t come in and blow everyone’s mind with a really powerful piece of content that’s been well thought out, that will connect and resonate with people. I realized this can be super overwhelming, but the opportunities available are, are out there for everyone. I love this.
Pete: Yes. Yes. And not only that, but I feel like a bunch of the “experts” in different fields, just the sheer ling, and language. By the way, I’m totally guilty at this nothing. I’m a huge expert, by the way, wait, I have an expert. That was my own self-doubt and imposter syndrome coming to light. And we start that sentence over. I felt guilty to this as well, just using normal blogging terms, that even SEO terms that I will still get, like little comments and like emails about like, what does this mean? Like people who just start this, that no idea, like what these words are with this lingo is, and law cases, I feel like that’s another advantage people who are relatively new to learning something and then-teaching it or helping somebody else along the path. You don’t have to present yourself as an expert, but you might actually have a unique angle on something that is easier to understand,
Britney: which, in my opinion, so cute completely, completely. And do you start to notice like with the experts here, interviewing and stuff as they evolve in their careers, I, at least from my perspective, I’m curious to hear what you think a lot of people become sort of those plumbers with leaky faucets. They stopped doing the actual work because they’re so focused on speaking at conferences, or creating different content here and there that they’re really lost sight of some of this powerful beginner stuff.
Generating backlinks through “link-intent” content:
But I want to talk about backlinks. This was the thing, a bunch of people finds this extraordinarily easy because they’re in a niche that kind of supports “spammy outreach emails,” right? Or that are in what I consider to be like some of the hardest niches without like blogging and digital marketing and stuff like that, where everybody you’re reaching out to also gets like a ton of these outreach emails, etc. So I want to ask, I can actually just link to part two parts five, or six or seven is one of the last parts and the beginner’s guide on mas. I actually thought it was really, really helpful. Stating why Google doesn’t really like spammy links, we normally have to go into that. It’s like that’s pretty black and white, I can actually just link to that. But in 2020, and going forward, specifically for bloggers like content, not really ecommerce, but just SEO bloggers looking to grow their organic reach, what are some of the most effective or non-spammy opportunities out there? What would like the top three things like what would you tell people to focus on the most?
Britney: Oh, my gosh, I love this question. That’s awesome. So the first thing that comes to mind is the most, it’s the easiest thing you could possibly do from a content perspective to get links. This involves zero outrage. And it, in fact, is just evaluating and researching keywords with link intent. So keywords with link intent are things like your industry, statistics, your topic facts, it’s finding the keywords that have statistics, facts, data, other things that have link intent built in between because people are putting resources together and they want to link out and reference research, they want to reference a statistic. They want to reference a fact. So I, I’ve always been fascinated by that in and of itself, and just baking that into your content strategy. Because zero outreach sounds pretty good.
Outreach sucks. It just sucks. And unless you’re going to go the really high quality route where it’s super personalized, you’re creating content to replace older content that has done very well. You’re just you’re going to have a tough time. So I definitely suggest creating those really powerful statistics, facts resources on your site. I think repurposing is also an easy way to gain links from other platforms and potential shares elsewhere. I think that’s another easy outreach tactic that you can do.
Pete: I love this. But I can hear the voices of my readers sending me nasty messages. Now, that sounds so hard. Britney, is also difficult. Where would you recommend people start? I’m assuming it doesn’t have to be like, I spend months and months and months doing this, like really in depth research. And like, hiring developers to track something or emailing 10,000 people in my niche? Or I’m assuming it doesn’t have to be that involved that data? Where would you recommend people start any specific questions that they could ask themselves to discover maybe some topics that they that would be the statistics post or facts or different data? Stuff like that?
Britney: Yeah, yeah, I totally, totally see what you’re saying. And my, my answer to that would be, you should round up what’s already available. Because chances are, it’s not just on one site.
There are various companies and various people out there that have done different research, and they’ve delved into this already for you, you’re basically packaging it up with a really nice bow on top, and referencing them. But if you’re going into this with the right mindset, there’s no reason why you could grab all of the best statistics and recent facts and whatnot. And you could house the most recent, blah, blah, blah, statistics for 2020. There’s no reason that average Joe can’t just do a little research and round that up on your own without doing surveys without doing questionnaires. There’s already such great stuff out there.
An old example of accidental “link-intent” content from Pete’s old PF blog:
Pete: So years ago, I had a personal finance blog for about a year and a half, two years. And I kind of did SEO on accident. Like this was not me, being incredibly intentional and just dominating an SEO strategy. It was kind of I really cared about the content. And that ended up performing pretty well. One of which was me creating a one question, Google Form. It was on personal finance.
So the question was something like a bunch of people are going to steal this now because I have some personal finance listeners. It was “What is your biggest problem on money?” or something like that.
Literally, just one question. And I had an email list at that time, it was like, as probably like less than four or 500 people total, like max, I probably got, like, 50 responses from that. I was like, Oh, this is awesome. I also shared it like with my friends and family, because they all knew I had the blog, shared it on Facebook or whatnot, there was only like, less than 100 responses, probably like 70 or 80.
But I wrote up the post, I thought it was an interesting one person, only one person out of that was like, I literally have no money problems. We are so blessed. Like I made a lot of money. And we say well, and like literally like somebody one person said that and everybody else had like, some normal stuff, like not saving enough or of living paycheck to paycheck, or whatever the answers were. It’s pretty normal stuff. That and thinking back I got at least three or four backlinks from Wow, what was it? It was like, life hacker was the first one that picked it up. What? And then third is still out there. You can actually go look at I think there’s like two or three others. I don’t remember what they were. But this is like, I was not I didn’t know what link intent was. So I just thought was kind of fun and cool.
Britney: Wow. That I mean, that does go to speak on how powerful just a little bit of effort on something like that provides is incredible
The other thing that I think is often overlooked is getting to meet people in real life, right? Or at a conference or even just having conversations with people like this. You and I have never met before. But I feel like I’m starting to get an idea of who Pete is. Right?
But I think what’s cool is if you want a backlink from us, we now have this established connection. There’s no reason why you couldn’t find an old broken link on a blog post and show me a better, updated version. And why wouldn’t I swap that out? So I do think things like that work, but you have to have an established relationship or be you start out just helping that person. And then far too often, we just see the spamming email outreach asking for links are trying to pay for links, and it just doesn’t typically work like that.
Pete: So Glen Allsopp and I spoke last week on the podcast. But that was something that completely blew my mind when I talked to Glen. So I knew about Detailed.com, and I’ve been kind of watching him start and kind of position that and draw it over the best you to us, I was a little confused at what that was trying to add specifically. So I asked him and our podcast and he’s straight upset.
Like Pete, I was making a bet. And I still am–that the future specifically link building we were talking about. He’s like, the link building guy. Now he’s betting his money on the fact that building real relationships is like, going to be the future of link building.
He was betting on that and building his company around that too. And I was like, Hmm, I would not have guessed that coming from your mouth. But you guys just said like the same thing, like getting to know people in real life that could turn into partnerships or collaborations are podcast interviews, or all sorts of stuff, guest posts, even Hey, okay.
Britney: Because it’s already networks in place of groups of people who do that for each other. And it’s just like a group of industry friends, they have no problems linking out to another member of this group, because that group often links to their things, right. So it’s, there’s already this sort of reciprocal established network of people who genuinely want to provide value to their readers. And they know that “so and so” has a really great piece of content out right now that I could easily link to providing value to both my readership and to hopefully, their authority as a website.
Where does Britney see SEO moving in the future?
Pete: What does the future of SEO look like? Let’s say December of this year 2019. And going into 2020? Do you see any trends that are going to change things, the activities we do as SEOs and bloggers and stuff? Any thoughts on that?
Britney: Yeah, I’m the only thing I would probably suggest there is that watching how Google has changed and morphed SERPs today, right, we’re seeing more featured snippets, we’re seeing more people also ask boxes. It’s a stickier experience in general, and they’re trying to provide all the answers, I really do see the shift of people that currently are invested in FAQ, pages for their site, are going to continue to see benefit of having real estate in the search results or invoice because Google wants these quick answers these summarized versions of things to provide to users.
And quite frankly, if you’re not going to provide that someone else will.
And so I have always been a big advocate of know what those questions are, and provide really solid pre summaries of the answers for not only your users and your content, but to sort of spoon feed that into Google, so that you could expand your reach there.
Pete: So side note on that this is actually something I am not too knowledgeable about at all, for the most part.
So let’s say you had your keywords or whatnot. And let’s say you use something like answer the public or I think you can actually do this in the Mostel, I’m not sure what that is good. Both of you come up with a few questions–three to five questions that are really common.
How do you actually present those in a post? How do you recommend like formatting? Like you put those in a stories doesn’t matter?
Britney: Yeah, really good question. I think it varies. I think if it’s a FAQ page, you can do it a number of ways and mark it up with the q amp, a schema markup. But if you’re summarizing content in a post, which I highly suggest everyone do, that can honestly live at the bottom, or at the top. I haven’t checked this in a little while. But if you do, if you do a search for how to lose weight fast, there is this one page that is in the featured snippet for all sorts of like fast weight loss queries. And they have just overtaken it because they’ve got this long form content. And then really, really great summarize takeaways at the bottom. And that post has fascinated me and I see it in other spaces as well. So definitely taking any of your long form SEO content, any of just your regular content, but providing really, to or too long didn’t read right summaries at the bottom or up at the top for people to take away and for Google to use for different features, snippets that we might not even predict will be coming out in the future. Right?
Pete: Yes. And it also helps readers.
Britney: Yes. And I totally agree. Yeah!
And where does Pete see SEO content going?
Britney: I want to ask you real quick, though, cuz I’m saying I’m so curious to get your thoughts on where you see content going in the future. Like I feel like you have so much experience talking to all these industry people? What are some things that you’ve heard or kind of are keeping a pulse on?
Pete: So in that case, I think I can just finish my seven minute rant, and that’ll answer your question. Yes, Leo, I have always been of the thought that good content. I’m just like, “good content.” Yeah. Meaning content that’s shareable and answers user intent, and is written well, and formatted well, and like all this other stuff, “good content,” right? I feel that it rewards both real human beings, and the bots, whether that’s Google bots, or any other months that you’re doing YouTube videos, to YouTube.
I feel like in the future, the bots are going to be smarter and smarter and smarter and more and more human. Meaning that if you produce your concept to help other real human beings, it’s going to grow. And Google in the long run, theoretically, yeah, that’s my theory.
My, my rant is that at the moment, we’re not there yet.
And I still see I’m not going to name names. But I see a lot of content that I personally don’t approve of that. I know the people behind the content. And their intent was not to help users at all, it was ranked number one in Google and get affiliate income or get Wow, XYZ. Yeah. Yes, that’s, that’s totally okay. For on one hand, right. Like people go to Google to search for products or for any sort of purchase intent, like I get that. But I still feel like people are “gaming the system?”
A little bit. Yes. Rank brain is smarter. Yes. Google getting smarter. Yes, boss moral and more like humans every single hour? Probably, but we’re not there yet.
So it frustrate me frustrates me a little bit. But I keep reminding anybody who listens to this podcast, if you’re in this will the shirt short term anyways? Just stop? Yeah, for the long term else, don’t do it, go get some other career and being that for the long term, or whatever it is, 15 years from now. I want to still be here and showing up and doing the right work. And I, I pray that I will be rewarded for that with reaching bots, like every two minutes. So that’s my toe.
Britney: Yeah, that is such a good point Pete I love that. And I mean, we kind of see that happening in local anyways, we see putting less emphasis on links, and more emphasis on real world data, right foot traffic purchase history. How long people were there? Is this a reoccurring customer? What percentage? And that’s how they’ve been determining more local results? Why wouldn’t they try to apply some of that real world? User data and play exactly what you say? Are you helping people?
Pete: Last question here. What do you wish other bloggers would stop doing immediately?
Britney: Oh, I don’t even have to think about that one. It’s just so in my face every single day. I am so sick of roundups, please stop the roundups.
And it’s like I used to do it right. It’s brilliant ego bait. It is then so overused in our industry, maybe it works great. And other industries, maybe do it somewhere else. But at least in the SEO space, it is just it’s exhausting. And it’s been circulated among speakers in this space and sort of higher-ups, the different companies that we will no longer be participating and roundups that ask us for content or, you know, unless they are these hand few sites. You know, it just it also feels a bit lazy to be totally candid. Yeah, I just stopped to do better.
Because you can I mean, it’s it’s not that difficult to do some extra heavy lifting, and just put something have way more value together. You know, and I also love the idea of, you know, really connect with your audience and think about how they feel consuming some of your content. I always love the idea of using personalized content, whether it be geo-specific information or a piece of content that was shared at search love was, you know, enter your name in here and see what position to rank for the most criminal names, like what your name is most known for, in terms of breaking the law. I thought that was fascinating. But that you know that that interactive, engaging, personalized content goes so far. so far.
Britney: Oh, that’s brilliant. And I’m all for that. I guess I wasn’t super clear on the round upset I was referring to but the follow them. It’s all about people around us. That drives me crazy. Because then I don’t even know I’m in around up and I get inundated with these emails and Twitter messages about hey, you’re in this like you should share this, etc
***
That’s all for today, bloggers! Did you reach this far? Do people actually pay attention to podcast transcripts? I’d be curious to know 🙂
Want to quit your day job?
Not fulfilled? Dream of a life doing fun, creative things while ALSO making money? And oh yeah–making a difference to people’s lives?
Just one tiny, little, hardly-noticable little problem…
I need to eat and have a place to live and buying lattes would be nice.
It’s true. Making the transition from full-time employed to full-time blogger (or YouTuber or podcaster or entrepreneur) is a tough one to nail!
Well, Erika Kullberg is r
I have been blogging for a decade, and Elementor Pro is easily my favorite WordPress plugin.
And while it’s flexible, affordable, and powerful…
…it does has steep learning curve! 🤷♂️
Here’s a start-to-finish Elementor tutorial–so you can start turning “what’s in your head” into “what appears on the page.”
Let’s go.
What is Elementor?
Elementor is a W
I have been blogging for a decade, and Elementor Pro is easily my favorite WordPress plugin.
And while it’s flexible, affordable, and powerful…
…it does has steep learning curve! 🤷♂️
Here’s a start-to-finish Elementor tutorial–so you can start turning “what’s in your head” into “what appears on the page.”
Let’s go.
What is Elementor?
Elementor is a WordPress plugin that helps you build and design different parts of your site.
Yes, it is a page builder, but you can also use Elementor to style custom-format blog posts, style your own headers and footers, as well create various “widgets” you can use just about anywhere on your site!
Did you know that I typed out THIS post in the normal blog post editor–but I have both the header, footer, AND blog post template styled with Elementor?
That’s right. Elementor has a “theme builder,” which really just means you can build pages or sections–and set up display conditions for them to display across your entire site 😃
What are some examples of stuff I can build with Elementor?
sales or landing pages (build custom from scratch or based on their templates)
opt-in forms to place within your content–or sidebars, footers, headers, or anywhere!
widgets within your content(!)
custom headers or footers
pop-ups
“global” widgets–meaning you can put this widget in multiple locations across your site, and update all of them at the same time
way more.
Global widgets = gamechanger
Is Elementor a plugin?
Yes, Elementor is a freemium WordPress plugin, meaning they have both a free version, and a paid version with extra features.
What makes it so special?
Elementor takes home my “best WordPress plugin currently made” for a few reasons:
The page-builder easily rivals that of Leadpages, Instapage, and any other expensive landing page software.
Elementor can replace many other plugins, such as any tool you use for either popups or opt-in boxes!
They integrate well with email service providers (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Drip, etc)
Their team is constantly pushing out new features that blow my mind–especially for the price.
FAQ: How much does Elementor Pro cost? – Do I need the paid version?
However, the best thing about Elementor Pro is it’s incredible price: $49/year for your blog.
FAR more affordable than its competitors, and it’s a better product.
Leadpages = $37/month for limited features
Instapage = $129/month
Elementor Pro = $49/year for all features
For the features we’re going to learn in a second, that’s a steal!
However, you can start using Elementor for free!
My review of Elementor: Who needs this?
Let’s cut to the chase.
If you’re serious about growing a blog, I think you should be using Elementor.
If you browsed my resources page, you’d realize I’ve never said that about another plugin before.
Why?
It simply “does too much” for the price. It’s the handiest plugin I use.
building sales pages
throwing together a quick opt-in page for your freebie
making opt-ins you can place ANYWHERE.
Did you know this block-thingy is an Elementor template I made? I’ve inserted it as a block in the WordPress Gutenberg editor, but I could also toss it in my sidebars, etc.
If you’re enjoying my tutorials, you’ll definitely enjoy the Do You Even Blog Tribe below!
And why not throw some share buttons in the same reusable Elementor widget?
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on pinterest
Pinterest
And what if I had to switch from Mailchimp to ConvertKit or Drip or ActiveCampaign–or vice-versa?
No need to start from scratch–just change the integration.
FAQ: Does Elementor work with any theme?
Yes! Elementor is designed to work with any properly-constructed WordPress theme–meaning if a theme is built to WordPress standards, it is well-suited.
But what if you wanted to use Elementor to build your own, custom theme?
A Start-to-Finish Elementor Tutorial for Bloggers.
We’re going to work from complete beginner to advanced Elementee (get it??).
How to install the Plugin
How to toggle between the editors
A tour of the vitals
Then we’ll tackle advanced use-cases and more.
How do I install and use Elementor? And toggle the editor?
Elementor can be installed just like any other WordPress plugin, but you should note that Elementor Pro is a separate plugin.
It is downloaded straight from the Elementor website when you purchase it, and both the free and paid plugins need to be activated in your WP dashboard.
Important: There is only 1 “editor” for Elementor. You use the exact same software to build landing pages, global widgets, headers, footers–everything.
However…
You can access the editor in different places!
This can get confusing when you’re only editing a single widget.
It’ll bring up the same editor as if you were creating an entire sales page!
An overview and tour of the Elementor editor
Sadly, with more power and customization comes more settings.
It’s vital you understand where to find stuff.
Note: We’ll explore how to EDIT the individual settings after this.
Where to find the major Elementor settings
Let’s hit just the really important stuff here:
1 – Page defaults and global settings
This is where you can set some default colors and fonts for this page only, as well as exit back to the WordPress dashboard!
Also, clicking “dashboard settings” will take you to the global Elementor settings in the WordPress dashboard.
Pro Tip: If you’d like to customize the “quick-selection color choices” that arise whenever you style new page elements, you can do that under “color picker.”
2 – The elements
Brings up available “elements,” I.e. the building blocks
You can always click that little square(s) icon to pull back up the elements, which you can drag-n-drop in your page.
3 – Page settings
We’ll be going through how to navigate page, section, column, and elements settings down below.
However, the page settings button is where you can edit the style of the entire page, and also update your page/post title, featured image, and page layout (see below).
You can also utilize the page title and featured image settings from the main WordPress dashboard as well!
Important: Choose your page layout!
If you are building full pages or posts–i.e. not individual widget templates–this is a crucial step!
If you want full-width landing pages, etc, you’ll need to choose either Elementor Canvas or Elementor Full-width.
If you’re just adding elements into an existing blog post, or just need to put stuff in the normal “content area,” just use the default.
See the image below for more!
Note: Choosing your page layout ONLY applies to full pages and posts–it doesn’t matter when building widgets, even though the settings will still appear.
Outside of setting up your page layout, the only vital information you need now is how to navigate settings and style your elements!
Woot!
How to style sections, columns, and individual elements
If there is ANYTHING that tends to frustrate bloggers using Elementor, it’s NOT how to style individual elements.
Colors and fonts are easy…
Margins, padding, full-width elements, inner sections–these can be frustrating. Mastering these is crucial, and most people skip this.
We’re going to dive into each of these in turn, after we figure out where to click to even access stuff!
Important: Where do I CLICK to access settings & styling in Elementor?
This is a bit tricky for beginners.
Hover over the area you want to edit, and you’ll see the related “boxes” pop up.
Right-clicking will bring up the basic settings that are available for every element, column, and section: duplicate, delete, copy, paste style.
Left-clicking will pull up the content, style, and advanced settings editor on the left side of the page.
