434: The Sneaky Tricks Pro YouTubers Use To Grow Their Channel With Zach Mitchem

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today I my friend Zach Mitchum on the show. Now as you guys probably know, I recently hit 100K subs on YouTube and it took me about 2.5 years to get there. But since then, Zach has been helping me with my channel and I’ve grown about 50K more subs in the span of just 2.5 months. So in this episode, we discuss the strategies to grow a successful YouTube channel fast.

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But before we begin, want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are on sale over at SellersSummit.com. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you all probably know me well enough by now to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people.

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And we all, and by all, we mean that everyone eats together and everyone parties together every single night. I personally love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. Now you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room, and help each other with our businesses. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. For more information, go to SellersSummit.com.

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Now I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for ecommerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Postscript specializes in text message marketing for ecommerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash div.

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That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcasts that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:24
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Zach Mitchum on the show. Now, sometimes in life you just get lucky. I met Zach at the Sellin’ Scale Summit last week and we sat next to each other at Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote speech. And that’s when I found out that Zach runs YouTube or helps out with YouTube for famous people like Evan Carmichael, who has a channel with millions of subs. And so this guy’s an expert at YouTube that you never know

02:54
you’re going to meet at whenever you attend one of these events. And what’s funny is I ended up chatting with Zach more than listening to Gary Vee, of all people. Now, Zach runs We Are Video Makers, which is a YouTube strategy consultant. And he’s also the chief social media officer for Seller Universe. And what I loved about meeting Zach was that he was just so open and honest with his knowledge. And I knew I had to have him on the show. So welcome, Zach. How you doing, man? I’m doing great. Thanks for the intro. And thanks for having me on. I’m

03:24
Super pumped. I love your channel all the things that you’re doing and really impressed by a lot of things you’re doing So I’m excited to dig into them a little bit. Cool. Thanks I would love to get your perspective from you know from someone who runs a lot of large YouTube channels But give us a quick backstory first like how did you get into YouTube? And why did I see you at the cell and scale summit of all places? Yeah Yeah, so quick quick version of the story is that I was actually trying to be a physician assistant believe it or not and I found a couple of

03:53
YouTube creators that it just looked fun what they’re doing. I like, this is really cool. So I reached out just wanted to learn more. Um, and the one person out of like the 10 I reached out to, it’s like, well, I’m actually about to quit my full-time job. You know, just making, you know, low to mid six figures doing international sales. like, how are you quitting your job at 50,000 subscribers? Like, well, you know, it’s replaced my income. So I’m just going all in. It’s like, this is crazy. And so got some exposure there, worked with some YouTubers that way. Uh, but it wasn’t really until pandemic hit where like I was studying, I was looking at it.

04:23
I like, I gotta go all in on this. Like the things that I’m doing now as a consultant, they’re okay, but YouTube is just going crazy. And so spent eight months really diving in, spending a lot on courses and getting mentored. And I just reached out to a couple of companies like, Hey, here’s a few things I feel like would help. And I honestly was just sending feedback cause they were local and wanted to help out like, Oh, what do you charge for your service? Like I hadn’t even thought of that so quickly, but together like a little pitch and a working part-time I was making more than.

04:51
the best full-time job I had before college. And so I was like, there’s something to this. And, um, I just did a good enough job that word of mouth. went from, you know, small businesses to larger YouTube creators, to marketing agencies and fortune 500 companies. And it just kind of kept going. Um, and eventually now, um, you know, you mentioned Evan Carmichael. we had him on a while ago and then we’ve really hit it off and just, he’s likes what I’m doing and, I can really use his wisdom, knowledge and all that good stuff. And so we’re, we’re working together now and helping.

05:21
Really my focus, want to help those who have really done well on podcasts do well on YouTube because you already have all the skills. You just need to know how YouTube works and get your message out to the world. And you asked why I was at selling scale. chief social media. So nothing to do with social media. was one talk about social media there though. I was really there to film, to get footage for our social media, to.

05:47
do some interviews. One of the things that we found was actually really helpful. And if you go to more conferences, this was a great thing. We walked the floor and just interviewed people at, you know, kind of lurking back, kind of not engaging as much. And we met probably some of the best connections that way, because we just said, Hey, why are you here? What are you looking for? And just interviewed and it’ll make amazing social media content. But more than that, the connection is there because we are genuinely interested in that person.

06:13
you know, if we could help, we wanted to offer help. If not, hopefully, some of those videos and reach out and help them. Yeah, absolutely. And how did so you actually went all in on this during the pandemic, which is 2020. Actually, I’m just curious how you landed some of the larger clients. Was it? Yeah. Was it a gradual process or? No, it was kind of just accidentally on purpose is the phrase I like to use. Okay. Worked with some smaller clients, and then I had some connections that just had, you know,

06:43
And we were starting with, you know, they had like two or 300 subscribers, helped them 1500, helped them 130,000, helped them 265, got them up to 300. And it just, it was huge jumps. And after that, was marketing agencies sent over some, it was a resume when we were moving to Denver to a marketing agency for a job and didn’t pan out that a couple of months later, like, Hey, we have some Fortune 500 accounts and we don’t have anyone that can handle them. Your resume kind of looked like it would work. Can we, you know,

07:12
do an interview, can you send an update resume? It’s like, I’ve just been word of mouth for the past year or so, so I have, I make a resume. But they’re like, can we just do a test? I’m like, yeah, absolutely. like, you’re literally the only person on the skill level we can find. When can we start? It’s like, nice. Right now, sure. So it’s been huge jumps, but it’s been So what I’m hoping to get out of you today, Zach, you’ve helped people with small channels and you’ve helped people with large channels. So let’s, I want to take it from both perspectives here. So let’s say you’re a brand new person on YouTube.