It takes a second to get used to.
Understanding & styling Elementor “sections”
The largest “container” for elements–other than the page itself–are called “sections.”
When you open a new Elementor page, you’ll be presented with a pretty little button to insert a new section, and you’ll have the option to add columns at that time.
You can easily add/delete columns later.
Here’s how to make sections stretch to the edge of the page, and take up more space vertically:
Remember that these settings are accessed by hovering over a section and clicking the top blue box thingy.
3 important aspects of Elementor sections
Note: the minimum height in the image above is 700, not 900.
Content Width:
This is an important one as well. If you leave as “boxed,” you can use the slider to make the content more narrow, wider, etc, or you can set it to full-width
Column Position:
If you have tall or “fit-to-page” sections–like above–you can choose whether or vertically center your columns, or put them at the top or bottom.
Understanding & styling Elementor “columns”
First, note that you can right-click any column “box” after hovering over it, and either add a new column, or duplicate the current column.
This is handy if you’ve already styled a column to your desires!
I styled one column…then duplicated and changed the content
The only 2 things you really need to know about columns specifically, is how to change the column widths, and that you can also choose whether to center content vertically, or push it to the top or bottom!
Understanding & styling Elementor “elements”
Simply clicking on any individual element, or hovering over it and clicking it’s “box,” will bring up the element settings.
Note: the settings available for each element will be different based on the type of element!
How to move elements, columns, and sections
There are 2 ways!
1 – Drag and drop
You’ll want to hover over the element/section you want to move, click the “box,” and drag to where you want it to go.
2 – Use the navigator.
You can access the navigator via the bottom-left menu icon, or by pressing “Command-I” or “Control-I.”
You can use this to drag different sections or elements around, rename sections, and more.
Now let’s walk through just a few style settings:
Elementor styling options.
Note: not ALL of these are available for every widget/element! Some are for sections only, or specific elements like forms, etc.
Background:
Play around with the position and size settings…
You can choose a background image for sections, columns, etc. It could be images or colors, and you can also choose color overlays for images, etc!
Border:
Borders are available for every element, section, column, etc, and you can easily change the color, width, and roundness of edges.
Typography:
This is exactly what it sounds like. You’ll come here to edit font family, font size, line height, font weight, etc.
Did you know you can easily use custom fonts in Elementor?
In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Elementor -> custom fonts.
Add a new one
Upload the different font files (.woff, .woff2, .etf, etc)
Your custom fonts are now available in Elementor editors 🙂
Margin & Padding:
Warning: this is for advanced bloggers only.
There are several HTML & CSS related attributes you can edit for each section, column, etc., under the “advanced” tab.
If margins can be thought of “the space just outside our thing,” padding is the space “just inside our thing.”
I’d use caution here if you’re not comfortable, as you’ll definitely need to circle back and change these for different device sizes (see below!).
However, it can create some cool designs, or be helpful to get the exact look you’re seeking.
Here’s an example from a landing page I built a while back.
Neato 😃
Elementor Mobile Responsiveness: How to style for phones and tablets
Good news & bad news.
Good = MUCH of the built-in elements and styling in Elementor will end up being quite mobile-friendly!
Bad = Once you start messing with custom font sizes, formatting, etc, you’ll definitely have to do some tweaking to keep it mobile-friendly.
You’ll need to double-check ALL your Elementor designs for mobile before hitting publish…
First, previewing your Elementor pages for phones and tablets is simple–click the “responsive mode” button and choose which to preview.
The Elementor mobile preview button
Ready to be amazed?
While you are previewing for mobile/tablet, the Elementor settings automatically switched so that you’re now editing just for that screen size!
You can always tell which screen size you’re editing with these 3 icons:
Important Note: Not ALL settings can be customized based on screen size. This is intentional and is likely stuff you shouldn’t be changing anyways 😉
Here’s my workflow for making sure all my Elementor drag-n-drop pages work on all screens:
For any sections or elements that will NOT be repeated:
Design and get to 100% on desktop
Switch to mobile preview, and editing for mobile from top to bottom
Exception: Any sections or elements that WILL be repeated:
Design that element on desktop
Switch to mobile and make responsive
Go back to desktop and continue as normal
For sections, columns, or elements that are repeated, it’s quicker to get the first to 100% on desktop AND mobile.
One more thing on this note…
Pro Tip: Check the *column* margins on mobile
I’ve seen this issue a lot:
I’ll have a perfect element on desktop, but it somehow gets pushed to the edge of the screen on mobile.
If you clicked to edit the margins on that *section,* you’d see you can’t edit it.
What you CAN do is edit the *column* margins.
adding margin to *columns* on mobile
Handy!
A walk-through of advanced Elementor features
Luckily, these aren’t really “advanced” because they’re harder to create per se–they simply accomplish more advanced functions outside of drag-n-drop page building!
Global Widgets 101
What if you wanted to have an opt-in form for your newsletter you could use repeatedly in blog posts, in your sidebar, and in your footer…
…and what if you could edit every instance of that form at the same time?
That’s a global widget.
Opt-in forms
Author bios
Social follow icons
Social share icons
Affiliate item “promotion boxes” you mention often
These work really well as global widgets.
How to create a global widget
It’s simple.
Right-click any individual element
Click “save as a global”
No need to create a template from scratch either. If you’ve already created a form somewhere on an Elementor page–head there and save it as a global widget.
You can insert global widgets from here:
Wanna edit your global widget? You can edit it from any instance of it in an Elementor editor.
You can also insert global widgets, and then un-link them, allowing you to customize that individual widget and not affect the rest of the instances across your site.
How to use pre-made templates (and save your own)
There are 2 types of templates:
Page templates
Section templates
This is important, as you save the two different types of templates in different ways!
Inserting page templates
To use a full page template, you can click the template button in any Elementor page–just be sure to edit the page layout after you insert it.
The add template button brings Elementor’s templates–plus your custom ones
You can then preview the templates, and click the “insert” button.
Saving your own page templates
If you want to save an entire PAGE as a template, that button can be found on the bottom-left menu, in the “publish drop-down” box.
Inserting section templates
You can also insert–and save your own–individual section templates!
Note: Elementor calls these “blocks” in the template dashboard, which I find a tad confusing.
There are lots of cool little things to insert!
Saving your own page templates
You can do this for any section you create, anywhere.
Simply right-click and save as a template.
saving my testimonial widget
Accessing, importing, and exporting your templates
You can find all your page templates, section templates, and theme builder templates (headers, footers, custom post templates, etc) from your WordPress dashboard:
Accessing your custom templates
Note that you can also click “add new” here to create a template.
You’ll be prompted to choose the type of template, name it, then the Elementor editor will open up.
Creating a new template from scratch
Important: When you’re creating and editing an individual section, header, footer, or post template–you will see your theme’s site header and footer! I’m not sure why Elementor doesn’t hide it, because you’re still just editing the individual element.
Got that?
Inner sections: How to add “rows” in Elementor within sections
What if you wanted to have 1 section with multiple rows?
I.e. maybe you want the top row to have 1 column, but a 2nd row to have 2 columns.
The “inner section” element accomplishes this.
This is a handy tool–and you’ll discover you can edit the inner section settings exactly like that of a bigger section.
How to Build Your Own Theme Elements using Theme Builder
Yeah yeah, you can totally create drag-n-drop headers and footers using Elementor–but that’s not the best news.
The power here is that you can specify which pages your custom headers/footers appear on around your website! It’s called conditions in Elementor, and it’s available for headers, footers, custom archive pages, and post/page templates.
How cool is that?
What is “dynamic content” in Elementor?
Dynamic simply means “this element updatesitss content based on changing data.”
I.e. You don’t specify the content specifically. Elementor pulls the content from elsewhere depending on the element.
A few more examples of dynamic elements:
Post title = pulls in the title of the post
Featured image
Post content = pulls in the content you write in the normal WordPress editor
Post comments = pulls in the comments area for that page/post
It’s this dynamic content that allows you to use Elementor to create custom blog post templates 🙂
Are you starting to see why Elementor is by far my favorite plugin? It’s powerful.
Creating your own custom headers or footers
Oh look, I have a short and sweet YouTube video that walks you through this process 🙂
Simply click “add new” under “templates” in your dashboard, then select “header” or “footer” when prompted to choose a type.
You’ll then be prompted to choose a pre-made template–but you can also just “X out” of that screen and build one from scratch.
If going from scratch, make sure to use dynamic content!
Display conditions: Choosing where to display your custom theme builder elements
Whenever you go to publish a custom header, footer, or post template, you’ll be prompted with this screen:
You’ll be prompted to choose display conditions
FYI, you can also access display conditions from the bottom menu:
So on what pages do you actually want to USE your custom header, etc?
Included on every page?
Included on every page, excluded on your front page?
Only on blog posts with a certain category or tag?
etc
How powerful!
Introducing the “Hello” WordPress theme from Elementor
Yes, you can use Elementor with ANY theme.
Yes, you can even build your own custom theme elements (like headers, footers, specific blog post templates for specific categories, etc), with ANY theme.
However, if you want to use Elementor to custom design your entire website–they build a WordPress theme just for that! It’s called “Hello.”
What’s so special about the Hello Elementor theme?
Not much.
As in, literally not much. It’s a bare-bones lightweight theme!
The theme was built to be specifically used with Theme Builder, so it contains absolutely no features and minimal styling.
This helps reduce plugin conflicts (that could cause Elementor or other plugins to break), and reduces your theme’s load times!
The website you’re looking at right this second uses the Hello theme!
How to create Elementor popups
Luckily, these are edited the exact same way as everything else in Elementor.
The next page will display pre-made popup templates!
There are only 2 things different about designing popups:
Custom layout settings
Display conditions and triggers
You’ll notice that popups have a slightly different layout settings pane:
Everything’s pretty self-explanatory.
Elementor popup display conditions and triggers
When you go to publish a popup, you’ll be presenting with these advanced settings (these are also accessible in the “publish drop-down” box as well.)
Conditions – Which pages should the popup be put on?
Triggers – On what action–or when–should a popup actually popup?
Advanced rules – how many times should we show the popup, and to whom?
You can choose to have popups triggered on
exit intent
after a certain amount of seconds
a certain percentage of page scroll down
when people click something
You’ll need to set these, else your popup won’t show
Sweet.
How do I trigger an Elementor popup on a button or link click?
I personally don’t use exit-intent popups on Do You Even Blog, but I DO love having the functionality of triggering one on a click!
Here’s what you do:
Create a popup first, but no need to set any display rules or triggers.
Optional: If you have a form on your popup, you can add a “close popup” action in the “actions after submit” box.
When setting a button’s link–choose the “dynamic” option
Choose “popup” under “actions”
Click “popup” to bring up the selection screen, and choose the popup
woooo! I love this functionality.
Introducing Elementor for Bloggers: A start-to-finish video course (with pre-made templates!)
Ready to be an Elementor Pro master?
This 4-hour course will have you designing and implementing everything Elementor has to offer–in an afternoon.
3 Modules
21 HD Videos
Example walk-throughs for real-world blogging examples!
Blogger? Podcaster?
Literally anybody growing a platform?
Being a guest on other people’s shows is one of THE best marketing strategies for you.
Exposure? ✅Backlinks? ✅Doesn’t take a ton of time? ✅Easier than guest posting?????? ✅Sarah Mikutel from Podcasting Step-by-Step is a pro at this (she sent an email to get on my podcast, which apparently worked, so…)
We gon’ chat about…
Strategies to grow downloadsPractica
To be frank, the word “manual” usually makes me shudder.
I’m totally a “try and get incredible results with not a lot of effort” kinda guy.
But when it comes to driving Pinterest traffic?
I am 100% all-in for a manual pinning strategy, especially after I interviewed Carly Campbell!
Manual pinning is way easier for meIt seems to be more effective for pin engagement and click-throughsIt takes me FAR less timeAND–you can also mix in a manual pinning
Carly’s pin template membership (For $15/month, she send you tons of fresh pin templates. VERY cool idea, especially for folks who value their time (ahem)
3 Reasons Manual Pinning Is Awesome Right Now
First up, money.
Tailwind is awesome, but it costs money, and for new bloggers looking to stay LEAN and profitable, manual pinning costs only your time.
Speaking of which…
Manual pinning make actually SAVE you time
You read that correctly.
For me personally, manual pinning takes me less time than managing a fully automated pin queue (and updating, tweaking, etc).
I’m not super worried about the PIXEL-PERFECT design of the pin, because I know I’m not really going to use it again (probably).
Also, I paid Kari over at https://esavingsblog.com/ to build me some pin templates in Canva–so I can quickly dive in, make a few tweaks to a pin, and re-pin it as a “fresh pin,” which is CRUCIAL to any Pinterest strategy right now.
Last, manual pinning seems to get more engagement for some people.
No, I don’t have any hard and fast data that 100% proves manual pinning is more effective. (I wish I did).
But I DO have multiple Online Impact members who claim their manual pins get more engagement & click-throughs.
Note: all of these people ALSO utilize an automated Tailwind strategy–in addition to manual pinning.
NOTE 2: But not me haha. I’m 100% manual pinning.
The exact steps to a manual pinning strategy:
Stay Organized: I recommend setting up a Google Sheet (I use a free Airtable base!) to keep track of what posts you’ve pinned, when–and you can even write out your headlines & descriptions here for easy copy, pasting, and tweaking in the future.
Set up a simple system of reminders: If you are ONLY pinning manually, you might need to create an occurring reminder when you’d like to pin. If you’re also using Tailwind, you might just manually pin once a day.
Pin during the “right” time of day: The “right” time depends on when your audience is most active!
Create “fresh pins”: Both Carly and Kate Ahl have expressed how VITAL it is to constantly create new pin designs, even for old content. Pinterest doesn’t want their platform spammed with 100s of the same image. Create templates in Canva to quickly pump out “fresh” designs
Write tasty headlines & description: Yup, Pinterest is still search & discovery-driven. Keywords baby! You can use the built-in search bar to get a good idea of what’s being search for, and you can also use the new Pinterest trends.
Track popular boards: In Pinterest’s built-in analytics, you can actually see which boards are driving the most impressions/clicks. Keep an eye on these–you’ll likely be pinning more to boards that perform well. #duh?
Track popular content in Google Analytics: Even week/month (depending on how large Pinterest traffic is to your overall strategy) You’ll want to head into GA and see which pins (and pin topics!) are driving you the most traffic. This should inform you of which topics tend to perform well, as well as which Pin designs seem to work best.
Do it again, but better.
A few additional thoughts on Pinterest marketing right now…
It seems to be all over the place.
I have friends who have seen NOSEDIVES in their traffic in 2020, and others who are just starting to pick up.
Group boards were thought to be 100% dead (and I still see Pinterest experts recommending we ignore them), but still–I know people who are seeing results from pinning to group boards, so🤷♂️
Some folks swear by manual pinning, others are like “meh”
The big point: try things, analyze what worked and what didn’t, iterate, and try again.
When I try and hype creators on starting a podcast, I hear the same roadblocks:
I can’t do audioI don’t have the timeI don’t see the ROITotally understandable!
However, for those willing to dig a little deeper, they’ll find that podcasting
Isn’t as hard as they thinkDoesn’t take the time commitment they thought it wouldCan provide masssssive benefits to grow a business.Dustin Heiner (Massive Passive Income & The Successfully Unemployed podcast) j
If you’re a podcaster, you have enough on your plate…
Scheduling guestsGetting that sweet sponsorship incomePORING through way-too-expensive microphones on Amazon.So little time.
Oh wait, but we have to edit our podcasts too?? Get them sounding good? Leveled? Loudness normalized??
Ain’t nobody got time for that!
These expensive mics aren’t going to buy themselves.
Enter the Auphonic Leveler.
It’s a post-production tool that’s going to save
It’s a post-production tool that’s going to save you MASSIVE time and energy producing a podcast that sounds great.
It’s magic, actually. (oh, and it’s free to use for 2 hours a month!)
Here’s my short-n-sweet Auphonic tutorial.
Watch this tutorial!
What is Auphonic?
Auphonic is a free tool for audio post-production.
It’s mostly used by podcasters 😉
Basically, you’ll upload some of your raw audio–fill in some details (optional), choose the different processing effects you want Auphonic to perform on your show–and click “process.”
Auphonic does magic wizarding stuff–and spits back your file sounding better and ready for publishing
!!!!
(most people usually “cut” their episodes, I.e. chop the segments, remove big pauses and “ums” and “ughs,” etc–and THEN upload to Auphonic.)
What does Auphonic do to my audio?
Auphonic does lots of cool stuff–mostly geared around taking your raw, mostly un-processed audio, and cleaning it up, polishing, and making it sound way better and ready to publish 😎
Adaptive Leveler = Corrects level differences between different tracks of your podcast. In other words, makes the softer parts LOUDER, and makes the LOUD parts softer. It balances out the loudness!
Limiter = Puts a ceiling on your overall loudness, so it doesn’t accidentally blow people’s ears off or crush your car speakers if you start yelling on your podcast 🙂 (It can limit the peaks of your audio to a decibel level, like -1db)
Loudness Normalization (my fave feature) = This basically brings up your entire podcast episode to be ROUGHLY the same volume as all the other podcasts in internet land 🙂 (I.e. one shouldn’t have to touch their volume knob in between your podcast and other people’s podcasts). The loudness standard is expressed in “LUFs,” and specifically, a podcast usually targets -16 LUFs.
Noise and Hum Reduction – Can reduce the, well, noise? and hum? of your audio tracks? Just cleaning them up a bit.
Is Auphonic Free?
Auphonic gives you TWO free hours of audio processing every single month.
Outside of the two hours, you can pay for additional hours in 2 different ways:
You can pay for a recurring monthly amount
You can pay for some hours in bulk that never expire
(Oh, and you can also pay a one-time fee to access a DESKTOP version of Auphonic)
I recommend one-time credits
Auphonic VS Levelator VS FixMyLevels
Levelator is an old (very old) free program that automatically levels your audio–similar to Auphonic.
However, it has some huge downsides:
It isn’t supported anymore! (It doesn’t work at ALL on MacOS Catalina, and even on Windows–it hasn’t been updated in forever).
Zero control over anything.
You drag audio into the Levelator app, and it spits it back at you. There are no controls, there are no options, nothing.
How do you use Auphonic? My complete Tutorial
Let’s get our hands dirty.
1 – Prepare your audio for upload
First, I recommend cutting your episodes, i.e. remove unwanted audio snippets, filler words, and moving around intro music, sound effects, etc.
I do all this in my DAW (Logic Pro).
Now is also a good time to EQ your tracks if you’d like–it’s one of the few post-processing things that Auphonic DOESN’T do (though it only makes a small difference for more podcasters).
2 – Sign up for an Auphonic account.
Again, it’s totes free for 2 hours a month, but you’ll need to grab an account.
Done and done, mah friends.
3 – Choose between “multitrack” and “single track” production.
Single or multitrack production?
Let’s break these down:
Singletrack production:
You upload 1 audio file to Auphonic.
Basically, you’ll “mix down” all of your tracks into a final .mp3 (or .wav), and Auphonic is going to process the entire file at once).
Multitrack production:
You export multiple audio files to Auphonic
You’ll export ALL YOUR TRACKS SEPARATELY from your editing software (DAW), and upload each one to Auphonic.
It will actually process each file separately, AND then again together. (This also allows you to specify some tracks as foreground tracks, and some tracks as background tracks, and Auphonic can actually lower background audio levels on autopilot).
(Watch my YouTube video above for an example)
I personally like to use the multitrack production option 🙂
4 – Configure your episode details & upload audio!
First up, you’ll upload your audio (derp).
Second, Auphonic actually gives you the option to tack on an episode intro and outro
Basically–if yo have a separate audio file for intros and outros, you can upload those here–and even set an “overlap,” so your intro music, etc, can overlap with your main podcast recording.
Next up, you can type in your episode details if you’d like (I never do this, as I just fill out my episode metadata in my podcast host, Redcircle)
Next, add chapter marks (I never do this either, but some podcasters swear by it).
Then set up your output files (pro tip: You can actually export MULTIPLE output files at the same time).
I generally choose:
.mp3 format
112 bitrate
mono
Also, you can set a filename suffix, i.e. “final” or “auphonic export” this will tack on that word to your exported file.