07:41
Yeah, zero subscribers. What would you recommend that they do to get like their first 10,000 subscribers? Yeah. Yeah. So the first 10,000 really is difficult because not that creating the content is difficult, usually, and this is why like working with people that have a podcast. Usually the hard part is figuring out what your message is, what it is that you want to share with the world. And you kind of go back and forth trying to figure it out. And a lot of that.

08:08
Not that it wastes time, but it just, makes the process a lot slower because one of the things you need to do is train YouTube. Hey, here’s my audience. Here are the people I’m talking to. And so it can continue to share your videos with those people. Cause if you look at your analytics, you know, you’ll see, there’s a place where you can see who subscribed, who’s not. And I don’t care how big or small you are. Most of the people watching your videos are not going to be subscribed. And that’s a good thing because it’s a new audience. And so you need to tell YouTube.

08:36
who that new audience is that you want it to show to. And if you’re creating a video on say e-commerce and then the next day you’re talking about relationships and then you’re talking about like if you’re all over the place YouTube’s confused. And as a big channel that’s okay because it has lots of data. You’ve had a lot of views, it kind of knows your audience and it can kind of find those overlaps. As a small channel you can’t. So you really need to focus in on what’s your message, create a lot of videos sharing that message, better at being on camera.

09:05
There’s kind of stages. That first 10,000, if you’re creating videos that are very search-based, you’re do better. As you get bigger, you wanna get away from those more. But how to do X, whatever it is that your message is, those are going to help because then YouTube knows we’re gonna catalog under this category. And maybe So you wanna be very specific and very niche-focused when you’re first starting out is what I’m hearing. Yeah, absolutely. And you are also recommending being search-based.

09:34
For a little bit. Yeah. That is definitely not where I want you to be, but it’s easier to grow at the start by search based, but you, really want, you want to get out of that place as quickly as possible, but it does help when you’re at zero. When you’re first starting, that can absolutely help. Okay. So walk me through like the search, the keyword research. Yeah. Yeah. So keyword research, there are a lot of tools out there that you can pay for that you can use. The easiest thing that I recommend you do is figure out what it is that you want to talk about.

10:04
go to YouTube and search that thing and try to find videos that have more views than subscribers. If you can find, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care if the channel has 1 million subscribers and it gets 1.5 million views, or if it has 1,000 subscribers and gets 2 or 3,000 views. If that video has more views than subscribers, it’s a good topic. It’s something that people aren’t able to find easily and use that title, a variation of that title, something similar. this will help you get suggested after that. But if it’s also a good search topic,

10:34
If you’re search and you can find it, um, you kind of hit both at the same time. So I added suggested in there. We probably should dive into that later, but keyword research. What’s your tool or choice tool of choice? I love to buddy, um, because of some of the other tools it has, but if you want the easiest to use keyword research, vidIQ is free. I would probably just use the free version of that. I do have the paid version, but I don’t think you need it, especially when you’re first starting. It’s funny. I have the paid version of vidIQ. I didn’t realize that there was a free version. Yeah. Yeah, there is it.

11:04
It’s okay. Both of the analytics that you get, like the scores and things and suggested tags, like the free version doesn’t give you, but you don’t have to have it, especially if you’re just getting started. Yeah, what I noticed is I do a lot of SEO work for my blog and I’ve noticed that the YouTube tools are just very different. They are. They are very much. The keywords are just very broad based. Yeah. And the volumes are ridiculous. They are. And if you compare Google and YouTube,

11:34
SEO a lot of times will be similar, but they’re going to be different. And part of the reason is Google is, is very SEO, very search-based. Like that is its thing. Google does not suggest to you, Hey, you probably want to, want to visit this website next. Like that, that would feel really weird to you. Whereas YouTube, even though it is the second largest search engine on the internet, 70 % of views come from suggested 70 % of the views come from it saying, Hey, we’ve, you know, analyzed all the videos you’ve watched and we think you’ll like this next.

12:03
And you appreciate that as you’re like, yeah, actually I like that. And you’ll watch it. Google doesn’t do that. that’s where you kind of see the differences there. when it comes, well, how do you rank for a keyword then? there any things that you can do to rank higher? Yeah, you can. The problem here, and I’m not saying you can’t do this, but the problem I’ve seen with search based channels is in fact, my first channel I ever grew, I let it die. I tried to let it die, but here’s the moral of the story is that

12:33
It’s search based and so it was slow to grow, but it’s slow to die as well. And so it’s just, it’s plugging it along. I’ve only posted four videos on there in past year. I’ve just kind of, like, I don’t have time for it and it still gets about 21,000 views every month. It’s got, it’s grown from 1800 subscribers to 2800 subscribers in a year without me doing anything. Like I was like, it’ll die. I’d like whatever it’s fine, but it’s grown because that search base is there. So that’s good. Um, but if

13:00
Like the videos that really grow the videos that in fact I had a video on that channel that made me $15,000 before I ever hit a thousand subscribers. And it was suggested. It was getting suggested to other people and that’s how it grew. So you can get ranked for these keywords, you know, making sure that when you’re doing that, that search that has low competition and high search volume, you know, low supply and high demand is a great way to get ranked that way. And as you get views, it’ll bump you up, but it’s, I wouldn’t focus on it.

13:29
It’s not as important as it used to be. Okay. So, but you recommend starting out on search to get some initial traffic. When do you start not paying attention to searches? Yeah, I would say, especially at the 10 K, you really just want to be all suggested as you’re beginning those first couple of videos, doing that search, the way I told you how to do that search will kind of hit both. If you focus solely on using tools like vidIQ, there’s morning fam, TubeBuddy, you’ll get away from the suggested a bit. Um, and so

13:59
when you’re looking for keywords, actually look on YouTube. And that way you’ll rank for keywords, but you are going to learn how to get suggested that way. it’s kind of this balancing act of you’re not starting where you want to be, but you’re learning a couple of skills that I’ll apply later. It’s the basic math that doesn’t really matter as much, but it’ll apply a little bit later. So how do you get mentioned in the suggested? Yeah. So there’s kind of a

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journey with this. First, you want to get suggested on your own content. And like if you look at, know, in your analytics, you can see this, you’ll see where all the traffic’s coming from. You’ll see search, you’ll see browse, you’ll see external suggested. That’s what you want to look at. You want that to be as high as possible. You want it to be your number one source of traffic. And the first thing that you can do to get suggested on your own videos is actually to have thumbnails that are uniform thumbnails that if I see, you know, your thumbnail, Steve, like

14:56
I know it’s your thumbnail. I know that that’s a Steve video because if I like your channel, I’m going to click on that next. And so if you’re training YouTube that, you know, people don’t watch a video of yours after. So for example, um, you could tell people to leave in the video. You could not have uniform videos. So they are getting suggested, but they just don’t know what your video, if people’s behavior is not to watch another video of yours, you’re training YouTube to think.

15:23
people don’t watch multiple of these videos. Maybe it’s a terrible example, but how to unclog my toilet. I’m not gonna watch multiple videos on that topic. Hopefully I’m going to have my problem solved. So those types of channels, YouTube says, okay, they don’t watch multiple videos. If you can train people at the end of your video and you say, Hey, we covered this problem, but the next thing you want to do is actually do this. And here’s a video for that. And they go watch that you’re training YouTube to say, Hey, they watch multiple videos. We’re going to suggest down the side, you know, in their search.

15:53
more of these videos because we’re seeing they’re keeping people on much longer. Okay, so what you’re saying is towards the end of your video, end with like, hey, now that I just taught you this, there’s a lot more to it, go watch this video and you get people to just watch your videos for a long period of time. Yeah, absolutely. All right, and then I guess if you just do those two things, you’ll hit 10K. If you do that, you’re consistent with your content, you know, posting at least once a week and

16:22
I would say focus on one thing, make it 1 % better in your videos. Cause it is that most people don’t have a background in any kind of production or editing. so your first 50, 60 videos, they’re going to be terrible. Mine were, mine were awful. Like I show people sometimes like, man, I still cringe. It’s just, it’s really, really bad. So you’re learning all those things. Um, just be consistent, keep going with it. And you’ll see that once you start getting suggested growth, we’ll start picking up. Maybe that’s at a thousand subscribers. Maybe it’s at five, but.

16:51
it’ll start just climbing. And when that happens, you know, you’re teaching YouTube and you’ve told it that people stay on your videos and you’re doing at least a few things right to be able to get there. How do you get suggested under other people’s videos? Are there any tricks? There are, yeah, a couple of them. Kind of that similar that what I mentioned earlier, finding those videos that have more views than subscribers do that, but find a channel bigger than yours. And same thing, but

17:21
copy of their title. And I know that sounds weird, but you’re linking in YouTube’s mind, these two are the same thing. So let’s test them against each other. And as long as you’re talking about similar things, you don’t have to watch the video. You don’t have to like try to one up that video, right? But if it’s on a similar topic, the title’s the same, they’re linked together. And so other videos that are like that video will suggest your content. And hopefully like the goal is to get suggested behind that one video because it’s, getting a lot of views. It’s a bigger channel than yours as the potential to do it that way.

17:51
And so your goal is to get suggested after that one video. If you can do that, YouTube will suggest you after quite a few more. Do tags matter? They don’t. A lot of people want to say they do, but there there’s a very, very small percentage of time where they do. That is if something is commonly misspelled or a technical term. So if you’re doing some sort of medical video and there’s this.

18:17
Disease that is hard for the algorithm to understand putting something like that in it could help but aside from like things that are commonly misspelled or Like you would think that the algorithm is not really gonna understand when it hears it. It doesn’t really do much Okay, so don’t spend too much time on now throw a couple in there It’s not gonna hurt but it’s also it’s not worth your time to like really meticulously choose which tags go in there. Okay

18:46
Let’s say you want to grow your channel as fast as possible. And I know you work with these large YouTubers who just put out insane amounts of content. What is like a strategy assuming like speed is your main goal? Yeah, so the more content you can post, the better up to one per day. I wouldn’t post any more than one per day because if you see the browse traffic, that’s actually YouTube will have one of your videos in people’s homepages or other places where it’s being suggested.