Next, you can hook up an external transcription services to Auphonic.
And what does this do?
When Auphonic processes your audio, it can automatically send the exported file through your transcription service!
Oh oh oh, and Auphonic can automatically UPLOAD TO YOUR PODCAST HOST!
I.e. no downloading to your computer and then uploading again to your host!
(Pro Tip: Even if you don’t see your podcast host listed, you can generally create an FTP account with you host, and then add the FTP integration in Auphonic).
5 – Set Auphonic Audio Algorithms
This section is what makes Auphonic super awesome. You can choose to add…
Adaptive leveler
Loudness normalization (I recommend -16 LUFs for stereo podcasts, and -19 LUFs for mono)
Filtering
Noise and hum reduction
You can also specify the noise reduction amount (i.e. just a little of noise reduction, or a ton. I generally leave it on “auto.”)
After that, just hit “start production!”
6 – Check (listen) the output file to make sure you’re happy with it.
You can actually listen to the exported track right in Auphonic before you download–and even request a change before you’re charged for the processed audio.
How nice of them!
If you’re happy, then just smash the “download” button, and you’re good to go my friend 👍
Over the past 6 month, I’ve made YouTube my #1 growth strategy for Do You Even Blog.
I’ve gone from…
40 views a day to 700+1,000 total watch hours to 6,000 (and getting approved to the partner program 💰)3 subscribers a week to 20 subscribers a dayAnd my channel is still growing nicely!
Here’s everything I know on starting & growing a successful YouTube channel.
You can listen to this blog post here:
or listen on Apple Podcasts \ Google Podcasts
Special Note: This post is incredibly long and thorough, so please use the table of content to navigate your way around!
Why YouTube?
There are 3 reasons why YouTube is still a viable channel to grow your biz (and why I focused on it in 2020):
K.L.T. Factor
Still a massive opportunity
It’s an acquisition channel
The K.L.T. Factor 👇
What does that stand for? Know, like, and trust!
You probably heard if you plan on selling products, whether that’s digital products or affiliate marketing, or yada, yada, whatever that is, or just, you know, building an audience of any kind, really your audience needs to know, like, and trust you.
And in fact, the more KLT Factor you have, the more loyal your audience.
Well, they need to know you and like you and trust you…
And that happens fast in audio and video formats. YouTube is a great way to build trust. Even if you’re not a hardcore YouTuber…it could still be a great way to supplement audience growth.
Number two, why YouTube? Because it’s still a great opportunity.
Not only are there fewer universe than bloggers, but there’s also an opportunity to help grow your blog.
Through SEO traffic.
YouTube is also a search engine. If you know what you’re doing, ranking videos (in both YouTube search results AND GOOGLE–it’s actually pretty simple and straightforward.
Search brings me a ton of views
It is a little bit simpler than organic Google SEO. I really do believe that.
And the best news?
There’s a way to “do YouTube” without being a YouTuber. WIthout cranking out multiple videos a week–all super edited. There is a way to produce video content for YouTube that is not that.
Before we move on, it’s important to think about the following:
What is YouTube FOR?
What is YouTube good at?
We already mentioned the KLT factor, but there’s another reason too.
It’s a great acquisition channel. We’re going to talk more about that.
Let’s compare that to podcasting. Podcasting is a little bit less of an acquisition channel. It’s more of a trust-building channel, cause you’re literally up in people’s earbuds.
They listen, you know, engagement is way, way higher on a podcast than it is on a blog (or even YouTube). People listen longer.
YouTube can build more authority and trust than a blog, while being MUCH more of an acquisition channel that podcasting.
Re-read that 👆
Podcasting is for a different purpose. Its strengths lie elsewhere.
YouTube. Great for acquisition.
There you go.
Overall YouTube Strategy
So the strategy I’m about to share with you is primarily for people with less than 10,000 subscribers. This is starting and growing a YouTube channel.
And there are two primary components of this strategy. And then we’ll talk a little bit about them individually,
Publish consistently
Keep people on YouTube.
That’s the huge overarching overall strategy.
Publish consistently. (Note: I didn’t say two times a week.)
YES–we’re going to get way more detailed below, but I want you to keep these overall points in mind 🙂
Publish Consistently
This particular piece of advice is given to bloggers snail mailers, YouTubers, doesn’t matter. Publish consistently.
Everybody said this when I started a channel and as I was growing my channel the past seven months and well, it turns out I think they were correct.
Set a schedule and hit it consistently.
And what do I recommend for people with zero subscribers are less than 1,001? One video a week.
Now, if you’re going HARD on YouTube, as in, YouTube is your primary growth channel…
You might look at doing 5-6 videos a month and/or supplementing with YouTube lives. We’ll cover YouTube lives a bit later.
But for those of us who don’t really CARE about being full-time YouTubers–and only want to supplement our other channels…
I get y’all people too. I think you should still do a few videos a month.
They don’t need to be as fancy if you miss a week here and there. Okay. Fine. It’s probably not a big deal, but I want to see. Content being published consistently, maybe like two or three a month. If you’re that person, I still think you should aim for one video a week, but either way it needs to be consistent.
Why?
Why does it need to be consistent for one thing? No one does YouTube algorithms, but I dare say it’s probably important to YouTube that their creators are producing content consistently. They want to help promote the creators who are still creating. Why? Because YouTube wants to keep people on YouTube.
We’re going to talk about that more in just a second, but when you think about it from YouTube perspective, that’s what they want. They want more views. They want your viewers to stay on YouTube, longer, your channel, other people’s channels. They want people to stay on YouTube and they want to help promote.
The creators that are keeping people on YouTube. Part of how you keep people on YouTube is producing new content. Please allow me to repeat that because it’s incredibly important for this point. I’m trying to make here.
YouTube wants to keep people on YouTube. They will do everything they can to keep people on YouTube.
One of the ways people come to youtube is through new content they will want to see creators preparing and releasing and publishing new content that is why publishing consistently is important.
What to launch with?
A quick note on launching…
Similar to launching a new blog or a new podcast, I recommend you build up a little arsenal of YouTube videos right off the bat.
You don’t want to send people to an empty channel that only has one video. Launch with two or three and have an additional two, three, four, five, 10.
The more you can schedule in advance, the better (at least for the first few months).
Part two of this overall strategy, keep people on YouTube.
Watch time is one of the huge metrics that we’re going to keep bringing up again and again.
Even a quick look in your YouTube Studio Dashboard will show you: YouTube wants you to increase your watch time. That is a good metric to look at for your videos.
view duration and watch time are shown all over your dashboard
View duration is basically “how long did they watch?”
Of your video, did they watch 50% of it? Did they watch 75% of the video? Did they watch five minutes total?
Keeping people watching, and keeping people on YouTube is incredibly important to this strategy.
Using cards using in screens, linking past videos in your descriptions, all sorts of things. We’re going to come back and explore those individually later. But for now, just know it’s a big part of growing a YouTube channel early on.
So let’s sum up these points in the overall strategy.
Number one, publish consistently.
No, it doesn’t have to be three times a week, but YouTube does want to push creators out there to their viewers.
That are publishing new content consistently. that keeps people coming back to the YouTube platform. That’s what they want. So you can help them out by publishing consistently. That can help you in search results that can help you getting your videos recommended and getting more views and subscribers.
Money money, money. There you go.
And the next one, keep people on YouTube.
Once they’re there, when you’re publishing new content, et cetera. Or you want to promote other pieces of content. You want to link to other videos. You want to have call to actions that are to watch this next video watch this other video you want to keep people on youtube.
There are a lots of individual strategies wrapped up in there based on your blog and your business and what you want to do but that’s the big just to growing a new youtube presence.
Youtube SEO and optimization.
So you might be wondering why not talk about the actual content, the actual videos, how to produce YouTube videos?
Isn’t that super important?
Like we all know–content is King!
Yes and no.
In contrast to blogging–you don’t really edit a YouTube video after you hit publish.
You hit publish on a blog post, you can edit it, you can change stuff. You can add stuff. You’re going to take stuff away. You can put different images in there. You can fix grammar.
Not so with YouTube.
You can change some things (titles & thumbnmails–which we’ll come back to), but you don’t really change much of the actual video content.
And for that reason. Here’s my big point here. And for that reason, it’s important to create your content with the overall YouTube strategy in mind?
I’m gonna say that again.
It’s important to create your content with the overall YouTube strategy in mind, you should know what topic you’re targeting. You should know roughly what the title’s going to be. You should know roughly what the thumbnail is going to look like. You should roughly know what keywords you’re targeting a different stuff like that.
And you need to do a little bit more of that upfront before you actually create your content, if you want it to be effective, because there’s no editing that video after you hit publish. That’s why we’re covering this first and why I want to make sure. Everybody listened to this really understands this very well
A quick tip for managing your topics.
First of all, I have a little mini-course called B.O.A.T.s. my “blogging organizational air table templates.”
This is to help me keep my content ideas organized.
I put in my topics when I have different ideas for you to videos, I’ll put them in there. And it also allows me to just plug in some of the keywords, the search volume, maybe from some of the tools that we’re gonna talk about later morning fame. And it helps me stay organized on what I’m creating, what week I’m creating it. It’s sort of a content calendar plus a little bit more since we do need to do a little bit more work upfront research, right?
Figuring out what our title and thumbnails are going to be before we start shooting, it can be even more important to have some sort of content tracker, a content calendar, et cetera.
So just an FYI. We will have a whole tools chapter where I dig into some of my favorite tools for keyword research, namely MorningFame, as well as TubeBuddy. If you don’t feel like spending money, you should absolutely go with TubeBuddy because they have a great free plan.
But even then there’s another free thing you can use, which is called the YouTube itself. You can go and use the search function to start typing in topics and keywords. And you’ll see some suggestions pop up at the suggestion is towards the top of the little search bar function there. It’s probably more searched for it. You can’t see exact search volume numbers there, but you can actually get a pretty good idea.
Of what some people might be searching for. I recommend going through and looking at a few different metrics when you use the search bar right there on YouTube. If you have to, buddy, you can just hit like show. Keyword metrics or something like that. And it’ll show you the search volume and competition.
It’s not an exact science. It’s not going to be, Oh yes. This is a score of 37. So I should absolutely not target this keyword. Nah. It’s not like that. It’s more of a general idea. But there are also some things you can look at. I’m stealing this sort of from morning fame. If you don’t want to pay for that, you can go look at some stuff.
Look through the top 10 ish search results and notes, a few thing. Number one, the views that these videos have, do they have like millions of views? Do they have like 300 views? Like, does the number one, number two, number three results for this have like a couple of hundred views or a couple of thousand views or more that could tell you some rough volume right there. Right? Cause a lot of that.
Those views, excuse me, are going to come from search and or related content, but either way, that’ll give you a good idea right there. And then as far as competition, I recommend you just briefly glanced through the publish date. You can see where when the videos were published, as well as the subscriber count for like the first.
10 results. So you can kind of open those up or sometimes you can see right there on the search results page. And you can kind of get a feel of the keyword difficulty more specifically, look for the one that’s out of the ordinary for exam. Here’s what I mean by that. If you go and you search for iPhone case reviews, you’re probably going to get some huge channels in there. That might be a pretty big keyword. And you’re gonna see people with like a million subscribers or.
Hey, if it’s a little bit less, maybe like 200,000, 100,000, even 50,000 subscribers. And if you go down there and the second result is also like, Oh, a hundred K’s subscribers. The third result is like, Oh, okay. Like a million subscribers, but the fourth result is like 1.5 K let’s just over a thousand subscribers, like Hm.
Well, that’s interesting. This smaller channel is on the top couple of results for this keyword. That’s interesting. There’s actually an opportunity there that might not be there elsewhere. Now you see the top like seven or eight results and they all have like a million subscribers. Oh, it’s probably pretty tough. Right?
It’s just a judgment call either way. But I suggest using two buddy, which is a Chrome extension, by the way, I should have mentioned that we’ll come back to that in more detail later, I recommend installing that and using the built in YouTube search function to kind of just start typing in your different topics. You’re different videos that you’re going to make your different keywords just to get a general sense of some different ideas that you could talk about by the way you can use this for your tags but we’ll talk about that here in just a minute.
Title Optimization
So it is time that we hit the two most important. Things you want to optimize any given time on YouTube, YouTube growth. This is analytics. This is the metrics you look at again and again and again, and you change every now and then new try and perfect title and thumbnail title and thumbnail. And before I go any further talking about titles, I want to say this.
They’re a combo. It’s not just the title.
There is not one without the other. When anyone sees a title, they see a thumbnail and ruined, sees that thumbnail. They see the title and.
The powerful part is that they work together to tell a little story. Not only what the video is about, but also maybe hint at the takeaways of the video. Here’s what you’re going to be getting out of this video. A little bit of tease built into it. That’s a very. Important point. I’m taking my time here because I really want to push this home out of this entire, everything. I know, session here.
Titles and thumbnails are crucial for anybody who posts anything on YouTube. Full-time YouTubers, just dabbling, repurposing content, titles, and thumbnails are almost everything. The only other thing is like actual good content that delivers on the title and thumbnail. But. That comes with we’ll talk about that later we’re talking about content later for now just know the titles and thumbnails they worked together and they are hugely important–I can’t overestimate excuse me i can’t over exaggerate that enough
Okay, so I’ve hit home. How important they are.
How to craft your YouTube titles 👇
Yes. If you have less than 5,000 ish, YouTube subscribers, you’re still in the early stages. You’re, you’re probably gonna want to be targeting keywords. You’re going to be targeting search on YouTube and kind of on Google too. At the same time in the early stages of YouTube is incredibly important and yeah, I do 100% recommend.
Putting the keywords in the title. Yes. It should just be in there. Just put it in there. Even if you have to do like an awkward, like, let’s see, you have a weird little phrase here, LaCroix review.
You can just do LaCroix review and then have a colon and then have like an, uh, rest of the title. That’s a little bit more interesting. This is a little bit more teasing. The end result of watching the video, et cetera.
And in fact, in my opinion, and the opinion of Darryl Eves and Nick Nimmons, and a bunch of other YouTube gurus, so to speak who I have learned from. Yeah. Learn from myself a perfect title has two factors one is that keyword we’re talking about and the other is a little bit of a tease right it’s kind of hinting at what the video is going to be about and not only what is going to be about but what they might learn.
Other than making sure to insert keywords and also just make the headline a little bit teasing a little snazzy.
I’m just going to give you some very broad, generic, and possibly frustrating advice. And that is to use standard headline writing practices.
Numbers are always a good thing to include that kind of catches the eye a little bit parentheses and or brackets, how to start a blog (the right way), the easy way, the fast way. You’ve probably done a little bit of. Learning how to write good headlines for your blog or whatever other business you got going on. The same applies for titles.
The only caveat is yeah. You want to kind of include some of those keywords for whatever you’re targeting and more than even a blog post, I would argue. It has to work with the thumbnail title headline, featured image, not so much on a blog. Sometimes they, you see them together, but it’s not as important. I think the title and thumbnail have to kind of play together just a little bit. That said i want to move on to talking about the thumbnails specifically
YouTube thumbnails.
Rather than giving you some broad advice. I thought I might actually be nice to walk through some very specific things you can do with your YouTube thumbnails that are more or less proven to work on YouTube. And there’s a lot of these I have stolen from everybody. I follow on YouTube. I didn’t actually make up, uh, many of these, although you know what, before I do that, I’ll tell you which one works best for me.
And that is this: including the keywords in like two words in big and bold.
For example, one of my top-performing videos is my review of Podia. The thumbnail has a picture of me, which we’ll talk about in a second. And it has in huge words, like viewable on desktop or mobile, or if you had to squint, you could still read it.
Podia review.
It’s very, very bland and boring, but it’s obvious and it’s big, bold text and people to see it. And then BOOM.
Is that going to work for all you tubers and all topics? Absolutely not.
But for me personally, when it comes to tutorial or review videos like that, I have seen those thumbnails work the best now. That said let’s dive into some of the other types of thumbnails that you should be able to experiment with and test.
Actually before we do that, remember that this thumbnail plays with the title. If the title’s kind of like a standard headline, you can actually not use the big keywords, like Podia review.
That works well for my video in that case, but you could actually tease something else. Number one, one of my favorite ones is.
The outcome.
What is the outcome of your video?
How can you show that that might be tough for a, you know, a podia review video where I’m literally reviewing like, A piece of software that’s, you know, it could just be like a screenshot, but then that’s never going to catch anybody’s eye.
But if you were talking about how to lose weight, for example, you might show a before and after picture of you, if you’re willing to. Take your shirt off on youtube i don’t know the point is a before and after is a great way to show the end result of the video that’s actually a really powerful thumbnail.
Or if your title is something like how to hook up your RV to your truck, parentheses the right way, the thumbnail could show the actual RV to your truck and you standing over it, pointing to it with a big green. Checkmark graphic like “this is the right way, check!” showing the intended outcome of watching your video
Another one we’ve actually already kind of talked about this. You can use a before and after that, not only shows the end result, but this is just a powerful visual representation of why somebody should watch your video.
Let’s say you’re reviewing a popular, personal finance, mobile app on budgeting or something like that.
You could have the thumbnail quite literally split down the middle, like a big line down the middle and maybe the one side of the thumbnail has.
A picture of you like holding a few, $1 bills and her hair’s kind of crazy. And you’re, you’re given this face right here. Ah, like a stressed, anxious face. And the other side of the thumbnail could have, like you showing off your bling gold, watch holding up hundreds, hundreds, and. You know, smiling, and that’s a ridiculous example, but it’s a before and after.
And why does this work? It shows people why they should want to watch your video. Why should they, why they should click that thumbnail and watch it.
Here’s another one. Stages.
If there is a three-step process to making the perfect pizza parentheses at home, let’s say that is your YouTube video. You might have. You could actually literally split the thumbnail and do like three sections, like two vertical lines, right? Section one, section two, section three. And you could have like a picture of some water.
A picture of a bag of flour. And then the third one could be like a shot of the delicious pizza. Like, you know, a step by step.
I wouldn’t, you know, make like seven panes. It’d be like the seven steps and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Mm. Might be too much, a little too overwhelming, but the step-by-step stages that could be a powerful thumbnail as well.
Also another quick tip that could apply to just about any of these templates is to show you! Show faces. Close-ups preference.
Preferably emotional faces. Happy. Angry, joy, frustration, you know, anything showing your face has. It’s pretty well proven on YouTube from everybody I’ve heard from to draw the eye, to draw attention. And then hopefully that could draw somebody on YouTube and to reading the title and then understanding what the video is, and then click. Show your face
And the last quick tip is if you do use text overlaid on your image or whatnot.
Make them big and don’t do full sentences. Make them pretty big fonts. And you know, if you have to write like five or six words, maybe that could work. But even like two, three, four words, even like one word that generally grabs people a little bit more. And if you want to think through a little quick tip again, we’ve talked about this already, the end result, after they watched your video, they’re going to have learned X. They will have gotten better at X that, you know,
Show them the end result in the image, if you can. And even if you include text there, that could be a nice one. Or like I mentioned at the top of this little section for me personally, just including the keywords, like the general huge broad topic of what the video is in huge fights, Podia review. 2020, or I didn’t even include 2020, but Podia review like big bold text don’t use a ton of words
So to sum up this little chat on thumbnails, I want to reiterate how important it is that it teases somebody into clicking to watch the video.
That is the only objective here when it’s, when you’re creating your titles. Well, titles could be used for algorithms a little bit more, including keywords in there, but specifically with thumbnails, it should make people click on the video.
What is that? Whether it’s teasing the outcome or teasing what you’re going to show or teasing what you’re going to say. I use that word teasing a lot here, but I think it’s very powerful. The only thing we have to be concerned about is does this get people to click. And watch the video when they see it on their YouTube home screen or suggested videos or in search results on YouTube or whatever it is.
The objective is to get people to click.
Last but not least–just remember it works with the title.
You could be talking about something in the title, the topic of the video, and then the thumbnail could actually be hinting at something a little bit different. Like not only what you’re going to talk about with, but what’s the end result of what you’re going to talk about. It doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s a good strategy.
Show what they’re going to learn. So what they’re going to get, what they’re going to get better at, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The title on thumbnails are incredibly important on YouTube.