19:15
post too soon, it’s going to kick that video out and you don’t want YouTube to do that. So say no more than seven a day, but honestly, the best play right now, this wasn’t six months ago. I wouldn’t have said this best play right now is our plus long videos. Um, they do take a little while to take off. Um, give it 60 days before you’re really looking at the analytics, but YouTube can play a lot more ads.

19:43
They can watch a lot longer, getting a lot more watch time and people are building a connection with you better. So if I watch a two minute video, I may or may not watch another video from someone else. But if I watch a two hour video and I watch the whole thing, I’m likely coming back to that channel. And so it does a lot of things right that way. It is harder in some respects to make an hour long video that is that engaging. But if you created, and this is not going to be realistic for a lot of people. If you created an hour long video, seven days a week, every single day.

20:13
Give it four, five, six months and you’re gonna see some crazy, crazy growth. Again, that’s not easy to do and you do need to pay attention to improving things, improving your intro, your thumbnails, all that stuff. But that’s what I’m listening to this probably have podcasts and that’s easy way to hit an hour. But how would you launch like a podcast like channel? Yeah, no, I love that question. So the thing about podcasts is you already have the content, you already have the audience, you already have so much right.

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that you just need to make it work in video form. And so, I mean, one that is going to include recording the video, because I think a lot of people do record the video, but they just pull the audio. They want to be able to see who they’re talking to, but they don’t use it. And so just start using the video one. You do have to make it a little different though, because on a podcast, people are used to the ad at the beginning. you know, getting into it a little slower. Introduce maybe…

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catching people up, introducing things. On YouTube, you really can’t do that. There are a couple of ways you can do this. I’ll give you one example. You can pull a clip from near the end and put it at the beginning, 15 seconds, 20 seconds, coming soon, kind of like a gold nugget, like everyone needs to hear this. Have that, and then really, really quickly, as fast as you possibly can, make sure there’s any context given, but you get right into the value of the interview. So you do have to change things a bit.

21:39
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22:09
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22:37
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22:49
Let me ask you this, Zach, before we started talking, I gave you like a quick 10, 15 second intro. Is that too much talking for an intro? I don’t think so. One thing I want you to do is go watch a YouTube video and then come back and watch that video. Do you feel like you would click off if you lost? I noticed that the more I watch YouTube videos, the more I’m realizing.

23:13
people are doing what worked well in 2016 where it’s like, hey, I’m gonna hook you and then I’m gonna explain the video and then I’m hook you. Like it’s just getting, it’s taking too long to get in the value. If you’re into the value between 30 seconds and a minute on an hour long video, you’re doing well. Like that’s absolutely just fine. The thing you don’t wanna do is you’re not getting into value until minute 30, two, three minutes. just, wanna make sure people know they’re on the right video.

23:38
because on a podcast, know I’m on the right podcast. I like your show. You are my Tuesday show, whatever it is, right? YouTube, it’s I’m trying to answer a question or get a specific type of value. And so if you’re taking too long to make me understand, I’m going to get that from this video. I’m going to leave. And people are willing to watch an hour long video. Yeah. A couple of not clients that I work with, but a couple of clients that someone in a group that I’m in with Evan works with.

24:06
their fastest growing segments, like eight hour videos and they’re just demolishing. Yeah. And the thing here is your ad revenue goes way, way up because on an eight minute video, you might get a couple of ads. You’re going to make very, very little per video. And if you get a million views, this is not accurate data, but let’s, call it 20 grand on an eight hour video. You are 10 times that because of the length and you’re, it’s going to vary based on your.

24:35
watch duration a lot of different things that way but you can’t get on an eight minute video even if everyone’s watching the entire video at a hundred percent you can’t even get close to the watch time of eight hour video so yeah YouTube loves loves those long videos. imply then like I should put together all my videos in a compilation that’s eight hours long? I would say one thing you could do is do mashups so if you have all of your videos and you have people that talk on similar topics absolutely if you

25:03
you have the bandwidth to do that? Yeah. fact, one of the things we do is we offer services to help with creating mashups because they do well. Now, there are certain ways you want to do that and lengths and things like that, but that is a very, good strategy. Do you recommend putting that on your same channel that’s already successful or a separate channel for those long ones? So the question here is, is it the same audience? So for you,

25:30
what I know of your YouTube channel and your podcast. And we talked about it when we were not listening to Gary V. It sounds like the same audience. sounds like shorter videos are the, I’m going to solve a very specific issue for you. But the long version is let’s sit down and chat through my experiences on this. Let’s chat through it. Like let’s really dive into some of these things that you’re not going to get the same value out of an eight minute video. But if you just want your specific answer, those are great. And you’re going to have a big

26:00
portion of your audience is like, I want to spend more time with you. Like I really want to get value from you because you are my guy for this thing. And so those hour long videos for some of the audience is going to do well. And for the ones that doesn’t, it’s going to, that’s why it takes 60 days or so. It’s going to find an audience that really resonates with that video. You know, what’s funny is I’ve been trying to keep my videos under like 14 minutes. Yeah. But it sounds like after talking to you, I shouldn’t hold back. Like if my video is like 20 minutes, 25 minutes.

26:30
Yeah. Yeah. I would say don’t make, don’t make a 10 minute video, 25 minute video, just cause the length, like you need the value there. Sure. Don’t take a 25 minute video and say, well, it’s gotta be under six. Like there’s you’re cutting out so much of the value there and your connection with the audience. So absolutely. If some of these, want to go longer, absolutely do it. There are, there are benefits to having shorter videos. They do better immediately. Like if you want views now, those shorter videos are going to perform better. Now we can test.

27:00
more and get more data more quickly. But they’re not going to convert as well into people that are clients or people that go into your email list or courses or things like that. People that watch those longer videos, they’re trusting you. They’re I don’t know if you’ve read Daniel Priestley’s The Keepers of Influence, but he says seven hours of interaction and 11 touch points. Right. You watch seven videos, pretty much there and they’ll hop into your course or whatever it is that you’re. It’s funny that you say that because like the longer videos weren’t performing that well.

27:29
for me like the first couple days. But actually I look back now, some of them have taken off like after months. But that’s why I started doing shorter ones. So I guess I just had to be a little bit more patient then. Yeah, yeah, and it’s short tail and long tail. You have marketing and sales and then you have brand awareness. What’s the goal here? And so if you want short term views, you want like those quick hits, shorts, those can work. Like you can get views and subscribers that way. I don’t.

27:56
I’m not a big fan of them, especially in education or thought leadership space. Like it’s really hard. just gonna ask you about that. yeah, shorts, I know like some of the people that are in my mastermind group have taken off just by making shorts along with their long form video. Like subscribers just like up and to the right. You just mentioned that you don’t like them. I wanna get your thoughts on that. Yeah, absolutely. And they are, it’s more hit or miss, I feel like because some people, I know creators on TikTok.

28:25
several groups and helping a lot of them try to get on YouTube. Millions of subscribers are followers on TikTok and their YouTube short, which is the same video they got hundreds of thousands or millions of views gets two views. And they’re like, what is going on? And it’s different algorithms. It’s different audience. YouTube is their shorts algorithm is changing as well as like I used to like it when it first came out, when you had to put like hashtag shorts, like back in, I it was like 20.

28:54
Maybe 2020 loved it because it might did well. They don’t anymore. Some of them do really, really well. Some of them do really terrible. So you can, it can be a part of your strategy. It absolutely can. But the mindset of someone watching a short 30 second video nine times out of 10, probably more is not, I want to go watch an hour long video. And that’s really where you want the people. And so you can get subscribers, you can get views, but what’s the goal? Is that converting into.

29:23
whatever result you’re actually looking for rather than just a band-aid metric. For some people it will, it absolutely will. But I think more often than not, it’s not going to and you need a good way to measure that. Actually, that was my next one. How do you measure that? How do you measure the impact of shorts? Yeah. So shorts, one thing I would look at is if you’re gaining subscribers from, you know, you’re posting lot of shorts, getting a lot of views. If your subscribers are going up, your views and watch time hours should also go up. Not just the view count.

29:53
but watch time hours. So if they’re converting well over to watching an hour long video, you’re going to get a lot more views, like long views, hour, half hour, whatever the videos are. Maybe they only watch your shorter videos. And so maybe that is helpful. So you see a large bump in subscribers and a small bump in hours. And that can work. I actually did a video on my channel looking at Alex Hermosy’s strategy. just like surface level on his channel. His

30:20
top five videos. So I took his top 30 in different lengths because each length has a different like competitive watch time percentage. So I won’t get too technical here, but looking at this top 30 videos, his shorts, I believe had seven and a half million views with his top five shorts, but it had like 6 % of total watch time based on metrics that I’m guessing at because I don’t, I don’t have his actual data.

30:48
His top five hour long videos, which he only has five on the entire channel, was 55 % of his top 30 videos for watch time. So if he would make a couple more longer videos, even just one a month, I think he’d do a lot better. He’s, I mean, he’s killing it, but like the strategy here is that you need, you need both. I don’t think you have to have shorts. If you’re in education and thought leadership space, go and test them. It’s not going to hurt, but I don’t think she’ll Actually, I was going to ask you, like, if you were going to do shorts, would you

31:16
put them on a separate channel or on the same channel, assuming they’re kind of like the same topics. Yeah. So really depends on the person. Really depends on the goal. I think if you want to really like if you have a TikTok channel and you’ve created a ton of short content, make a separate channel and just post those like crazy because you only want to post one a day. So if you’re trying to post two, three times a week with your normal length videos, whether that’s hour, six minute, whatever that is, you don’t want to post a short within that 24 hours. So you’re only going to post a few shorts.

31:46
Um, so go, go create a shorts channel post. I’m post three times a day. It’s figure out what the data says. Um, but that’s not hurting your longer videos. advising people to put things on a separate channel, that won’t help your main channel then. Right. A little bit. The data is not great there though. I honestly, and that’s why I don’t love it because if you’re posting one, two or three shorts a week where like, if you only have four videos a week, you’re like, I’m not doing any more than let’s call it three. I’m not doing any more than three videos a week.

32:15
Post four shorts a week, that’s great. You’re getting a video out every single day, which is just fine. But if you’re like, really wanna double down on shorts, posting two shorts a day on top of your normal videos, that is going to hurt those views. So I wouldn’t do that. So basically you’re saying only one video per day on any given channel. I wouldn’t post any more than that. You know what’s funny? Something you said earlier, like a video, if you post another video even the next day, it’ll knock that other one out of the browse, right?