It’s two of the metrics you’re going to be looking at all the time. If you want to grow and get more views, titles and thumbnails. youtube video descriptions
YouTube video descriptions.
Ah, ha the descriptions underneath your video, the sexually, one of my favorite things to talk about, and let me tell you why, because I have this mastered. Me personally, I feel like I have kind of struck gold with figuring out how to produce really quality YouTube descriptions very, very quickly. And we’ll come back to the quickly part in just a second, but.
Why? Why is this important at all?
Well, think back to our main key objectives on how to grow a YouTube channel, especially in the early years, less than 10,000 subscribers. And that’s this keep people on YouTube and increase, watch time–keep people on YouTube. Well, if our goal here is to keep people on YouTube, how can we use the description to do that?
Well, first and foremost, we can link to other videos on YouTube.
Let me say that again. Cause that’s incredibly important. I’ve seen a tremendous amount of success. Just being a little bit over the top, even linking to other YouTube videos specifically of mine, you’re going to absolutely link out to other people’s as well. But I link out to my own videos and I try and make it a logical thing to click on.
Let me say that one more time. I linked to my own videos in my other videos on YouTube and I try and make it a logical thing to click on. And you’re also more than welcome to include a little bit of text. Hey, if you enjoyed this video, you know, you also need to check out this other one right here. That’s slightly related.
So I, I mostly consider this the primary objective in your first couple of years on YouTube linking to other videos on YouTube. Sounds a little obvious, but a lot of people don’t do it. So. That said, I’m going to give you one little tool and then I’m actually going to break down the exact parts of my video descriptions and the one tool I want to talk about.
There’s a bunch of them. These tools allow me to hit a few shortcuts on my keyboard and then it expands into more texts. Again, TextExpander. Atext is a really great one. Alfred for Mac also does this. I use KeyboardMaestro. There’s a lot of tools to do this. I type.as in period dot Y T X.
And then my YouTube descriptions fill out like it’s, it’s, it’s quite literally like 1200, 1300 words and has a bunch of different sections in there. And from there once I’ve kind of copied and pasted that in with my little shortcut. I will edit it for the specific video. This saves me. I can’t even comprehend how much time if you were to like try and copy and paste video links and, you know, type out a bunch of stuff this could take for ever, for ever forever use some sort of shortcuts, this little hack. To prepopulate your video descriptions now what goes in that oh i’m so glad you asked!
Let’s move on to what goes in your video descriptions
Thing number one, as in right up there at the top, I like to include one to three sentences. Uh, just telling what the video is about and hint, hint, hint, right up front. I’m gonna tell you toss in the keywords police toss in the keywords on YouTube in your first sentence. Why? Because people are generally going to be able to see.
That in YouTube search results. They’ll see that first sentence. And by the way, if you actually go and search on YouTube, like if you typed in two or three words, it’ll highlight and search results, those two or three words, I do believe it’s still does that.
So include keywords right there in the first sentence or two sentences, three sentences, mostly just, Oh, by the way, use like some other closely related.
Keywords right. I did a video about, Hey, the new email provider. And I also included a few words like G mail or G suite. And I knew I was going to be targeting stuff like a review and tour and some other like slightly keywords. It’s very natural sounding. I didn’t just like you start throwing in keywords everywhere.
So it sound like garbage. No. It’s complete sentences and it makes sense. That’s very important too, but I am realizing that people are going to see that and I want them to know, Oh yeah, that’s the video I’m looking for. Click. Right. So the first part is include one to three sentences. Basically what the video is going to be about the next little part. And you can kind of do this wherever you want, but I like to keep it up top.
Is a subscribe link. Now i’m about to get really fancy on you
You can pull your channel URL, where you would link people to your YouTube channel. For me, it is youtube.com/do you even blog? And you can attach this on the back end of it. You’re never going to remember this by the way. So you used to go to my YouTube channel, just look at how I’ve written this out.
The next part I have is this is, again, this is my placeholders.
Remember I have this tool, my shortcuts that auto-populate like my entire description. I have. This stuff mentioned in this video. And then underneath that, I have some emojis that look kind of like bullet points, like, like, like a little list. Right. But it’s actually emojis or the, uh, the bullets. And I think this one for me is like,
Uh, right hand, like something that’s like pointing to the right. I don’t know. You can go check it out. Uh, the point is I put stuff in here that I mentioned in the video is generally only like one or two things. If. For example, I’m doing a podia review. I will have my affiliate link for podium right there. Stuff mentioned in this video. Now have that boom right there.
The next section. I love this jump links. That’s what I call them. These are timestamps for your videos. There are different opinions out there in YouTube land on. Yeah, you should absolutely include these like timestamp jump links where people can click them and get forwarded to the different parts of the video. So people really know, no, don’t do that. Hashtag watch time. I don’t watch any longer. Well,
I include them for almost every video and for a few different reasons.
Number one. I think it’s just good user experience. I personally love it. When other videos do that. Oh, so good. Number two. It can, it can, I’m not saying it will, but it can actually help your video get found in Google. Have you ever done this thing where you Google something and it shows a video right there and you click play brew. Doesn’t actually play at the beginning. It plays like.
Two minutes and 37 seconds into the video. Well, more than likely it’s realizing, Oh, this one section that, that video is talking about this topic. That’s done with these jump links. That’s why I do them first and foremost right there. And it’s it’s good user experience now. Quick tip, before I move on.
If your first jumbling time step is, uh, zero colon zero, zero, and then you can type whatever you want. Uh, intro. That and we’ll actually show your different jump links on the video itself. Like the video timeline bar, like towards the bottom, it will actually show the different sections of your video. That’s actually cool. If you don’t include a.
Zero minutes and zero seconds. Uh jumbling it won’t actually do that so quick tip oh wait actually let me tell you how to do these you just include the minute actually if it’s more than an hour the hour and minute and seconds and then a space and then you can type out whatever that section is about the subtopic or whatever that is how you include these little links in your video description for example something at one minute 44 seconds would be one colon for space and then you know whatever the topic is
Now– moving on. After I have my little intro. I have the subscribe link. I have the stuff mentioned. I got my jump links in there.
I like to have a big section called related videos. This is where I link to other videos of mine. I think people should go and check out now.
By the way, if you have text expander, or if you just have a document somewhere that you’re copying and pasting for each new video, every time you create a new one, or if you have like every time you create a really. New good one that turns out well. Go ahead and grab the title of that and the link or just a link or whatever, and put it in there, like your, your copy and paste document. And just so it’s easier to delete then go and find meaning once you copy and paste in your video description, like template, like the starting point, it’s actually easier to delete a bunch of stuff.
Then go open up new tabs and grab the links to old videos and then copy and paste the title from old videos and yada yada it’s much easier. Just to grab that stuff one time. And throw it in your copy and paste template and then delete it if you don’t want it later. So there you go. I literally have like 20 videos in my copy and paste document. I only leave like. Maybe five of them in there i just like delete the ones that are less relevant and i keep the ones that are more relevant et cetera et cetera if you want to see an example of this again go to my youtube channel and look at the video descriptions they’re pretty much all right there
And next up below this, there are a few different things, but I really ever change it.
This is like the static thing that is just always an, every single one of my YouTube video descriptions. And it’s a few things affiliates for one thing, I have one that says my blogging tools and then underneath that I have some, another bullet list. There are no bullets. It’s just emojis. Right?
One is my blogging tools. I got like SiteGround they’re I got podia. I got like active campaign and some other stuff. And then I had my podcasting tools section and then some more emoji list. I got Podbean, I got SquadCast. I got my ATR 2100 microphone, some road stuff, stuff like that. And then underneath it, I have the following.
Um, I’m gonna read this, literally. I’m looking at it.
“Love blogging, podcasting and online business. Me too.”
In all caps. I have that. And then underneath it, I have a step by step, little checklist of how to support do you even blog? And it’s a lot. If somebody did this, by the way, they’d be like a super fan, a true fan. If you will.
I have number one, subscribe to my channel. And then I had my subscribe link. Again. Number two, free guides. I have a link to my podcast launch freebie my 60 minute SEO freebie underneath that. I have subscribed to the, do you even blog podcast? And then I have a link to Apple podcasts, another link to Google by gas, Spotify, et cetera. And underneath that one, I have let’s connect. And then I have a link to Instagram, Twitter, private Facebook group, my website, doing blog.com private membership, community online impact.co like.
I’m just giving everybody every opportunity to continue following my brand. Should I say that again for a reiteration purposes, I’m getting, getting. Ah, I messed that one up. I’m giving all my viewers every opportunity possible to further dive down the rabbit hole of my brand freebies. My top blog posts, obviously my top videos. I’ve already covered those a little bit. Uh, social media channels, subscribe to your podcast, subscribe to my YouTube channel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the last part is actually two parts. Then I have some hashtags. You can do this on YouTube and they’ll show up just below the video. I don’t have that much evidence to suggest that these hashtags will help you show up better in search results. I don’t know about that.
I just liked the way they kind of look. And so I generally have like two or three hashtags somewhere down there. For example, I’m looking at a blog post template, YouTube video. It says hashtag blog, post template, hashtag blogging, hashtag do you even block? So one of my hashtags is always my brand name.
And the last part is my affiliate disclosure. I have some of the links above our affiliate links. Affiliate links are used for each tool that we were an affiliate up, which means if you click the link in. So, so let me make a purchase, will earn a commission, yada yada, check out my disclaimer here for more information, do and blog.com/legal.
And that’s it.
Again, I can’t emphasize this enough. Use some sort of copy and paste tool, text expander.
If you just wanna open up a Google doc and like type all this out one time and then kind of reuse that, just copying in and out of a Google doc, like great. Go for that. It saves you so much time and it’s nice to be able to quickly point people to more videos of yours on YouTube.
Obviously, that’s a huge one. And it’s nice to just have some, you know, affiliate links in there, your favorite tools and like a little guide to following you. Right? Subscribe, check out this freebie, check out this post connect on Instagram, like whatever that might be. youtube tags
YouTube Tags.
Ah, ha tags, adding tags to your YouTube videos. Let me just say off the bat that some people are like. Yep. Tags add as many as you possibly can. There’s like a character limit by the way. So you can only add like 10, 15, 20 tags, depending on how long they are. Yeah. Adam. Totally that’s searched. You’ve got to have these yada yada other people are like, Nope.
Not even the border, like literally who care, like, no, not even a ranking factor, whatever, you know what, I’m going to be honest with you.
I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t put in necessary tax.
Why would you not?
It takes you no time, especially with. TubeBuddy, by the way, I can’t say enough about these guys–as you’re actually creating your YouTube video, you just uploaded the file. You’ve got your description now. And underneath that there’s like tags.
You can just start typing in some of your keywords and like topics, like what the video is about. And they will actually pop up with some suggestions.
The free plan too, by the way, you don’t even need to pay TubeBuddy for that steel. You’ll actually see something right there. Uh, or you could obviously go back to the YouTube search bar right at the top start typing in different keywords or topics. And again, right there, it’ll, it’ll kind of.
Pop some up that are related and you just want to make sure, like all of your main topics are there and your tags. And again, I don’t think it’s going to be the difference between you just thinking at YouTube and never growing or you disguise rocketing because YouTube algorithms. Ah, no, I really don’t think so, but why wouldn’t you.
It’s such an easy thing. It takes zero time, especially if you have to buddy right there to make it even easier. Yeah. Go ahead and put in tags. And just do your keywords plus keywords plus a little extra plus the topics, you know, just make sure they’re all relevant. I think this helps YouTube understand what your video is about. Do I necessarily think it’s going to make you rank higher? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know, but it does tell YouTube.
And your audience probably in some way, what the video is about. So go ahead and include tags right there in your video description. Or no, i’m sorry not in the description it’s a whole separate thing but as you’re uploading right after the description actually yeah put in your tax
Chapter summary.…
I won’t lie to you. And some people are going to be slightly angry at me and disagree with me here.
I kind of feel like YouTube search is kind of a Google search. Google SEO was like six or seven years ago.
I’m not gonna say you should like keyword stuff and that sort of thing. But I do think that until Google and YouTube can read a video like they read text a little bit more weight goes into the tags, the keywords in your title and include it in your descriptions.
And of course your click-through rate. We’re going to talk about that here in just a second. But the title and thumbnail, how many people are clicking through that? See it that’s pretty much what a click-through rate is. I think those things are incredibly important.
Uh, by the way and watch time.
Watch time, click-through rate. Make sure. Making sure your keywords are in there appropriately. And I think your YouTube, SEO and optimization as well on the way.
Starts with a little bit of key where keyword research, excuse me, to find topics that are trending and search for, and maybe not too competitive, obviously producing videos on that.
And then using those keywords in the title and the description making through your thumbnail actually makes people want to click the same as your title. And including tags where relevant. I think that’s pretty much it let’s move on and actually dive deep into analytics for a little while. And then after on the links, of course we’re going to jump back into the actual content
YouTube Analytics
So believe it or not, I was going to put in a brief overview of the important metrics that you should be analyzing. You already kind of know a lot of it!
We talked about watch time already and how that’s so vital, as well as the CTR, the click-through rate, as in your title and thumbnail and how many people are clicking through once they have searched for your topics or seen it in suggested videos or something like that. And then there are some other metrics like engagement, likes and comments and subscribes i’m just gonna go ahead and lump subscribes in with engagement. I believe those are going to actually send positive signals to, uh, you know, YouTube’s algorithms as well of course but other than that there’s not a whole lot of main metrics that you should be looking at on any given day or any given week so that said i’m actually going to dive into each one of those separately
YouTube Watch Time
So right off the bat, what is watch time?
Or viewer retention or audience retention–as it’s called a lot of the different times. Quite frankly, it’s the total amount of time.
The total amount of time the viewer spent watching your videos and the more that people watch your videos, the more YouTube wants to promote your video and wants to show it in the recommended videos and in search results on stuff like that.
Youtube wants to keep people on YouTube.
This is one of the most important metrics which you should always be aiming to increase i want to increase my watch time
Video Cards
Video cards. These are the little things that pop up in the top, the top right hand corner of a video that promotes another video. A lot of YouTubers will even talk about this in their video.
“Oh, and speaking of blah, blah, blah, you can check out this other video, which I’ll link to write up here to learn more about this little sub-topic.
This is a great way to keep people on YouTube.
Maybe not going to increase the total watch time for this one video, but it keeps people on YouTube longer. That’s an overall session–viewing watch time that increases it.
A few things here…
Number one. When I just said that YouTube is, we’ll actually talk about their cards, like, Oh, speaking of which, click this YouTube card right here and learn about blah, blah, blah.
They know that the card is going to be in the video–before that goes in the video
As in, as they are shooting the video, they haven’t scripted out like, Oh, I like, by the way, we’re going to talk about outlining here in a couple of minutes. I do all of this in the outlining stage.
Like, Oh, you know what? I can promote this other video during this, this section right here. This is great. Going in, right. So you can actually record it while you’re recording all of your video and then you can promote the cart like right there. That’s a really, really, really great way to keep people on YouTube and increase overall session. Watch time.
Also. I’ve done this before. I know that I’m going to be creating a video like a couple of weeks down the road. I’ll go ahead and record a little segment in this video we’re making right now, promoting that card, even though the card is not there yet, I have done that. It might be a little weird when people watch it before the card is actually linked and added to the utility like that, that might be a little weird, but it’s.
I’d like to go ahead and put it in there quite frankly. And then a couple of weeks later when I record and publish that other video, I will go back to the original video and throw it in the cart. And now they’re linked together. Right? And also, uh, how many cards should you put in a video? Just be real, just be human. No, it shouldn’t be like 17. You don’t need 17 cards. You might actually have a limit. I’m not even sure if you could do that, but you know,
Two three, five, depending on how long the video is, every couple of minutes and or whenever you specifically are talking about something. And again, it’s good to go ahead and put that in your notes before you record, or even after you’re done recording, you might make a note to yourself like, Oh minute for 37 seconds, add this card to this video. You might do that too. But even if you don’t specifically mention like, Oh, go check out this other video. Oh, click this card. It’s still could be useful to put in some relevant links to other videos sprinkled throughout every couple of minutes or as you bring them up as you talk about them stuff like that
Video End Screens.
So, if you don’t know what these are, these end screens pop up. Roughly 20 seconds before the end of a YouTube video, you can set these, you can choose what you want to display. And there are a few options. You’ll often see like a little circle with the YouTube channel avatar, where people can click to subscribe to the channel. You can also see some like related videos and this other playlist and stuff like that. These are called end screens.
And they are incredibly important.
I would argue incredibly important. And I have a few things to say about this number one. Let’s actually talk about. What to put on the end screens. You should absolutely be pointing people to. Videos of yours. All right. And there are two things you can do. I like to put two videos on each end screen.
The first one, I always, always, always, always, always, when I’m recording a piece of content. I will give a shout out to click on that end screen video. I will. In other words, I know what video I’m going to suggest in the end screen. Before I even make the video, I was like, Oh, this other video that I have would be the next logical thing that somebody should click on and go watch.
So when I’m recording and one of the last things I’ll record is my outro for each video, which is normally 20 to 30 seconds long. Max, I’ll talk about why that is and just a second. And I will point people to, “Oh, You have just learned about X, Y, Z. Check out this video right here. I will link to this other relevant, you know, next step video.”
I basically know what the end screen is going to be, what videos I’m going to be suggesting as I’m recording the current video.
So I can just talk about it right there. Point to it. Yada, yada, the end screen. There it is. Boom. Now sometimes I will also just use the YouTube option “best for viewer.”
And it will basically, you’re just letting YouTube algorithms decide like, Oh, this person might watch this video next. It’s trying to decide what video of your channel, which one of your videos would be best for the viewer. And it’ll try and stick that in. I sometimes just put that one on there too. So.
Oh, and then the subscribed thing, I always put the little subscribe icon. You can see it right there as you’re creating an end screen. I always do that. So. By the way. Here. Well, let’s talk about the, the outros of your video. Just a little bit.
In terms of in screens, it is very important that people see them.
Well, yeah. Duh. Okay. I kinda get that.
No, no, no. You’re not feeling me here.
A lot of YouTubers, especially newer YouTubers, they’ll get done with the main part of their content in the video. And then they’ll say something like this. Well, that’s all I got for you today. Thank you guys for watching. I really appreciated you subscribe and like yada, yada yada, before an end screen comes up.
They will conclude the video. They’ll sign off. They’ll say thank you for watching. They’ll say that’s it for today. Folks. They’ll start to say those words on video. What happens to viewers? What happens to viewers’ brains when they see that and hear that on your YouTube video, they say, okay, we’re done.
They close out of YouTube.
Maybe they click on another video, but they probably don’t even see your end screen. Here’s my big takeaway from all. This is important to have a very solid structure. When it comes to your video, outros, people need to be engaged in the video. They’re still watching because they’re still learning about your topic, whatever the video is. So stir start learning. They’re still watching. They’re still learning.
Boom. End screen. Here is the next video.
They need to make that transition in a heartbeat. So no more like 10 to 20 seconds of all. That’s all I got for today. Thanks for watching. Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, and then getting to an end screen. Now people need to see the in screen with the next videos that they need to watch. Before they’ve left the video. That sounds a little bit obvious, but when you tuber start talking like, Oh, that’s it for today?
People tune out and they’re like, okay, the video’s done moving on. What else is, what else do I need to do? And then they leave YouTube. Right? So make sure your intros are very solid, very snappy. And you’re getting people to look. At that end screen. Before they click away before they leave, before they know the video is even done.
Now just note, we are going to come back and talk about your outros in the next chapter on content. So we’re going to revisit that a little bit, like literally what to say in order to make it short and snappy is of the people. See you’re end screens, but for now, just know that you want to link to other pieces of your content.
That’s the summary of this little chapter. You want to increase, watch time. You want to increase the time that people spend watching all of your videos, utilize that in screen and make sure people see it. Right. Don’t have a huge long outro before the end screens even show up. You want to make sure that people will actually see the end screens and then you want to be leading them to the next logical thing to click on the next logical step in there, viewing journey, whatever you happen to be talking about. Right.
Video click-through rate.