32:45
It can, yeah. that’s, won’t always, sometimes it’ll stick in there for part of your audience, but YouTube’s cycling through those. And so you’re risking a short kicking out an hour long video. I would rather someone watch for an hour than 30 seconds. So, um, you’ll see browse for a little while really take off and really help some videos and then you’ll see it die off. And sometimes later it’ll come back and you’ll get a lot of views that way. But YouTube just kind of not exactly sure how it decides how to cycle this, but it’ll, it’ll cycle those videos through browse.

33:15
Does that imply then that you shouldn’t post too many videos? because don’t you want a video to stay in the browse for a while before you post the next video? You can, there’s strategies that way. The data, if you’re posting once a week, the data is really, really good that going to two times a week is going to, depends on your channel, but it can double the ad revenue that you’re bringing in. So. Really? Okay. So, and really depends on.

33:42
Again, how big your channel is, what niche you are, a few different things. But generally speaking, I would say, you know, posting two, three times a week is where most people want to be. Okay. So let’s say you, you already on a schedule to just post one long form video per week. Would you recommend posting shorts the other days on that same channel? Or would you like, would you post six shorts and one long form video, or would you post like three shorts and one long form video to give that one long form video?

34:11
a better chance. That’s a good question. I think that one I would. It’s going to come down again to the goal of the person like who’s editing the video. How much are you paying for these these shorts? If money is not the issue and your money is not the issue. No, he’s not the issue. would honestly I would test both. think the problem is not every niche performs the same. Like if you go to the short shelf right now, you’re going to see a lot of bigger channels getting more views. You’ll see some of the smaller ones sprinkled in, but it’s not like Tick Tock where

34:40
It’s not the big people getting all the views. They do pop through, but it’s a really, really even spread. Whereas YouTube, they’ve proven that these bigger channels get more views. And so we’re going to give a little bit more, you know, show time or shelf time for those bigger channels. So I, I just, I feel like people get more frustrated than anything with shorts because a combination of, you know, shorter six, 10, 15 minutes on long videos with shorts, nobody has good data.

35:10
I mean, Evan’s testing, nobody has really good data on that. That shows that it’s beneficial. So at least that I’m aware of. Can you share with me like what a large YouTuber like Evan, I think he has millions of subs, right? Pretty sure he has millions. Can you just give me some insight on how he runs his stuff? I’m sure he puts out a ton of content every day. How much content is he putting out at what frequency? Yeah, so he, I don’t know.

35:38
every working because I’m not part of that team, but he’s he’s walked me through it. Sure. You know, he’s putting on about 20 videos a day. He has many channels, many channels. So this is not one channel. Right. The thing with his is he has I’m trying to remember how many honesty, like 30 people on his team, and they’re always running tests. And so I think he has like four people dedicated to A B testing thumbnails and.

36:04
Trying to find a template that beats his current template and when that happens they go and they update all of the videos to that new template and so, know with Honey, 20,000 plus videos. I don’t know how many videos he has at this point like that once you find a template that wins seven out of ten times and you have to go update everything that is That’s full-time job for a whole lot. You’re talking about like redesigning thumbnails and titles Yep, the entire library entire library. Yep. So

36:33
One of the beautiful things and one of the things that I do help do clients is that, you know, we use a different software. TubeBuddy does have a software where you can A-B test thumbnails. And so the goal thing I would encourage everyone to do because you can revitalize an old video with a new thumbnail. You know, a thumbnail is 70 % of getting someone to click the titles. is important. That’s why earlier we were like, well, how do you rank? like, that’s like a 30%, 30, 70, instead of, you know, close to 80, 20, but you want to focus on the thumbnail. And so.

37:02
The thing that we’ve seen is you can double or triple click through rates if you get a better thumbnail, if you figure out the principles that work well for your channel. But again, to get suggested on your own content and to have that congruency, people need to know what your thumbnails look like. And so if you find a template that’s 250 % more click through rate, you know, so 2 % to 5%, you need to update everything to that.

37:28
so that it looks similar. People that have watched before might be a little confused, but likely it’s not that different. And if it’s winning seven out of 10 times, you know your viewers like that better. So. Can you give me an idea of what a decent click-through rate is? Yes and no. Okay. mean, in the niche that I’m in, for example. Yeah. So the hard thing here is that it’s all relative to the amount of impressions the video is getting. So.

37:56
If you have a double digit click through rate, I’m worried because that means likely you’re not getting a ton of impressions. It’s doing really well with your audience is generally what that’s telling me. So if you have 13 % click through rate, you’re to go look and probably your views are down. Your impressions are down. It’s showing it to your audience who’s already subscribed. The subscriber to not subscriber ratio is going to be higher for subscribed likely on that video than your average. But if you’re at 1%, I’m also concerned because that’s, that’s pretty low.

38:26
I would say generally like three to six percent is where you want to be, it three percent’s not necessarily better than six because I’ll take three percent with two million impressions over six percent with a hundred thousand impressions. So the more impressions you get, your click through rates going to go lower because YouTube is finding new audiences, but it’s art, maybe a little more art than science when it comes to that, because there’s a lot of variables that go into that. OK, well, that’s good. Three to six.