Click through rate, otherwise known as CTR is basically how many people on YouTube. See your video, thumbnail and title, whether that’s in search results or in suggested videos or anywhere when they’re browsing YouTube anywhere, they see that your video exists. How many people actually click on it to watch the video that is your click through rate? Hopefully that’s pretty self explanatory. This is actually a huge metric.
And in fact, if you log into your YouTube studio dashboard, always, always, always at the top left, you’re going to see your latest video and its performance. And right there. It’s like one of the first things you see impressions, click-through rate.
Oh, by the way, what else did they show you? Average view duration, average. You could tell what metrics are important to YouTube, to sending your video out there. They care about click-through rate, watch time, average view duration, stuff like that.
Click-through rate is incredibly important. And the good news is we’ve kind of already hinted at the magic formula to try and maximize your click-through rate.
Title and thumbnail.
So without repeating myself too much, I’m going to give you just a few more ideas and how to increase your click through rate. Now the title and thumbnail. The first thing we think about this from the perspective of a viewer or even one of your subscribers, as they log onto youtube.com. What happens first? Well, they see that your video exists, they see the thumbnail or title, and usually people’s eyes are drawn to the thumbnail burst, and then they kind of glance over at the title. I would think, I don’t know that for sure, but they see it, they know your video exists. So what can you do right there? That’s called an impression.
By the way. Well, You draw their attention. When you think about the, all the marketing and copywriting frameworks in the world, they all list attention as the very first step. You have to grab people’s attention. Without that, they’re not going to go to review those guys. They’re never going to click through yada yada. So.
We already kind of talked about this, putting your face on the. Thumbnail could draw people’s eyes in a little bit more using big, bold text. It’s easy to read, even on a mobile device that could draw people’s eyes in as well.
Here’s another quick tip, not using YouTube red as your primary. Mary color. If you use YouTube, read the, like the YouTube brand, the logo, that color red, it’s actually going to blend in more to the overall platform. So, you know, use colors to your advantage. Yeah. You want to keep it on brand? I really do. I didn’t mention that before. Actually I probably should have.
I like to make sure I’m using the same brand colors and every single, you know, featured image, every single thumbnail. So that eventually over time, people will recognize that as being one of, Oh, that’s, that’s one of Pete’s videos. Oh, that’s one of, do you even blogs videos? I trust that guy. I’ve seen that guy’s video before. I know that guy, I’m going to click on that, that builds up over time, ranting, yada, yada, but for now just know the colors and, you know,
Contrast, putting your face on things, using big Boulder texts with not a lot of words that hopefully will draw people’s eyes in and get you more attention. That’s what you want.
So at this point, you have crafted a thumbnail that has at least drawn their eyes and drawn their attention. The only remaining step. For click through rate is to get them to click. And so there are two main, big broadened methods in order to do this. Number one is going to be problem solving. This is more for search than it is suggested videos maybe, but they want to know.
You know, I’m interested in this topic. I’m interested in this subject, I’m searching because I have this problem. I’m searching these keywords because I’m looking for this solution or something like, what are they looking for? Making sure your title and your thumbnail. It’s promises to give them that solution.
That’s the best way I could think of the phrase. It just, there. Make sure that people are going to click through to be like, Oh yes, podia review this one in big, bold text. It says podia review. Okay. I know what I’m getting here. Okay. That’s what I was looking for. The thumbnail just like solidified that in my head. Yeah. Okay, cool. I’ll try out this one right here. Podia review, click.
Right. That’s number one, answering their problems. Yes. This video does contain what you are looking for. That’s number one, number two. I hate to go back to the word tease, but I’m going to do it anyways.
Your title and thumbnail should sort of tees at something. They need to draw attention to your thumbnail and your title, and looking like a little bit deeper, just glancing at the title, and then looking at the thumbnail. They need to be a little bit intrigued. You need to teach them just a little bit like, Oh, I want to see how this video answers my problem. Oh, I want to see what happens here. Just a little bit of that. Some people will say like that and he used to tell a story. Well,
That’s kinda hard to like grass and put into practical terms. Okay. What does that mean? For my title and thumbnail, but I think that’s what they’re getting at. It needs to be clear. That your video has what they’re looking for. And that’s why they want to click. They want to watch this. They’re interested in this topic, this subject, and it’s intrigued them a little bit. Oh, okay. Yeah. I do want to like check out how this person did that or how this person accomplished that. Or this video does satisfy my search intent. If you want to get fancy, they need to just glance at it. You’ve caught their attention and understand.
I want to watch this video. That is the bottom line to increasing click through rate. Now. Before I leave CTR click through rate. I would also say this. It is important every now and then if you’re going to be growing this whole YouTube thing to go back and change your titles and thumbnails. You can actually go in into YouTube analytics. I can’t show you through this episode, but you can actually go in and filter all of your videos by click through rate. It’s actually not that hard either. You just click analytics, it’ll show you a bunch of.
Uh, analytics here you’ll click on the advanced tab should be like advanced analytics or something like that. And you can just select it from the dropdown menu, click through rate, and you can just see it right there. Oh, wow. This one has like eight, nine, 10% or more. That’s generally doing pretty well.
Depending on, you know, your niche and who you are and stuff like that. Or if this one’s like, Aw, this one’s like 0.8%. Ooh, gotta work on that one. You can actually go back maybe once a month. Just give yourself like an hour to go back and change the titles and thumbnails of a couple of videos. You’re underperforming click through rate videos. You might actually be blown away by the results.
This can do, right. It’s it’s, it’s kind of crazy how easy this is for the most part, but a lot of people don’t do it. Go back, check on again. I’m gonna say once a month, go back like once a month, find your lower performing videos when it comes to CTR. It changed the title. And if you want to change the thumbnail to that would probably be appropriate, but at least you could change the title. Cause that’s even easier. You click on that video, you edit it, you change that stuff around, and then there you go. You try that out and you see what works.
One final tip on this. You may have already thought this. I love to use a tracker to track these experiments. I have one in Airtable, but you could use Excel or a Google spreadsheet or something like that. And I will list out like, Oh, here is this video right here. It had a 0.8% click-through rate. I changed this on July 1st, 2020.
And then come back later. Next time you do this, like next month or something like that. And then check it again to see, Oh yes. This made it better. Or, Oh yes. This made it worse. Create a little tracker where you can keep track of these little experiments that you’re doing.
Video Engagement: Likes Subscribes and Comments
I’m going to be completely upfront with you guys and say that the following two or three sentences is just my opinion. I personally believe in the early days of your YouTube channel, the first like 1000, 2000 subscribers, especially. I don’t actually think the likes and comments and subscribes are going to do you as much good as really trying to increase, watch time.
Notice that I didn’t say those things aren’t important or no, you shouldn’t ask people to like, or comment or subscribe to your channel. I didn’t say that. I said, I think it’s less important overall to the growth of your channel than watch time getting people to binge on some of your videos and keep them engaged.
Via the content. We’re gonna talk about that in the next chapter. But. I just want to go about saying that upfront. Now that I’ve said that I do think it’s important to encourage likes and comments and subscribers. Now let’s actually start with subscribers because I think this is an interesting one.
A lot of people will ask people to subscribe to their channel in the first parts of their video. I hate that from a viewer perspective, I’m usually like looking for the skip forward 10 seconds button on my keyboard that I have, like the shortcuts I’m like, okay. You did get to the point, get to the content, please.
Especially if you’re just starting out. I don’t think you should do that. I don’t think one bit you should ask people to subscribe to your channel before the core content of your video. Why because people don’t care, they’re looking for their answers. They’re looking for that value. They’re looking for the content. Once you get to your outros, I think it’s a five.
Second edition to your outro. And if you enjoyed this video, I would love it. If you subscribe to my channel, you can always come back and hang out with me more. How long did that take less than five seconds and it was pretty authentic, right? I think that is enough in your first little bit on YouTube. Don’t.
Worry so much about subscribers now, of course, they’re important. They’re going to help snowball your views. Absolutely. Subscribers are incredibly important. I actually think just that little mention. Providing awesome value, which we can talk about in the next chapter, the actual content. I think that matters 10 X more to growing your subscribers on YouTube than anything else that.
And increasing views, which how do you increase views by the way? Well, that’s time overall session time, yada, yada, do those things to get subscribers. You don’t have to be super active about subscribe, subscribe, smash, the subscribe button. I don’t think he needed to do that in the early days of your channel. I think you need to focus on the other things and let subscribers come as a byproduct. A by product of having that subscribe link and your description, a by product of having lots of views, a byproduct of just having really good content. We’ll talk about that in the next chapter
All right. Let’s talk about likes. I personally don’t ask anybody for likes ever. Some people might say you should do that. Okay. Whatever. If so, I like to add as an addition to the outro, similar to the five seconds subscriber ask, I just said like, Oh, if you enjoyed this video, you know, smashed a little thumbs up like button there.
And that’s literally it like, that’s all I would ever say. I don’t actually think it’s that important. I think people will just choose to like, or not like a video. There you go. Let’s talk about comments. Cause I think that’s a little bit more interesting. I I love the idea of encouraging comments. I love this form of engagement in general.
First of all, if people want to comment they’ll comment and if they don’t want to comment, they won’t comment that just so you know, however, I do think there are some things you can do to encourage commenting. And there’s two things specifically. Number one, of course you could ask in your video specifically in the outro probably, but even I think this was one of those things where you can bring it up earlier in the video, not the first like.
10 to 20 seconds, but somewhere in the middle of your content, you can ask a question relevant to the video. Of course, Hey, let me know what you like better this one or this one, let me know in the comments. I think that’s actually pretty cool. That’s a great way to encourage commenting and engagement on your video.
Asking a question, getting the viewer involved in some way. And by getting them involved. I mean, they’re actually adding value to the experience of your video. If I ask for somebody’s opinion on something and P five people comment. And I’m watching this video by the way. I like somebody else does that. And they asked for opinions and I see a bunch of comments. I’ll actually scroll down through those comments and look, and maybe I’ll respond to some, or maybe I’ll add my own comment. That’s actually pretty cool. So ask a question about your topic, ask over their opinion, give them a choice, like make it specific. Don’t just say like,
Comment below. Well, okay. Comment on, say what. What is my comment, make it specific, ask them a question, ask their opinion, stuff like that. You can put that at the outro or in the middle of your content. That was all number one. Number two would be to comment yourself. You see this advice a lot from the YouTuber gurus. And I personally agree with that. The very first comment on every single one of your videos should be you.
And if you asked a question in the video, by the way, just ask that again in text format. And then what are you, do you pin that comment to the top right there? Even if you don’t ask a question in the actual video, by the way, you can ask one right there, just to be like, Hey. What do you think about this right here? Have you ever done this? This, this drop me a comment below and the pennant right there as the top comment.
Chapter summary
So I do believe in your first couple of years on YouTube growing your channel, you’re going to want to focus on two metrics above all else.
Watch time or really just thinking about it like this, the amount of time one of your viewers spins on YouTube.
That’s actually a little bit more appropriate. The amount of time, one of your viewers spins on the YouTube platform, do everything in your power to increase that you can use cards, you can link to other videos and your description below your video. You can use end screens to point them in the next logical video to watch.
It just, you know, you can produce longer videos. You can increase the percentage of the video watched audience retention, like 20, 30%, 40, 50% of a video. That’d be great. We’re gonna talk about that in the next chapter. Increasing their time on YouTube. And another thing you can do specifically for your videos is the ctr
The clickthrough rate.
Obviously that is going to do wonders for the YouTube algorithms. And there are two main ways you can do that, the title and the thumbnail you’re gonna have to play around and see what works. We already talked a little bit about experimenting. And tracking your experiments by the way. So you can see what actually increased CTR and what didn’t work so well, tracking that whole experimentation marketing phase.
That plays a huge role in YouTube, promoting your videos. When people look in search results, YouTube wants to promote the videos that are going to keep people on YouTube and that people actually want to click through and watch. Title thumbnails. They have to tell a story, so to speak, meaning they have to make people want to watch your video and whatever you can do to increase that metric right there.
You’re golden. So there are the analytics let’s move on to the content.
How to Make Great Video Content
So before I dive into literally what to do in your own video, I’m going to spend just a few minutes talking about the overall process of creating a good YouTube video, making great content. Because I believe the process of coming up with topics idea going through an outline the thumbnail obviously we’ve already talked to about a little bit–this whole process is actually more important than other mediums like podcasting or blogging so I’m going to spend a few minutes talking about that first
Topics
Let’s talk about topics.
We’ve already discussed keyword research and yes, if you are a new YouTube channel, you’re going to need to base a lot of your videos based on search, especially the not super-competitive keywords, but some of the smaller keywords that you can actually stand a chance of ranking.
You’re going to need to do that, to get some initial eyeballs. Now, obviously you want to produce other content too. You want to have a good balance of producing content for search you’re, you know, you’re targeting just keywords based on your SEO research. As well as non search. Content content that is just going to be valuable to your audience period. Now, I like to, I’m going to talk about kind of organizing your topic ideas in the same step here.
I like to base my topics out on two things.
Search
“On-brand”
I like to call it brand topics. I’d like to think of my entire business. Do you even blog as a brand? Social media podcast, YouTube blog, everything. So I really want this type of content to be on-brand. Is this something relatively unique? Is this something that’s Pete
You know what I mean? Like when my audience sees this video, I think it’ll be like, Oh, that is so do you even blog? Oh, that is so Pete, even if it’s not specifically geared toward search. Uh, those are my two big ones. Now there are other people like Tim Schmoyer or tons of other YouTubers, actually that we’ll talk about a third or fourth little bucket as well. I think Tim’s mortar calls them. You have your search intent topics. You have your brand building topics. You could also have some sales video topics. That would be like 5% of the time, max. Right? These are very rare, but it’s specifically to sell something.
And there’s some other stuff in there. Like some. You know, every three months do like one that is specifically geared to go viral to get shares, right. Produce content for shares. Well, you could do all that stuff too, but I like thinking about it in two big buckets. Geared towards search and on brand content. Not necessarily geared towards search, but this is something that I know my audience wants and they need, and I know they’re going to click on Rita.
Now and by clicking read on, I mean, click and view on it.
Here is another little pro tip. Go create a Google spreadsheet or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or an air table template. Actually what I use. And in fact, you can go see that in the show notes for this, everything I know, episode. I like to organize my topic ideas. I put them all down on a spreadsheet and I actually rank them based on their three things. Search viability, how on-brand it is. And also I add a third column for how motivated am I to do this video?
I average those three numbers out and the highest numbers of the ones I work on next, it’s actually pretty simple. It’s just a little quick tip to stay organized.
Creating a Title & Thumbnail
No. You have your topics. Maybe you’ve got a big list. You know, the next two or three videos you’re going to produce next step would be thinking about the thumbnail and the title. First. Yes, we’ve already talked about, this is a great deal, but this is incredibly important for producing your content too. Why? Because you want memorable. We’re trying to do here. We’re trying to increase.
Click through rate, which is directly from the title and thumbnail. And also watch time when, when people click on your title and thumbnail and they start watching your video. That little 10, 15, even 30 seconds is absolutely crucial. You have to deliver on your title and thumbnail. I’ll say that one more time. Cause that’s incredibly important for growing on YouTube.
The first 15 to 30 seconds, you have to nail and you have to deliver on the promise of your title and thumbnail. That’s why you want to think about your title and thumbnail first, before you even outlined the video.
You can come back and change it, of course, but you really want to be able to record. That intro the first 15 to 30 seconds with your title and thumbnail in mind that is so crucial and so it’s important that you think about what the title and thumbnail are going to be before you start recording
Outline
Now at this point, you should move on to outlining your video. Now, before you tune me out for the solo section and be like, Oh, Pete, I don’t really outline my blog post. Oh, Pete. I don’t really outline my podcast episodes. Let me just tell you.
YouTube is different because it’s not only what you are saying. It’s what you look like. It’s what’s on the screen. They are hearing things, your viewers, and they’re seeing things at the same time.
That is going to be much more taxing on your organization.
Whenever you set up different camera angles, different recording locations, as well as, Oh yeah. By the way, the actual content, what you’re showing on your screen. If you’re doing screen shares, the words that are coming out of your mouth, it’s a whole lot more than just podcasting and just blogging. Okay. It’s crucial. You do some outlining here. Now you can call it different things.
It keeps you could be writing a screenplay. You could be scripting the video. You could be. I just call it an outline. And here is how I suggest you do it. This is what I’ve found works best for me. You can of course tweak this, but here’s what works best for me.
I begin my outlines with just the topics, the bullet points as if I were gonna write a blog post or podcast episode like this one, same thing. I write down the.
BTW, I use 1HR BLOG POST templates to do all my outlining and scripting. Go check that out here.
Topics the subtopics, the points that I want to get across and et cetera, et cetera, just like any other piece of content, the topics and subtopics, I outline those first. After I’ve done that. And I’ve, I usually do that pretty quickly. It takes me no more than three or four minutes most of the time. Cause I already know what I’m going to be producing. I’ll just like brainstorm. I’ll get like five to 10 bullet points done.
Then I will actually go back through and think about what the video looks like to the end viewer. I’m going to say that again. After I have my topics down, I will go back through and then think through what the video should look like. I should be showing my screen here. I should be showing my face here. I should be changing my camera angles here.
I could actually insert a little snippet promoting one of my other YouTube videos via a card here. I’ll try and think through what the video looks like. And. By doing so by the way, the end result, and this is an incredibly important, you are knowing where to put your camera, what to be focusing on screenshare or not.
Before you actually start recording. Again, I’ll say that one more time, a little bit louder for the people in the back. It’s crucial you script or outline your videos, not just the actual topics and subtopics, but also camera angles, where the camera is, what the video should look like. The more you can do that upfront, even if it’s kind of general, you don’t have to be super specific, like switch to camera angle three 35 degrees South and move it up to seven inches and zoom in on my fitness. I don’t know. You don’t have to do that speed very broad, but you need to be thinking through what the end.
Video looks like.
And by the way, the first 10 times you do this, you are going to stink at it. You’re going to stink at it. You may think, Oh, I could be like, totally do that. No, no, no. You’re going to be terrible. You’re going to be terrible. It’s okay. You do that 10 times. You will figure out a process that works better for you, and it will get way more streamlined that I can almost guarantee.
It’s going to be hard at first. It’ll get easier.
Video Intros
So let’s dive into what I would argue is one of the most crucial parts of your video. The intro. Now I have several tips here just going to have to bear with me and not going in any particular order. Number one, think of the intro as the first 10 to 15 seconds.
You can have a second intro. We’re going to get to that in a second, but I, what I really want to talk about here is the first 10 to 15 seconds.
And I’m gonna start with this.
Don’t do the following: Don’t do some branded intro showing your logo and a little sound effect and or music that you paid somebody on Fiverr for. And it’s like 10 seconds long. Don’t do those. You can do those when you have a million subscribers and it doesn’t really matter when you were trying to grow a YouTube channel. Don’t do those at the beginning of your videos.
Don’t do it.
In fact, if you have to do it anywhere, do it after the 10, 15, second intro, after that, like a little bitty blip, and even then I would never, ever, ever have it lasts more than three seconds. That is too long. People will just leave. That sounds a little silly, but they do. They’ll just stop watching your I
don’t do those when somebody hits play and like click your thumbnail, that click the title or whatever, they should see the video starting. Boom. They’re into the content.
All right. It’s time to talk about the one rule now for your intros.
Actually there are two rules, but it kind of rolls up into one.
I’ll separate it out anyways. So the first mini role is. It has to confirm the title and thumbnail. As in somebody scrolling YouTube, they see the title, they see the thumbnail and like, Ooh. Okay. I think I want to watch that.
They click the video. Those first 10 seconds should confirm the title and thumbnail it. People should know. Oh, yep. I clicked the right video. I’m going to learn about this. She’s going to talk about this. This is what I want to watch. This looks like the video for me. I was correct. And clicking on the title and thumbnail.
I was correct to click on the title and thumbnail. Now you can also hear a little bit of a different strategy in there, and that is teasing, right? You don’t necessarily need to answer the question of the title and thumbnail in the first 10 seconds. No, no, no. You just have to. Affirm the viewer that that is what this video is the first 10 seconds you really want to confirm that’s what this video is based on the title and thumbnail
And the second part of the rule is, has to be less than 15 seconds period. No, no, no. Arguing with Pete out there. Key and you know, it’s eight seconds, even better, even better. It has to be quick and snappy. If you talk fast. Good. If you talk slow, talk faster just for your intros, you have to get people into the core content. The bullet points, the subtopics, whatever the video is about.