38:55
general range, anything higher than that, which means you’re probably not reaching as many people. Anything lower than that, maybe there’s a problem. And it’s funny, you mentioned the thumbnail as being the main driver and not the title. So does that imply then, then that anything that’s clickbaity should go in the thumbnail? Clickbait, I feel like there’s a really big negative connotation with clickbait because it’s like, oh, I’m gonna…

39:24
I’m going to hook you in and just not deliver good click bait is finding the best, most interesting part or something that you can provide and then delivering on whatever that promised. And so you see some of these expressive faces and thumbnails. And part of that reason is those tend to work. Um, you know, you see, you probably see a lot of people doing screenshots from the video and putting that, and it’s not this Polish. not the LinkedIn photo. Those tend to do better. And so it depends on your niche, what’s going to work well.

39:53
but you do, your brain can process a photo. It’s like 20 times faster than it processes words. And so if you have too many words on your thumbnail, people aren’t able to process and know what the video is about. And then they’re not gonna read your title because you haven’t hooked them in. So if you have a thumbnail, three to five words, it looks engaging. It’s showing them something that’s going to be in the video enough that I’m gonna read your title. That’s the whole goal. And that’s why the thumbnail is more important because I’m never gonna look at your title.

40:22
until I’ve looked at your thumbnail first. And if you don’t pass the thumbnail test, I’m scrolling past to the next video. Okay. Okay. And then I would imagine all these larger YouTubers that you work with spending an inordinate amount of time on the thumbnail and the title. Sounds like. Yes and no. I think once you figure out that template, you copy it and you go with it. If you find your click through rates, it’s odd, too high, too low.

40:48
Something’s off. And so we want to test that. We want to do AB tests. We want to look at the video, see what’s going on. Maybe, maybe your intro was just abnormally poor. Like, like there could be things going on there. would say focusing on it more than the title. Yes. Significant more emphasis placed there more time and investment. Um, but he really want to be AB testing. would say create two thumbnails for every single video and always, always, always AB test because you might have something that works. Keep, keep your style now.

41:17
but try to find one that beats it and always focus on that. Whereas titles, you can do A-B tests with titles and that is a good strategy, but I wouldn’t do that until you’ve done that with the thumbnail first. When you’re talking about templates, what exactly do you mean? So, you know, one example is Evan’s style where he has, you know, person on the right side, zoomed in on the face, you know, three to six words and emphasized certain portions of the words, different like,

41:45
You’ll see if you go look at channels, they look similar to themselves. And so they have this format of what, you know, that channel’s template looks like. If you look at yours, yours is the same. You have not all of them are exactly, but they’re similar. And that’s what I call the template is your setup. Yeah. Okay. And then how far back can you change a thumbnail and have it make a difference? All the way back. Really? So I should go in my like,

42:14
videos that haven’t gotten views in a long time and just update them is what you’re saying. Yeah, absolutely. The best, fastest, easiest way to resurrect an old video, new thumbnail. OK. And let’s say you launched your latest video and it sucks. How soon do you make changes? Yeah, so I would not change anything until at least seven days. The first seven, I mean, you’re maybe you’re emailing people about it. You’re announcing on social media.

42:42
YouTube’s testing with your audience, first seven days don’t even think about it. If you’re a smaller channel, maybe the first couple of weeks, don’t even think about it. It’s really gonna depend on how many impressions and views that gets. One of the things you’ll see in TubeBuddy is it’ll say run the test for 14 days or run it till statistically significant. Always run it until statistically significant because that means it knows with pretty good confidence which one’s going to work. Sometimes for bigger channels, two or three days.

43:12
Smaller channels, that could be months. yeah. So if you’re like updating an older videos thumbnail that doesn’t get that many views, that’s split cast to tape forever. It could. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the nice thing there, if bigger channel, older videos, likely you’re going to see a bump in those views. And so, you know, that’s that’s where someone like me comes in and it’s like, hey, here are the most important ones to focus on. Let’s let’s A B test these and and go through that. So but it’s you’ll be surprised.

43:42
at what working on your thumbnails can do for your channel. So does changing your thumbnail get YouTube to display those videos again for a little bit? Typically, it’s still testing old videos, it’s just slow. And so if it sees a bump in how many people click on it, it’s like, oh, something’s changed here, let’s test it again. Still higher. And the more momentum it gets, the more it gets tested. And so…

44:09
Like if for whatever reason people just decided to click your video more because maybe there’s a world event that makes it relevant, YouTube will show up more. It’ll take off. That’s not super likely for most videos, but changing a thumbnail can do that because it’s always testing the videos. YouTube videos live forever. That’s the beauty. Podcast, you kind of have to build your own thing. You got to push people there. know YouTube does it for you. So that’s what I love about YouTube.

44:36
I mean, I have videos that have been around for like years and they’re still getting a lot of views. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t even know how they’re, I guess I should look at the stats, but presumably a lot of it is search. Well, and it’s usually if it’s still doing well for a long time after suggested it’s a big part of that. I do have videos that it is just search and you want to try to move them over to suggest it because it’ll, it’ll go bigger. But yeah, like usually the best performing videos to really go to top 10.