At that 15, second Mark or sooner you have to. As you’re doing it wrong. I really do mean that everybody agrees with me. I didn’t make this up either, by the way, I’m following this advice from Darryl eaves and Tim Schmoyer nickname. And it’s a bunch of these people, they all say the same thing. And guess what?
Every time. I have personally tried to veer away from this and be clever or creative and have a cinematic intro. It bails. The watch time goes down every single time. So just do it. That’s the rule. You have to confirm what people clicked on in the title and thumbnail. You bet. Oh yes, it is this video. You have to tell them that. Literally tell them and show them that. And it has to be less than 15 seconds. That’s all.
Done do it.
By the way–bonus points. If you can literally show the end result of the video in the first 15 seconds, that could go a long way.
Even if it’s just B roll footage, right? Like over the A-roll footage, which is a shot of you maybe talking about XYZ and then B roll, no audio, just like a video overlay. If you don’t know what B roll is. I should’ve said that up front maybe, but there we go.
Show the end result.
If this video is about how to make a great cup of coffee, I might shoot 10, 15 seconds of just me. Introducing it and saying, here’s what we’re going to learn in today’s video. You’re gonna learn X, Y, and Z. And at the end of it, I will have taught you how to a, B, C. That was like seven seconds right there. Maybe that’ll be yet, but I would add some B roll of the delicious looking coffee mug, you know, on top of that, as I’m talking about it, I’m showing.
Again, what the title and thumbnail we’re kind of promising. I’m talking about it and I’m literally showing via B roll or does it have to be, be role? It could be a screenshare or whatever. Showing the end result of the video. There’s another quick tip for you.
The Core Content
And actually, before we talk about the core content of the video, I could also say, this is where you could insert a second intro and intro number two, kind of like a second breakfast. The second intro, mainly the first 10 to 15 seconds need to absolutely convince the viewer to stick around. Yes, you clicked on this title and thumbnail. That’s what this video is going to be about. And you are going to learn.
X, Y Z you are going to get this end result. That’s the first 10 to 15 seconds. If you want to, and you feel it’s appropriate and you just need to, you can then jump into a little bit more. Context. After the 10 to 15 seconds, I don’t recommend doing this for like three or four minutes. If anything, you’s like 30 to 45 seconds to better set up the video. You can do that, but there’s one rule to this as well.
You’re going to have to convince people to stick around.
Through that context and needs to be a little bit of foreshadowing. It needs to have a little bit of teasing. You should still be reminding people why they need to watch the rest of your video. You need to talk about what they’re going to learn, the end result. You need to do that. Even in intro number two.
Maybe I should call it the contextual intro. You have the short and sweet intro that tells people yep. You clicked on the right video. And then you could have a little bit more time. Setting up the topic a little bit more context, et cetera.
So whether or not you do the second intro. After your 10 to 15, second thing, it’s time to dive straight in to the topic at hand.
What is this video about?
This is where you go back to your outline. You have your topics and subtopics of the video, and you’re just, boom, you start talking about it. You start the screen, share you start whatever you’re teaching, whatever you’re talking about, you hit your topic, you dive right in. No wasting time. Boom.
Okay, let’s talk about a few technical things related to this. This is where people’s opinions are going to get a little crazy and there’s no right answer to what I’m about to tell you. Got it. Good.
I prefer zero silence in my videos, unless it’s a very intentional silence.
Like I’m, I’m doing a joke and that requires two seconds of silence or something like that. If it’s not a joke, it’s not intentional. I edit my videos to have very little dead time. I’ve only had a few people complaining that you’re going too fast. I wish he would slow down, but there’s actually a much bigger purpose than that. I want people to feel engaged and just really like they have to pay attention. I don’t know, maybe that makes me immoral. Maybe I could teach things better, but quite frankly, if you don’t have anybody’s attention, you can’t teach them anything. And so that forces people to stay tuned into the video.
Just a little bit more. It’s not going to be a game changer, but editing out silence, making it just boom sentence. Boom. Sentence, like literally very, very little silence. It will keep people more engaged to the video, which increases watch time. And make the videos a little bit shorter, but we’ll increase watch time and keep people more engaged now.
Again, that’s just my opinion. That works really well for me and my brand. It also takes a little bit more time in the editing process to go through and like, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. But it is very snappy. You don’t have to do that. That’s just my opinion.
And in fact, For you and your topic, you may not actually see much more engagement from that.
Maybe your audience is around for longer-form content, or maybe they just aren’t as attention-starved as my audience. I don’t know, but I would suggest cutting out a lot of the silence, even if you just don’t, you cut out all of it. Like I do.
Experiment with making the core content or actually your entire video, the core content snappy this point, boom, onto the next point. This point, boom, onto the next point. Don’t waste any time, even if it makes your videos a little bit shorter. It just keeps them engaging.
Camera Angles or Shot Variety
Here is the second more technical core content tip. And again, this was also mostly my opinion, but this is something I would suggest starting with. Get what I like to call shot variety. What that means is if I’m saying about, let’s say 60 seconds worth of content, I don’t want to just be talking on camera for 60 straight seconds.
With no shot variety. What am I you mean by shots here, Pete? I mean, moving the camera. Zooming in a little bit, zooming out a little bit. Uh, changing from which direction I’m being shot by the camera, moving to a different room or a different scene or something like that. Shot variety. Camera angles, moving the camera here or there.
By the way you can also do a little bit of zooming in zooming out or whatever in post production in final cut pro or premier pro or whatever you’re using. But it’s just as easy, if not easier. In my opinion, a lot of times to do it as you’re shooting, this goes doubly for what I’m about to talk about chunking content. But we’ll talk about that in a second. The point
I use a variety of shots. I like to actually, to be honest with you, I do like to do a lot of this in post-production, specifically like a little bitty zoom-ins, so to speak. Just because that is easier for me to shoot. I like shooting as quickly as humanly possible. And then I’ll do that in post-production. Even if it takes a little bit longer, that’s just me and my preference. Totally easy to do while you’re shooting.
But try and vary up the shots, the angles, the zoom ins and stuff like that. Quite frankly, a lot, the more you can do it, the better, not like every single second. Of course, the videos might be a little overwhelming, use your best judgment, but try not to get a straight 30 to 45 chunk. Where’s just you talking to the camera without just a little bit of variation the more you can do that the better again but use your own judgment
Chunking Content
What do I mean by that?
Breaking out how you record into different chunks.
One sentence at a time, one paragraph at a time don’t try and record three to four minutes of a YouTube video all at once. Break it out into different chunks. This has several drastic, positive effects, by the way, if you’re a one tip or a one time, you know, first take only sort of guy or girl, I get that. You’re my people too. I like to do that mostly because I’m lazy, but for the large majority of people chunk
The video’s out separate that one minute spiel that you’re about to say on camera and to like three 20 seconds clips that will allow you a few things. Number one. It’s just easier to record, especially if you’re going on bullet points or you’re going on word-for-word scripts. Like if you’re reading that, especially, it’s easier to deliver that content and make it good.
And by the way, if you screw up like 59 seconds into a 62nd clip. You don’t have to shoot the whole thing over again. You can just do like the chunk you’re working on right now, chunk it out as much as you want to every sentence, every paragraph, every 10 to 15 seconds or whatnot, et cetera. And the last thing that does is it allows you to get a shot variety, easy.
You do this chunk, you move the camera, you do this chunk, you moved the camera, you do this chunk. You move the camera. Rinse and repeat.
And the last thing I want to say about this core content section, the, you know, the. The content of your video, that’s actually focused on your topic.
You still need to kind of be teasing people just a little bit every now and then.
And there are actually some ways to do this that doesn’t feel like you’re just jumping people off, ripping people off, like trying to engage their attention just for the sake of engaging their attention. And that’s this, you can actually talk about, what’s going to come up in the video.
For example, even recording this podcast episode for everything I know several times in here I’ve said, Oh, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we’re actually going to dive deeper on that and just a minute. So be sure to stick around. I didn’t say those exact words, but I’ve done that a lot. And you could do that in your videos. You can, if you have like five bullet points in your video, you could like just tease or mention, or a lot of times just comes up naturally, by the way, you don’t even have to really think about that much. You’ll mention something that you’re going to talk more about.
In a couple of minutes. So you can say that and pro tip and you can just, you know, get a shot variety there, change the angle really quick and be like, by the way, we’re also going to cover X, Y, Z, and just a minute. So stick around for that, something like that. Teasing other future parts of the video that helps increase, watch time as well.
As long as you’re not spending too much on that, by the way, what I just said was literally like two and a half, three seconds. Try and make it quick like that, but that’s just enough to kind of clue people into, Oh, she’s going to cover that. Oh yeah. I definitely want to stick around and find that in this video.
Video Outros
So we’ve actually kind of already talked about this as well. Back when we were talking about the YouTube cards and the end screens. I would suggest this now again, once you have more subscribers, this strategy is going to change a little bit, depending on your call to action, what you want people to do. You want people to like the video?
Comment below the video, subscribe to your channel or watch the next video?
Watch this other playlist, stay on YouTube. Watch time, watch time. Watch that right. In your first couple of years, or, you know, your first couple of thousands subscribers I’d suggest promoting in your outros, the next thing they should watch on your channel or off your channel. Most of the time, I would suggest keeping people on your channel on another one of your videos, for sure. But I would do that for a long time. You can also drop in very small engagement. CTA is like comments or likes as well as subscribes. You can drop that in relatively quickly.
Spend the majority of the time setting up the next video or playlist that you want them to watch now.
We’ve already talked about this, but I’m going to reiterate once again, you should go straight from your content. You’re talking about your core content, your last bullet point into the outro. And then the rest of that video should be no more than like 20 or 30 seconds.
Your entire outro should probably be about 20 seconds. It’s going to be hard to do that the first couple of times you do it, but.
The reason is you want your viewer to see the end screen, or they can subscribe to your channel or click the next videos before they click away. That sounds pretty obvious, but. When do people click away? When you start saying words like this? Well guys, thank you so much for watching. That’s gonna do it for today’s video. If you like this video, please subscribe. People are gone. People have clicked away. You, you can do that. What I just said right there, but.
The end that outro should be like 20 seconds because you can only put the end screens where they’re going to be clicking the video to watch next on the last 20 seconds of your video. That’s why your outros need to be so short. They need to be flowing from the core content then boom. They see the end screen. Now most of the time, my outros are about 25 to 30 seconds. And the end screens come in about.
Three to five seconds after I start my intros. And I never started my intros by the way with, well, that’s it for today or? Well, thank you for watching. No, I will almost always say something about the topic or I will already be talking about the next video. They should watch the next topic. I’ll say something like.
And the next step in this process is dot.dot. Right. What I’m doing is setting up the next video they should watch or the next playlist, or I will sometimes I’ve even just said like, and I actually have these other videos. I will link them in the description below. Uh, on the same subject, like I have some element or videos, but, and so I’ll say like below this video, you’ll actually see some links to additional element or trainings that I have here right on YouTube. Hope you enjoy it.
And then the last five to 10 seconds of your intros should, well, they can really just be anything you want. You can thank people, viewing it. You can ask them to share. You can ask them to comment. You can pose a question. For them to answer in the comments, that might be a little bit more likely for them to actually comment. You can ask them to subscribe, yada, yada, but it needs to be about 20 to 30 seconds. And again, you don’t want to use those words like, well, that’s it for today or thank you for watching. You want to dive right into.
And the next step that I want you guys to do is go over here and click this video. You’re going to learn blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that one. And it’s just amazing playlist. If you love this video, please like, and subscribe. Thank you guys for watching adios. Something about that length then at 1520, 25, 30 seconds, right in there is the perfect YouTube outro.
Video Tools & Resources
So in this chapter, I’m going to be talking about software tools. I’m not going to talk about cameras. That’s going to be in the next chapter, but I want to share with you some free and paid tools.
To not only edit your videos, we’re going to talk about that, but also use for analytics to make the entire upload and keyword research process easier, and a bunch of different software tools.
First, a handy quick-list:
TubeBuddy – free Chrome extension used for TONs of stuff
MorningFame – paid tool for advanced keyword research and analytics
Premiere Pro – Available only with the Adobe CC suite if you have it.
First up is YouTube itself
Especially for analyzing the competition and getting some keyword ideas and exploring different topics to do for your videos. You can absolutely just go to youtube.com and start searching in the search bar. You’ll see that YouTube will bring up some keyword suggestions, some search suggestions.
Either actually keyboards, but they probably look like search suggestions. Those are absolutely things that are getting searched for. You can even go pretty long tail. Would that enter in like four or five words and see what you took comes up with? Uh, the further are, they are up at the top. Right. And those like search suggestions.
Theoretically, the more they are searched for you don’t see exact metrics when you do it this way, but that’s actually a, still a great idea to get a feel of what people are searching for. Just start typing in your topics and see what pops up and you’ll get some ideas right there. Another way that you can kind of use YouTube itself is if you already have a specific keyword or topic or whatever, search for it, hit enter and look at the results that are popping up. Now, this is a very rough way to determine.
Competition. It’s not going to be precise. There’s no way to predict like, Oh, I’m gonna rank, right, right here. Number five. If I do this video now, it’s probably not that easy, but you can get a general sense. If the top 10 results all have millions of followers, those channels have millions of followers. And.
Thousands or millions of views. And it’s just, it just looks brutal competition. Well, it probably is. Now on the other hand, if you see, Oh, some channels are big, they have like, You know, 25,000 subscribers, but there’s actually this other video right here that they only have like 1000 subscribers and they’re ranked three, like above some of these other ones. Well, that might be a little bit easier. Again, there’s no exact metrics here, but you can use YouTube itself.
MorningFame is a keyword research and YouTube analytics tool.
It’s super fancy (but paid).
Personally, I can’t recommend this as a MUST-have, but they do have just enough powerful features to make it worth the cost if you’re taking youTube seriously.
I use both MorningFame and TubeBuddy.
MorningFame’s analytics are definitely helpful–but what REALLY shines to me is the keyword research tool. It’s fairly incredible and easy to use.
I just wish it were cheaper to non-YouTubers 😎
TubeBuddy plus MorningFame. Can’t go wrong.
YouTube video editing software.
So you’re going to hate me, but I am not going to straight up recommend one editing software tool because it depends on a lot of things. What’s your price range. Most of these tools can be pretty pricey. There are a few free ones, but most of the good ones are definitely paid. Some are like really expensive. Some are just like five, 10 bucks a month, summer, a onetime payment. It’s kind of all over the place. And then there is honestly, what kind of computer do you have?
Seriously like video editing, it takes up a little bit of CPU power on your computer. And if you’re just working with like a super old, super cheap laptop, it might be kind of tough to use some softwares over another one. You’re going to have to find one that works. However, I still have some tips for you on video editing software.
I hereby give you permission to spend a few extra days before you choose one. Before you make a purchase.
Doing your research. Don’t just dive into one because Pete said it was good or this other YouTube has said it was good. Do your own research first and why I would our heart rarely ever give this advice, by the way, I’m going to jump in and sort of guy, the reason is it takes a lot of time and energy. To learn how to edit video. And most importantly,
If you start again with a different software, it’s going to take you that much more time. Again, every video editing software is slightly different. They do a bunch of the same things, but they’re going to have different shortcuts, the process of uploading video in there, and then, you know, working with sound or audio or colors or effects or anything like that is going to be a little bit different.
So my recommendation is to choose one. Learn it and stick with it.
I’m going to say that one more time. Choose a video editing software that works best for you. Learn it and then stick with it. That will save you so much time and headache in the long run. You don’t have to relearn anything. You don’t want to do that. No more relearning learn the ins and outs learn the keyboard shortcuts. So you can quickly splice together videos, edit, remove some silence, right there. Zoom in a little bit on this one, clip learned that stuff, but then don’t learn it again.
That is why I recommend you spend a couple of extra days upfront researching video editing softwares. Now let me throw out a few.
Final Cut Pro
Premiere Pro
iMovie
DaVinci Resolve
I use final cut pro or final cut pro X. It is a Mac-only thing, and it’s a one-time payment. That’s the only reason I use it, by the way. It’s because I paid $200 – $300 for it three years ago. And I don’t have to pay anything more ever again. That’s done. It’s a one-time payment.
Final Cut Pro X
It’s Mac only, but it’s really great. I love it. Final cut pro if you’re on a Mac. That’s a really great value. If you plan on doing this for more than a couple of months, great bang for your buck too.
Another big one is part of the Adobe creative suite – premiere pro I’ve used premiere. Before back when I had the Adobe suite, I don’t even have it anymore. And it was great it was extremely powerful is a lot to learn There’s a little bit of a learning curve there, but once you do that and you get the basics down after your first couple of videos, it’s going to be great and you’ll enjoy it. That one is a monthly recurring fee as part of the Adobe suite. You can also get it separately, but it’s still like a monthly recurring fee. And I added, I wouldn’t really attract that anyways. So I just used final cut pro
Now allow me to throw out just a few other names, specifically free options. If you’re on a Mac, you can totally just use imovie. It’s actually more powerful and doable than you think. If you are on a PC. And you can find it. There’s windows movie maker. They actually, I believe discontinue that. And it’s no longer available for download as of sometime in 2019, I believe. But there’s another one that I’ve never used. Don’t get me wrong, but I’ve heard good things about, and it’s called Hit Film.
That’s supposedly free for Mac and PC. Now two other programs that I have dabbled in, I don’t use, but I have tried them out before would be Filmora.
It is actually relatively affordable. It’s cheaper than the Adobe premiere pro like subscription for sure. And it’s actually really great. It’s a little bit more beginner friendly in terms of editing softwares. There’s still a lot to learn. There are still learning curve, but in general, a lot more.
User-friendly than some of the other ones. Including premiere pro final cut pro. I would argue Filmora it’s another good option.
And the last one I want to talk about, I’ve never used, but it’s probably the one that I hear the most about.
And that is DaVinci Resolve. It’s by a company called black magic design. I’m actually looking at it on my computer right now. DaVinci Resolve.
I hear nothing but great things about this. And the weird thing is you can get started for free, I believe, but it can go all the way up to like literally editing Hollywood and movies. Like it’s, it’s that sort of editing software there is from everything I hear.
More of a learning curve, but it’s also more powerful. So that could be something you could check out as well. It’s called DaVinci resolve.
Cameras and Other YouTube Gear
So let’s talk about cameras and gear for a little while. Let me preface everything. I’m about to say with the following use, what you all ready have. Chances are you have a really powerful camera in your pocket, on your desk right now. And that’s is your phone. Your iPhone or Android can be perfectly fine to start with. You. Don’t need to drop dime to drop hundreds of dollars on a fancy DSLR or anything. You could just start with that.
Make it work to your advantage, right? Just it’ll be okay in your pile. Some books under desk and make like a little tripod or spend $20 and get a.
Okay. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars. You don’t, it doesn’t actually make that much of a difference. Now that said that was incredibly important. I hope you take that to heart, but now let’s actually walk through some of the gear you will need, if you really want to take it above and beyond. This is nice to have this isn’t a must have again you can just start with your smartphone
Cameras & DSLRs
Cameras. So, let me be honest with you. There’s one thing that matters more than anything else when it comes to purchasing a DSLR or some sort of camera, and that is auto. Focus meaning when you focus on something and then you move the camera around, closer to the subject, farther away from the subject manual focus cameras you’ll need to literally.
Adjust the focus you’ll have to reach over and turn the dial or press the buttons or get it in and out of focus or whatever. That’s generally not what you want when you’re recording video. Okay. You want auto focus.
A bunch of the higher-end DSLRs and my higher end, I actually just mean medium-end and above, like more than $400.
Almost all of them have this at this point in time in 2020 and beyond. It’s actually tough to find a more expensive camera than $400, like a DSLR that doesn’t have auto-focus I love cannons for the longest time. I loved cannons. And so I recommend. Again, this is going to be outdated, like two months after I record this, but right now,
The cannon M50, that is the model that it’s right around $500 as great dual pixel autofocus, which means it autofocuses like really fast as you’re moving around the subject or you’re moving the camera around. It stays sharp. It stays in focus really well.
And it’s totally affordable.
I used to own a Canon rebel T seven. I, they have like, And every time they release a new version of the Canon rebel, a little bit like a T eight or a T nine or something. It sounds like a Terminator movie, but those actually had autofocus as well. And it was really great. That thing was huge and heavy. I didn’t really like that. And you gotta think about that by the way, if you’re going to be doing like selfie, vlog-style videos, and literally holding your camera, you don’t want to get like a here.
$3,000 camera that is massive and weighs like 50 pounds. That’d be really hard.
The only other official camera recommendation I’m going to make is the one I’m actually using right now. The Sony a6400.
And it’s fantastic. It is a lighter weight. It’s pretty small has great. Autofocus it just works. It’s just fantastic. And.
I’m going to talk about lenses now. It comes, it doesn’t come with it. Sorry. You can buy for the Sony a6400, a Sigma 16 millimeter lens.
If you literally want links to all these, go check out the show notes for this, everything I know episode, it’s gonna be hard to remember any of this, just go there and you can see these and I’ll show it to you and you can click on the links or whatever that lens is incredible for the price. I think it’s $300, which it sounds like a lot. If you’ve never done.
Before. Oh my gosh. That’s on the cheaper end of lenses. It’s insane how much you can spend on that sort of stuff. But that $1,000 camera plus that $300 lens is cool quality. You cannot get a better result from $1,300. You can’t period. I don’t care who you are. I don’t know how skilled you are. That is the perfect combo for that price range. Yes, you can absolutely go by that higher end canons or even the higher end Sony’s or Nikons for that matter and by great lenses. But it’s going to cost you a lot more money.
So my official recommendation, if you’re looking to spend some money on a camera is to go cannon M 50, I’m just using the kit lens. That means the lens that comes with the camera. When you buy it. It’ll be like an adjustable one where you can zoom in and zoom out a little bit. It’s not going to be the best lens ever, but it’s going to be fine. And that’s gonna set you back like $500 total.
Roughly, maybe that’ll change again from the time you’re listening to this, but it’s right in that price range. If you’re going to spend a little bit more go with the Sony, a 6,400 and that Sigma 16 millimeter lens, that combo right there is just. Hmm. Picture perfect quality
The last point is if you want to get more information on great camera gear, I’m going to recommend Sean from think media. If you just search for anything related to camera gear on YouTube, chances are he’s going to be result. Number one or two, that guy has 1.3 million subscribers at this second. And he has videos are just great they’re fantastic think media when you see that name pop up when you see sean think media pop up watch those videos when it comes to gear the really great and they’re really helpful
Microphones
So I’m gonna make a very strong argument here. That audio specifically microphones is what we’re talking about here. Is way more important than you tubers realize you might think, Oh, well it’s not just a podcast is YouTube. There’s also video. No, no, no, no. You have to have good audio or at least listened to BL audio, meaning people can understand you. It’s not super quiet.
Like you recorded that a decent volume, right? A decent level. And so a microphone is actually really important again. If you are just using your iPhone, just use your built-in Mike. You’re fine there. But if you’re using a DSLR specifically, those built-in microphones are generally speaking. Absolutely terrible.
Any of their on-camera microphones, meaning it literally attaches to your DSLR. You plug it into your microphone, Jack. And then you use that some require batteries, some will run off of the power of the camera, the camera battery. There’s a bunch of different things you can do here, but an on camera.
I think that they’re actually a shotgun mics. Most of them are boom mikes. Road is a great brand. You can also get cheaper ones totally. But something that you can literally attach to your DSLR. Boom. There you go.
And the other option, you can get a lavalier mic...as in a big chord with a tiny little microphone that clips onto your shirt. You know what I mean?
I run it up through my shirt, touches my chest. And I attach it to my, my collar and it plugs into my camera. I like this option the best I don’t mind. That you can literally see like my little lovelier microphone. I don’t care. I don’t think my audience cares either. If you care about that, then don’t do that. But I’m totally fine with it. I get a little bit more flexibility and.
Which direction I turn making sure I can still be heard and et cetera, et cetera. That’s just easy to, I don’t have to worry about batteries either. Like that for me is the way to go. The third option is to have an external. Sound recorder, audio recorder, and then splice it together with the video and post production. If you’re new to YouTube, I don’t recommend doing this. Spend a little bit of money and get the cheapest lavalier microphone on Amazon. You can get one for like $20 or less. The one I have, I think is $30. Now that’s a steal. That’s a steel, it’s a steel to not have to worry about your audio. You can just plug it in.
Clip it onto your shirt or something like that. And then go, I don’t recommend external audio recorders, unless you have a little bit more budget to play around with and you have some advanced. Editing skills to be able to combine that audio with the audio from the video, like splice those together and, you know, make it sound good. That’s actually a little bit tougher. I don’t recommend that for new YouTube.
Tripods and Stands
There are a ton of different directions. You can go with tripods depending on your style of video. What kind of videos are you producing? Is that for the blog? You know, you’re holding a camera, walking around with it all day. You might go with Pat Flynn’s switch pod or a Joby gorilla. I don’t remember what it’s called. Just search gorilla pod or gorilla tripod or something on Amazon. It’ll pop right up.
Those are very flexible. You can set those on a desk and put your camera on it, or you can kind of fold it up, right. And you can walk around with it like a selfie stick. They kind of serve both functions, their search for a gorilla pod. I think it’s called switch pod from Pat Flynn. That was a little bit more pricey, but it’s really great from what I’ve heard. There’s one option.
Just a normal camera tripod that will maybe wedding photographers use or whatever. Get a medium sized one that you can put on your desk, but can also go a little bit taller. It may not be like seven feet, like a full on camera tripod, like super tall, but it’ll be a little bit more flexible than just a desktop tripod. For example, the Joby gorilla pod and the switch pod, they don’t go taller. You can’t adjust that. It’s meant to be either a desktop or selfie stick.
But if you get a medium tripod, you can actually kind of adjust it up or down the height a little bit better. I tend to use that. And the last thing, especially if you’re doing anything at your desk or on an office, like I am, that’s the large majority of my YouTube videos is to get some sort of desk Mount.
You just kinda have to go look up what it is. I’m not even trying to tell you. It’s basically like a stand that attaches to your desk or to any poll whatsoever really, and is extremely easy to move around and bend and tighten and loosen a friction arm and go look that up on Amazon actually have one of those. That’s what I use for YouTube. Most of the time.
Video Lighting
Lighting. And this time just talking about my favorite subject ever, and that is lighting. It’s so crucial. You understand how to light yourself for videos? It’s actually really simple, but most people just don’t know. So a few things. Let’s talk about the gear first and then actually leave you some strategies and tips for lighting after I do that. So you can spend thousands of dollars on video lights, or you can literally spend like,
$8 at home Depot. Here’s what I recommend. Grabbing a light you can afford. Oh, duh, I kind of get that. No, seriously, don’t worry about super fancy lights. You can get by with any sort of lights. Just look for a few different things. Number one white light. That sounds really obvious, but there’s not one color of white.
There’s actually a scale it’s called the Kelvin scale, the kale Kelvin light scale. And it pretty much just means warm color, like yellowish orange, just light or cool. Temperatures like blue, bright blue lights. And there’s a scale in there.
I suggest something maybe right in the middle, but a little bit on the cooler side, a little bit more blue.
Yellow right. You can go to home Depot or Lowe’s or something like that, and find really nice light bulbs that you can also buy and you can even purchase like clamp lights. Like these are work lights, you can find in the hardware section at home Depot, they have like little clamps and you can clamp it in anywhere. You can clamp it to your desk. If you’ve got a chair in the corner. Part of a wall that sticks out even, I don’t know, you can put one of these like six, $8 light bulbs in there into these clamp lights and then boom, you have some lighting.
I also recommend going on Amazon. And searching for ring lights.
Those are generally really great, but you can spend anywhere from 50 to a hundred bucks. And get like a pretty cheap ring light it’s literally in the sake of a circle a ring by the way and if you want you can even mount your camera right there in the middle of the ring that’s what’s kinda cool about them but even if you don’t mount your camera there you can set your ring light anywhere and that’s that’s generally great as well you generally don’t need batteries for those either or light bulbs it’s led led is actually really great for lighting youtube videos
And as we switch to talking about strategies for lighting and sort of the little worth mentioning. Uh, natural light the window you want the window windows were great. Natural light is absolutely fantastic. It makes you look beautiful as long as you know how to. Position yourself in the camera in regards to, you know, said window.
Now that said, let’s talk about the strategy. What you want is the light coming towards you. It’s important to have a background light as well, by the way, but it shouldn’t be like the brightest thing. If you are recording yourself and there’s a big, bright window behind you. That generally looks absolutely terrible. However, the opposite is also true. If you have the window.
In front of you as you’re recording. So you can’t see it on camera. Like the window is lighting you your face and there’s no light whatsoever behind you. And it’s super dark back in. Also look a little bit funny. You have to have a little bit of a balance. And you can go to Google and search for three point lighting technique.
That’s super fancy. What that really just means is it’s important to have a big light source, preferably like a window natural light, or, you know, your, your actual, your ring light or whatever in front of you. Off to the side, generally like 45 degree angle, not right in front of your face. And a little bit of background light. This could be like a lamp on, in the background or.
I went to Meijer, or you can go to Walmart and buy those like little tap lights that you just like click they’re like little circles. I think $9. I gotta pack a three of them. You can just put those behind you in your scene or set up or whatever and click those on and off really easily. That’s a very cheap way to get some background light.
And the last part of this lighting strategy is to diffuse or bounce. The light. If you have a $50 light you bought on Amazon, or you go to home Depot and you buy one of these bulbs and you use a clamp work light or whatever it is, you don’t want to put it like four feet away from your face, just blaring straight on you. You’re going to see it. That looks absolutely terrible. There are two things you can do.
Number one, you can diffuse the light. You can go on Amazon and buy a light diffuser. They come in all shapes and sizes, depending on what your light is. Or you could be, you know, you can hack it with a shower curtain. A clear shower curtain is actually really good for diffusing light and fact, that’s what I’m using right now for all my YouTube videos. I have a pretty powerful 18 inch ring light that I bought on Amazon years ago.
And it wasn’t, it’s super bright and it’s powerful and it’s great looking light, but it wasn’t defused at all. And so it looked horrendous. I got a shower curtain for $3 at home Depot. I folded it a few times and I just kinda like, hang it up in front of my ring light and it diffuses it. It makes it a softer look. It’s almost like a glowing look.
That is the light. Do you want, now there’s another tip. If you just have. If we’re just using like a lamp or you don’t have a shower curtain. Nearby or whatever you don’t spend money on any of that stuff. Turn it around and bounce it off something. Preferably something white by the way. But if your walls are light enough color, then they actually might look fine point that lamp or light or whatever at the wall. And then let it bounce off a wall and hit you.
And by the way, you can also go to Walmart and buy two or $3 foam white boards. It’s next to the crayons. Generally the big white pieces of foam. Really really thin they cost like two or $3 foam whiteboard. If you put one or two of those, like. Uh, on a wall or standing next to a desk or propped up against the chair or whatever, and you bounce really strong light off of that. That can actually look really great as well.
No, I’m not going to go much further into the lighting because it’s hard to talk about and audio and you just got to see it in action. So I actually recommend going to YouTube and looking up YouTube lighting, just watch any number of videos. All of them are pretty decent. That’s a pretty competitive.
Topic for, you know, you tubing, YouTubers, and go find one from Peter McKinnon, Peter McKinnon has a beautiful, beautiful videographer and utuber, and he has some really great like hacking together awesome looking light and like how to do it and position it and bounce it off a wall or whiteboard or whatever. He has some great videos. So go check that out. Peter McKinnon on YouTube.
Other Gear
Let’s transition into talking about some other gear that you might need, some miscellaneous, various stuff you might found useful. Well, first of all, uh, camera batteries. You might have one or two of them. Camera batteries are those things you don’t want to be like right in the mood, the recruit, a record, a video, and then be like, Oh, I don’t have any battery power. Oh, let me just let that charge for two hours. And then I’ll jump back in. That can be super annoying. So make sure to either charge that camera battery beforehand, like in advance the day before several hours before.
Or go ahead and buy like one or two of them and just kind of keep them around fully charged as best you can. That can actually be really useful and pretty cheap. By the way they also make chords for most of the DSLRs that I’ve talked about, the canons of Sony’s where you can plug it into the wall. So you don’t have to put batteries in it at all. It literally looks like a battery with a cord attached to it and you can plug it in. You can go buy one of those on Amazon fairly easily.
Another one. I’m going to talk about his memory cards. Oh gosh. Video, big file sizes. Especially if you’re recording in 4k. Oh my goodness. Huge file sizes. You want to have a memory card where you don’t have to like keep deleting stuff like every couple of minutes or every hours? At minimum at minimum, I think you should get a video card of at least 32 gigs, preferably 64. And beyond honestly, you can do like a couple of hours of shooting on those and not have to delete anything, not have to move anything. You don’t have to think about it. It’s worth.
The money and they’re cheaper than they ever have been in the history of videography, by the way. So go get a decent memory card.
Now in that same breath, we’ll also talk about storage, like your computer storage, storing video files on your computer. Go and grab an external hard drive. I actually have an external SSD, not a hard drive. It’s a little bit faster and more expensive. But I hold all my YouTube videos on that. And in fact, I edit them from that external storage, the external SSD storage. However, I also have an external hard drive, which is way cheaper and a lot more storage. Like three terabytes is the one I have.
Where I archive stuff. So I delete some video by the way. I’m not one of those people that keeps every single footage of every single video I’ve ever done, but I do keep a lot of it and I will transfer it over to that big bulky three terabyte, external hard drive, just for archiving purposes. And then I don’t leave anything on my computer.
It slows down your computer for the long run. And I just don’t do it. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. So I archived stuff on the T three terabyte hard drive and my working hard drive is really an external SSD.
So there’s only one more tool I want to recommend. And that is a piece of white paper. Pete. What on earth are you getting on about one of the most underrated ways to make your videos look really, really good. Is to set a custom white balance. And if you don’t know what white balance it means, it means your camera. We talked about the Kelvin scale of warm light versus cool light.
Your camera setting, a little thing called white balance, a number, uh, setting, trying to decipher what is actually white. So if you have like a bunch of. Uh, yellow looking lamps on you. That’s what you’re using for light. Your video might look super yellow, but you can actually see change the white balance setting.
And it’ll actually make it look less yellow. And this is the same. The opposite is true too. Like I have my ring light, which is really, really cool light and I can actually adjust my white balance setting on my camera. To make it look a little bit less blue, a little bit less awkward there I’d get like as close to real life color as possible. You might be surprised how easy it is just by setting a custom white balance.
And most cameras smart, uh, smart phones. I don’t know about to be completely honest. I don’t know if you can set custom white balance. Maybe you can’t, I don’t know, but the Sony a 6,400 or the cannons or the DSLRs or any of that stuff. They will have a feature where you can literally take a picture.
And you’ll hold up a white sheet of paper and it will set the white balance for you. You don’t have to like play around with it. You just hold up a piece of paper in front of your camera, like roughly where you would be standing or sitting or whatever you’re filming is. You can set your custom white balance right there. You’d be surprised how much that as to a video looking great. That is a super underrated strategy and all you really need is a white thing. It doesn’t have to be a piece of paper. Really. I use my white foam boards that I mentioned a few minutes ago, but a white piece of paper works great.
Repurposing Content, i.e. YouTube for Non-YouTubers
This chapter is primarily for those of you who aren’t like, I’m a full on YouTube.
YouTube is my number one marketing strategy to grow my on my business or whatever. I’m a, you tuber. That’s what I’m trying to do by the way that’s been me in 2020, YouTube has been my primary growth strategy. That’s what I’ve been working on. It’s been going really well. I’m really happy with it.
If you’re not that person, if you’re just wondering, like, I’m, I’m primarily a blogger. I really just want people to come back to the blog and I’m going to grow my SEO, traffic and yada yada, or even a podcaster. Totally cool. You can still take advantage of YouTube as a marketing platform now. Obviously.
Uh, the better you can make your content, the videos, the intros, the core content, the outros, everything we’ve talked about, the titles thumbnails, the better period. Everybody should be trying to do that. However, there are some benefits you can still get, even if you don’t do all of that. That’s what this chapter is about.
Embedding YouTube Videos in Blog posts
First, I don’t want to give you any hard and fast data. Please don’t tell anybody I told you this, but I believe YouTube videos can be a great way to boost your Google SEO traffic, not to the YouTube video, but to your blog and vice versa, by the way. Yes. I think you could easily make some videos as in you don’t have to do all the fancy editing, just minimal editing.
You know, the more you can control as you record the lighting, the sound, the microphone, the camera, the easier the editing process will be for sure. But. Embed that in your blog content and link back to it from your YouTube video, of course in bed, like it goes both ways. And by the YouTube video on your blog posts, link to the blog post from the YouTube video.
That is just one more link out there on the internet. That points to your blog posts, first of all, but also tells Google what your blog post is about. No, that is not like a super solid backlink. That’s going to automatically make you rank because of link juice per se. No, of course not, but that is one more way to help Google understand your content, which is what needs to happen. If you want to rank for anything, the keywords you’re targeting in search.
So, what can you do? Produce your blog content record a five minute video on your phone. Upload to YouTube, try and make a good, by the way. It’s not going to be as helpful if it’s just. Absolutely terrible. No, I would never tell you to just put out terrible content, try and make it good, but it doesn’t need to be as heavily edited.
You can push out one takes as an, I just hit record. I talk for five to 10 minutes and then I press stop. And then I upload to YouTube. You can still do that, especially with the knowledge you already have after listening to this podcast episode on title. Thumbnail. And then the first 15 seconds and then the outro.
Right. And just getting your cards and end screens that takes very little time and it’s totally great marketing to grow your YouTube channel, as well as just grow the video, help the video do better at which adds value to your blog posts. So the point is. Yes, you can get by if you’re not just trying to primarily be a utuber by producing a little bit more simple videos as in less.
Editing less. Post-production. Again, try control the lighting and the sound and trying to make the content good. Like do some outlining beforehand. Just so you know what you’re gonna talk about, et cetera, et cetera, but it doesn’t have to be super well edited. Not nearly as much as if you’re just, you know, I’m going to be a YouTuber, use that embedded in your blog post, and then link back to your blog posts from the YouTube video description.
YouTube for Podcasters
YouTube for podcasters. Just for a second. Let me just say this. Yeah. You’re more than welcome to use those tools out there in, in, in Atlanta that will just automatically put your podcast on YouTube. With like a static image. I hate those personally. And maybe some people listen to that and maybe they don’t, that’s not really what does best on YouTube, but luckily there are actually a few.
Fairly simple things you can do to make those podcast episodes and do better YouTube videos. Number one, split them up, even if you’re just going to be using that static image, which I still argue is terrible. But even if that’s just you split it up and not know 60 minutes, YouTube videos. If you can split that up by topics, first of all, that might help, that might allow you to target some keywords, not like your entire podcast episode, if it’s like an hour long.
Uh, split it up into sub topics and get niche, get like 10, 15, 20 minutes onto one of these YouTube videos. You split it up. That’s one thing you can do. The next thing you can do is have video that accompanies your podcast. Maybe that just means buying a web cam and recording yourself as you record your podcast. And just put that on YouTube. That’s another great option. Same thing to me. He said, if you do interviews as well, like use zoom or Skype or some other tool that allows you to record video as well, Zencaster and squad casts are almost there by the way, they’re going to be releasing a video.
Capture as well as audio and the near future, but they’re not quite there yet. You can use zoom or Skype. To record video as you’re recording the audio for your podcast and just put that on there. It doesn’t even need to be highly edited video. Just like we talked about for bloggers, you can just record yourself talking.
Record yourself, recording your podcast and just put that video. On YouTube and split it up. Try not to do like an hour long interview where you cover a bunch of different subtopics, like try and make it a little bit more specific. And topical split it up into 15, 20, maybe even 30 minute segments.
Marketing Your Videos
Honestly, this is going to be a fairly short chapter. Do you know why, especially targeting search in YouTube? There’s not a whole lot special that you probably don’t already know when it comes to promoting your videos. After you hit publish, there are a few things, and we’re going to talk about those, but it’s not like.
Another magic ingredient for the most part, it’s knowing how to target search terms on YouTube, which we’ve already talked about how to produce that good engaging content that keeps people watching and. It’s just good. In general. We’ve already talked about that as well. What now, after you hit publish, there’s a few things I want to talk about, but you’ve already heard of these before.
View Velocity
However, before we talk about that, we have to talk about something called velocity. I don’t really know why they call it this, but a bunch of tools like morning fame or to buddy. It doesn’t exactly call it this, but it’s basically velocity. What that means is the first 48 to 72 hours. How many, how has it taken off?
How’s it doing? Right. YouTube loves to see some positive signals if you will, to their algorithms in the first couple of days, even the first couple of hours. So if you’re going to be marketing your videos, promoting your videos to an email list, social media, yada yada, stuff like that to your existing subscribers.
Do it heavy in the first couple of hours in the first couple of days. That’s consent again. There’s no hard data that anyone can produce as far as I’ve seen. There’s no hard data, but the suggestion is that can influence the YouTube algorithms to start showing your video to more people view velocity, video velocity, as in how much engagement and views are you getting in the first couple of days?
Okay, that said, let’s talk about marketing it, promoting it. You already know all this, share it on Twitter, create pins on in pin, on Pinterest, linking directly to your, you could YouTube videos. You can totally do that. Embed your YouTube videos in your blog, post on your website. If you have one.
Share it on social. Um, or what else? Just tell your friends about it. Send an email to your email list, share it in any private communities. You’re a part of, this is very standard promotional techniques for podcasts, YouTube videos, blogs. It doesn’t matter. This is all the same. You just want to do it. As soon as you’ve hit publish on that video, don’t wait three or four days and then start promoting it. Do it ASAP.
Right. When you hit, publish and schedule them out in advance. Go ahead and share on Twitter, share on Facebook, go ahead and create a pin and pin it on Pinterest. Try it and get those views early on in the first couple of hours. And the first couple of days. That can, not that it will, but it can send great signals to the YouTube algorithms. But other than that, I don’t have a whole lot more to say on promotions.
Getting on other people’s podcasts doing collaboration’s I’ve seen that. Advice given route and a bunch of YouTube circles, like do collaborative videos. I personally think that could be great, but that’s definitely more time consuming. And more of an advanced strategy. Once you really have a following on YouTube and you have some existing subscribers, then you can do more collabs and that’ll be a lot easier to get your foot in the door with other creators or whatnot.
And until you get to that point, I don’t know if it’s worth your time. It might be more work than what you get in return. I’d focus on your own channel for the first couple of thousand subscribers. That’s just me. Other people disagree with me on that one. That’s just my opinion. But in general, promote your videos, social and email lists embedded on your website, share it with groups, ask people to watch it and watch the whole thing. Even tell people like, please watch the entire video, cause I’m really gonna share X, Y, Z.
Try and get them to watching more of the video.
No, that’s pretty much it. You’re probably asking, like, what is the magic bullet here to growing my YouTube channel when it comes to marketing? Well, we already covered it and that is. S E O targeting the right topics that are being searched for on YouTube and including those keywords in the title and the description like we already talked about and making sure your title and thumbnail are the best it can be. Right. Increasing your CTR, your click through rate and doing the analytics and figure out like.
Where people are dropping off in your videos and why are they dropping off? How can I increase my watch time? How can I utilize cards and in screens and linking to other videos in the descriptions to get people watching the next video, and then the next video, how can I increase my CTR and watch time?
Those are the marketing techniques on the first couple of years of YouTube, not promotion. Yeah. You totally want to share it. You totally want to post it on social media and the email list don’t get me wrong yet. You should absolutely do that. But just as important, if not more important for growing a YouTube channel in the first couple of years is search keywords, titles thumbnails. The first 15 seconds of your videos.
Cards in screens and linking to other videos of yours increasing watch time. And just trying to keep that click through rate the CTR of your title and thumbnails targeting the right search terms. That is YouTube marketing.
YouTube Lives
So give me just one more second of your time for this marketing chapter to talk about YouTube, live going live on YouTube. I’m not going to give you a ton of tips specific to how to do a live stream because honestly that’s a whole nother everything. I know, podcast episode, it is, it’s a whole different skill set. It requires a different type of preparation and yada, yada, the only thing I’ll say is.
I actually had really good results from my YouTube lives. Even early on before I got a little bit fancier with live streaming software and stuff like that. First of all watch time. If you’re gunning for watch time on YouTube and you do like an hour, an hour and a half, two hours on a live stream, that’s that can add up really quickly. Even if you only have five to 10 people on the live stream.
So I use this, I did them just about once a week for a couple of months. They’re not really that much. Maybe like once every two weeks for a couple of months. And I love doing them. They required no editing, which for me, it was like, Oh, sweet. I don’t have to edit the video. I can just go live on YouTube. It’s generally not a YouTube video. Quote, unquote.
I’m gonna say that again. A livestream is unedited. So it’s not that your typical YouTube video, but it doesn’t have to be people understand that when you go live and they’re watching a replay of a live stream, it’s not going to be highly edited and that’s okay. Not only two little tips right here and that I’m not going to talk about live streaming anymore. Number one would be to go learn how to live stream.
That sounds stupid and obvious, but I’m going to point you to other people go watch Pat Flynn and his stuff on live streaming. Really, really, really, really, really great tips and tutorials coming from him recently in 2020. And number two at the very beginning. As soon as you’re recording for livestream, announce that you will do jump links or timestamps. We already talked about those a little bit.
In the description below. Because you’re not gonna probably jump into the content right away when you’re doing a live stream, but just right when you hit record. So they’re like, hello everybody. If you’re watching this on the replay, be sure to check out the timestamps in the description below this video, and you can jump to where the action starts, or you could jump around to the different topics, stuff like that.
Okay. Let’s move on from live streaming. I think it’s great, but I’m not gonna talk anymore about it. On this episode, go get some tutorials elsewhere for that stuff. Let’s move on.
Where You Can Learn More
I’m gonna point you to other people, other people that you should go follow. In fact, these are other YouTubers, but you can also find some podcasts and blog content with these people as well. And their specific specifically people channels. I’m not pointing you to other courses.
Products or free. It doesn’t matter. I’m not pointing you to that. I want to point you to the people. And some of these people have free courses and paid courses and memberships and masterminds, and they’re trying to sell you on stuff. Every single one of these, I guarantee it. But then again, so do I try and sell you on stuff every now and then I want to point you to the people that you can go take their free content and they’re paid content. You can find which ones resonate with you and which ones you like to learn from.
Number one, Nick Nimmin. I actually found Nick podcast. First, he repurposes a bunch of his YouTube content for the podcast. And specifically, I believe, I can’t remember what it’s called.
Oh, comments over coffee. That’s what it is. That’s the name of the podcast. He basically answers. His YouTube comment questions via podcasts. I actually found that really helpful. I enjoy Nick’s stuff. I actually love the podcast more so than I actually love his YouTube tutorials.
Another one I’ll talk about is Cathrin Manning. She used to be called the content bug. I actually found her on YouTube when she was the content bug. And they’re not as snazzy as some of these other YouTubers, like.
The editing is, is great, but it’s not anything fancy, but I just resonated with her. And the way she talked about YouTube and growth and stuff like that. She has been great for me.
The next is Tim Schmoyer.
Video creators is the name of his brand and his company. He’s great. He seems like a totally legit guy. I’ve met him at a conference before and we’ve chatted for just a little while. Great guy.
Next: Peter McKinnon. He’s actually one of the bigger YouTube offers in the photography and videography space. Half of his videos are on photography, but he’s just, he’s just really fun to watch. And he also has some great tutorial videos on lighting and camera gear and stuff like that as well.
Definitely worth checking out a little bit more of a vlogger as well these days, but Peter McKinnon still great.
The next one is Think Media. I already mentioned Sean from think media. They do really good gear videos reviewing camera’s comparing cameras and camera mics and lighting equipment.
Their stuff is some of the best on YouTube for that. Just go search, think media, or just go to the show notes for this podcast episode. You’ll see all of these right there.
Another one is Derral Eves. This guy specifically when it comes to like thumbnails and titles and a little bit on the. Creating content and SEO keyword research side Derral’s stuff is really fantastic.
Last, but not least one or two more Dusty Porter. I particularly have not been able to follow him. I just, his stuff doesn’t resonate for me, but other people have told me like, Oh, I love dusty Porter. He also has a YouTube podcast as well. I don’t like that one quite as much, but a bunch of people love him and his advice is still solid. So go check him out if you want. Let me go through those again.
Let’s sum up this YouTube growth chat with the big action items, and what to do now.
First, I want you to remember the two big metrics that you should be gunning for, especially in the early days of your channel. Watch time and CTR. Click through rate your title and your thumbnail. It has to be clickable. And the first 15 seconds of your video, skipping ahead a little bit. It absolutely needs to clue people in and confirm.
What you are promising those viewers when they clicked on your title and your thumbnail that end watch time, get people into more of your videos, put them in the comments, link to them in the comments, leave them in the video description. Use YouTube video cards. Use end screens. Be very intentional in your video outros. Hey, the next step in this video is to go check out this other video, whatever be intentional about watch time, getting people into more and more of your content.
And also just user retention, viewer retention. Getting people to stick around, not click away from your video. You could do this by a, just in general, making the best content you possibly can be using different camera angles. Like. Got shot variety. As I like to call it, making sure to use the first 10, 15 seconds of your video to really drive home what the video is about and what the main takeaways are from your video. So that they’ll keep watching. Maybe you remove some of your silence to keep things a little bit more engaging. I tend to remove all dead air period from all of my videos to make it more engaging.
In increase, watch time CTR and watch time. That’s like the big overall takeaway number one.
Very closely related and talking about CTR, your titles and thumbnails. I can’t overstate how important they are. It’s incredibly important. To learn, go back and analyze what are my click through rates of these videos? Like what’s performing well, what’s really not working. How can I make my titles and thumbnails better going forward? And then you can always change them later. You come back.
A month after you publish a video or two months later, make a little note, put it on your calendar two months from now to like go back and check on the CTR and change up your titles and thumbnails with the ones that aren’t working very well, try and increase those. You have to do that. It’s mandatory. It’s one of the most important things you can do to grow on YouTube.
And last, but certainly not least is just to be patient.
Nothing is going to take off overnight. It’s gonna take you 10 to 20 videos to really get in a rhythm and get a streamlined approach to producing videos where you can start to do it a little bit quicker, and they’re going to get nothing but better over time, but you have to be patient. It’s not going to happen in a month or three months or six months, or maybe even a year. You have to be along for this consistent strategy. I recommend starting with once a week, try and do one a week.
And if you have to go to one every two weeks, then fine do it.
You don’t even have to do two or three times a week. Just be consistent and be patient. Be around for the longterm. Try and get better with every single video you do write better descriptions. Write better titles, produce better thumbnails produce better videos. Get faster at producing videos. Get better at outlining and scripting by better camera gear. Just try and get a little bit better. 1% better. With each and every video but it takes patience it really does you gotta be in it for the longterm
My other call to action is if you enjoy this episode or blog post, share it.
Please share it. I would love for you to share it on social media. If you enjoy this and you got value from it, I would actually really appreciate it. Helped me grow. Thank you. I appreciate it. I love you guys. Thank you so much for listening to this entire episode, blog tribe, kudos to you. If you’ve committed this entire episode, man, that was really well done.
Questions or comments on growing a YouTube channel?
Consider WordPress security one of those “hahaha not really important at all” sorta topics…
…until your site gets hack and your content stolen.
it only takes onceSo. frustrating.
WordPress security is no joke, and should be taken seriously by anybody with a site!
This is because hackers keep coming up with new means of compromising websites. It does not matter how large or small your site is, or to which industry domain you belong. And thanks to its g
Consider WordPress security one of those “hahaha not really important at all” sorta topics…
…until your site gets hack and your content stolen.
it only takes once
So. frustrating.
WordPress security is no joke, and should be taken seriously by anybody with a site!
This is because hackers keep coming up with new means of compromising websites. It does not matter how large or small your site is, or to which industry domain you belong. And thanks to its global popularity, WordPress websites are increasingly being targeted by hackers.
If website security is something you haven’t really prioritized so far, it’s time you took action. Website hacking can affect your business in many ways – by lowering your website’s SEO rankings, directing away your traffic, affecting sales and conversions and, lastly, leading to a loss of customer trust and hard-earned brand reputation.
In this article, we have evaluated the best WordPress security measures and shortlisted ten of the most effective ones. :
WordPress security plugins
Website backups
WordPress updates
User credentials
Two-Factor Authentication
SSL certificate
Firewall protection
WordPress hardening
Least privilege principle
Country blocking
Let’s now discuss each one of them in detail.
Tip #1: Install a security plugin on your site
Duh.
Security plugins continuously scan your website for any malware and infections, identify any vulnerable areas on your website, and notify you of any failed login attempts. While there’s always the option of manual scanning of malware, you need to be technically proficient in WordPress to understand how and where hackers can hide their malicious code in your WP installation. Besides, doing this on a recurring and regular basis can mean a considerable investment of both effort and time.
WordPress security plugins like MalCare and Sucuri monitor your site 24/7 for malware threats help you take action by cleaning malware, and offer a host of other security features specially designed for WordPress. If you have a business that is entirely dependent on your online presence, installing the best WordPress security plugin is one of the most important decisions you can make for your site.
Tip #2: Backup your WP files regularly
As an online business owner, you would want your website to be functional 24/7 and for 365 days a year. Hence in addition to a security tool, you also need regular website backups.
How often should you take a backup?
That depends on how often your website goes through any change or how many new customers do you add to your database every day. Backups are available daily, weekly, monthly, or even in real-time, where a backup is initiated each time, there is any change.
Real-time backups are vital for eCommerce or WooCommerce sites. For WP sites, you can opt for paid WP backup plugins like
VaultPress
BlogVault
UpdraftPlus.
These backup plugins automate the entire backup process and store multiple copies of your backup at a safe and independent location. Compared to manual backups, these are far easier to restore through automated workflows on their dashboard.
Tip #3: Update your site
Many of us install plugins and themes on our site that help improve its overall functionality. To ensure that these add-ons work at optimum performance, you should update all your themes and plugins. Apart from them, you should also update your WP version as soon as there is a new update.
Why? Like any software tool, WP updates contain fixes for common bugs and security issues found in previous versions. Keeping your site updated protects it from security vulnerabilities that hackers exploit.
How do you update all your WP components? You can sign in to your dashboard as an admin and install new WordPress updates when available. For plugins/themes, you can view all your installed plugins/themes using the panel and individually update each one of them.
Or, you could use the WordPress management features offered by WordPress security plugins such as MalCare.
Tip #4: Strengthen your login credentials
While this tip seems very obvious, many users tend to take this security aspect lightly and use usernames such as “admin123” and “admin” with passwords like “123456” or “password.”
If you happen to be one of those users, here’s what you should know – you are providing an easy entrance to hackers on your site as such credentials are relatively easy to decode. Hackers deploy bots to guess your usernames using various brute force tactics.
Always use a unique username, but more importantly, configure a strong password that is at least ten characters long and is alphanumeric in nature. Even if you set a strong password, follow a practice of changing your password regularly.
Tip #5: Implement 2-factor authentication
Even though strong passwords are effective, they cannot be the only defense against malicious login attempts. Hence, you need to implement two-factor authentication (or 2FA) for your WordPress login page. With 2FA enabled, when you try to log in, the system sends an additional authentication code on your mobile device to validate the owner.
To implement this, you can install 2FA plugins such as Two Factor Authentication or check if your security plugin offers this as a feature.
Tip #6: Obtain an SSL certificate for your website
Take a look at any website URL and check if it displays the “padlock” icon or is marked as “Secure.” If yes, then it is an SSL-certified website. As a practice, SSL (or Secure Socket Layer) certificate is recommended for every site. This is because SSL-certified websites encrypt the transfer of information to and from the user’s browser to the website server. With encrypted data transfer, hackers find it difficult to steal and then decrypt the information.
While an SSL certificate is mandatory for websites that execute online payments and financial transactions, it can also improve the SEO ranking of your website. Google strongly recommends SSL certification for every site.
To get an SSL certificate for your website, you can either approach your web hosting company or install an SSL plugin like WP Force SSL or One Click SSL.
Tip #7: Set up website firewall protection
Firewalls are the first line of defense against any hacker trying to enter your site. Think of a firewall as a security guard who allows or prevents visitors from entering your premises. Technically, a WP firewall monitors every request that is made to your website and then identifies the “good” or the “bad” ones.
There are primarily two types of firewalls: DNS Level firewalls that route your website traffic through a cloud firewall server or the Application Level firewalls (or plugins) that monitor the traffic only after it has entered your web server. While implementing one for your website, we suggest application-level firewalls as they are popular, easier to configure, and are part of most security plugin tools such as MalCare, Sucuri, and Wordfence.
Tip #8: Implement website Hardening
Based on the techniques that hackers typically use to damage your back-end files, WP has 12 different hardening measures recommended for any website. Here is the list:
Limiting the number of login attempts – to just 3
Implementing 2-Factor authentication
Blocking PHP execution in vulnerable folders of your WordPress installation
Disabling the file editor
Disabling any plugin installation
Maintaining an audit log – to monitor what’s happening on your site
Logging out inactive users automatically
Changing your security keys regularly
Using strong passwords
Configuring alerts for any suspicious logins
Setting up a WordPress firewall
Installing an SSL certificate
Manually implementing each of these hardening measures requires technical knowledge and can be time-consuming. Thankfully, security plugins like MalCare have in-built hardening measures – that can be easily implemented through a central dashboard.
Tip #9: Restrict the number of ‘Admin’ users
Did you know? WordPress allows six different user roles to be created; however, hackers are more interested in hacking into user accounts with administrator or admin roles.
The reason is that admin users have the highest level of authority and rights that allow hackers to have more control over your website.
For this reason, try to restrict the number of users with admin rights for your website, or only assign admin rights to trusted users. For the rest, you can assign user roles such as – editor, author, or subscriber with lower privileges or authority.
To configure user roles, you can use any WordPress management tools like WPManage or WP Remote.
Tip #10: Implement country blocking
Did you know that WordPress allows you to block users from an entire country or region? While blocking multiple countries is not good for website traffic growth, country blocking (or geo-blocking) is useful if most of your cyberattacks are originating from a single country. Some of the leading countries where hackers operate include Romania, Brazil, Russia, and Turkey.
Country blocking ensures that all users, including hackers, from these countries, cannot access your website. You can quickly implement this security trick by installing a plugin like iQ Block Country or IP2Location or use your security plugin’s firewall to do so.
WordPress Security in a Nutshell:
With the global increase in cybercrimes and malware attacks, website security is among the top priorities for any online business owner.
While website security is ever-evolving, sticking to the fundamentals and getting them right is the best place to start. The ten security tips discussed in this article are highly recommended by security experts, easy to follow, and very importantly, can be implemented by even novice users using easily available and specially designed tools.
If you still have any queries or suggestions, please let us know in the comments section below.
“Oh look. Another b l o g.”
That’s probably what the average person is thinking when they land on YOUR website.
The internet is a crazy place now-a-days–and it’s NEVER been more vital to stand out, capture people’s attention quickly, and be memorable.
If you can’t grab your ideal audience’s attention in a positive way–no amount of SEO traffic or Pinterest traffic or snail-mail traffic is going to help you.
Sooo let’s work o
That’s probably what the average person is thinking when they land on YOUR website.
The internet is a crazy place now-a-days–and it’s NEVER been more vital to stand out, capture people’s attention quickly, and be memorable.
If you can’t grab your ideal audience’s attention in a positive way–no amount of SEO traffic or Pinterest traffic or snail-mail traffic is going to help you.
Sooo let’s work on that!
Rachael Kay Albers is…
A hilarious stand-up comic
An INSANELY talented content creator, designer, and branding person
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