45:04
for channels over a year old, I would be shocked if you didn’t have one of your oldest videos somewhere in that top 10. When you say move over to suggested, you’re implying just like a new title and thumbnail. Usually, yeah, updating thumbnail, A, B testing that you can do title. Sometimes your title really was terrible. If you’re getting a lot of search volume, though, one thing to know is that it will recategorize it. So I had a video that was doing incredibly well with search and I was trying to get it to suggestion and

45:33
Yeah, I was like, okay, let’s just see what this does. Cause it’s my channel. I’ve destroyed my channel. My channel’s the crash test of me. So, but I was like, okay, instead of thumbnail, let’s change the title and see what happens. uncategorized it. got way less views and it just, wasn’t great. I did change it back. And so it started picking back up again, which is the beauty. It used to be a lot harder for you to do that, but it picked up views again and then kind of died. it really, the thumbnail, it’s not going to affect any search.

46:03
volume, but it will get you more suggested. I’m always paranoid about making changes like in Google land for the blog, like you change like the title. mean, that could drastically affect. Yeah. Uh, I mean, SEO is everything in blog land. I guess that’s the main difference. I think that’s the hard thing because I, I’ve been doing this for a while. And when I first started, there was no YouTube, like you could not find YouTube strategy jobs. Now on LinkedIn, I see hundreds of YouTube and podcasts related to work that I could fulfill, but it’s, you know,

46:33
And I should reach out and be like, Hey, I’m on contract. But the thing here is that it’s so different. People who know Google SEO. In fact, I worked with a company like, Oh, I know Google. It’s fine. I’m like, but your channel’s not doing fine. And you can see when I came on and when I left, like it, it follows that because it’s not the same. Like it feels, it looks the same, but it’s not.

46:55
What I’ve found actually is attractive titles always trumps SEO in terms of use. But what I do is I might insert the keyword at the very end, like in parentheses or something, just so Google can index it. You have your description there. Put those keywords in that description. Make sure they’re there. If you really want to put them in the title, if it makes sense to you, go ahead. But you’re right where it’s your title is again, the more you want to suggest, the more art is than science. The science is let’s get this.

47:25
suggest like keyword research. The art here is like you’re talking about something and you want to introduce it in a way that peaks curiosity doesn’t give the answer away, but still lets them know what the video is about. And that’s, that’s not an easy thing to do. So titles are important. It is that 30%. Um, but I feel like most people, unless you have a team really doing a lot of this, focusing on the thumbnail is going to give you more bang.

47:51
So let’s wrap this up. We’ve talked about a lot of different things. Okay, brand new channel. You said start with search just to get some initial traffic and then move over to suggested. You’re suggesting long videos if you can over an hour. And then when does it make sense to do shorts? So again, this is contextual for the topic. If you’re saying like how to fix a watch, how to fix a toilet, like it’s better not be an

48:20
It’s got to be short like sure if you’re reviewing products make them, you know as long as needed but as short as possible 15 minute review on a $2,000 camera. That’s great. You don’t want an hour-long video But if you’re in the education space, you’re in the podcast thought leadership, you’re you’re bringing a message Longer is better. So it depends on your niche. I don’t think everyone should create that but if you have a message to share, absolutely

48:46
And then the shorts, guess, haven’t been around long enough, but you’re saying it just, can’t hurt to do shorts and those people can lead to longer term subscribers. Yeah. Yeah. Just know that it’s a different skillset. It’s like the difference between creating a Tik Tok video and a YouTube video. You know, we have shorts now, so it’s not quite the best comparison, but it’s a different audience. They’re looking for different things, different mindset. What mindset are you in when you’re watching a Tik Tok? What mindset are you in when you’re watching a short? Like it’s, it’s different. So it’s not going to hurt.

49:15
but just know you’re now taking on another skillset. Don’t have any expectations for it. Data shows it can help grow, but it also shows it’s probably more of a vanity metric than actually getting people to do the thing you want them to do. But test it for yourself. Some people really are going to crush it with shorts, but I’ve seen that to be more the exception than the rule. Interesting, yeah. So I can tell you from my experience of selling courses, a lot of people say they found me through TikTok.

49:43
And then they came to my site and they just started consuming all the content like TikTok plus YouTube and whatnot. So I do think it’s good from a top of funnel standpoint because you get like masses of people, but I mean, the quality isn’t as good, obviously. Yeah. Well, I’m in a group of 60 coach creators for TikTok. The thing with TikTok is it’s a different platform. So if I’m on TikTok, there’s this expectation. But if I’m on YouTube watching shorts,

50:14
I’m a different type of content consumer. If I’m on YouTube watching one hour videos, I can’t watch one hour videos on TikTok. And so it is a different pool, so to speak. So it can work. they, I mean, they’re making five figures a month selling courses and coaching and things like that. Most of these people in this group, so that can work. It’s just, if you’re on YouTube and you’re avoiding long form videos, likely you’re the, I only want short content on TikTok and I only want short content anywhere else. Right. Yeah.

50:43
There’s just so many changes right now. guess it’s hard to predict. But shorts don’t make any money either from ads, right? They’re going to, starting 2023. I think you’ll see that it’s not as significant as YouTube AdSense. My goal for AdSense on YouTube is for it to pay for your team. I want that to pay for everyone working on your social, your editor, like everything, and for you to able to scale.

51:09
I don’t think shorts are gonna make a huge dent in that. might if you’re getting millions of views. Nobody knows what that’s gonna look like quite yet, but I don’t see it being able to even touch what an hour long video AdSense can do. Yeah, but it should help you get that gold plaque. It can. It absolutely can. And one thing here is the silver plaque, the gold plaque, it’s amazing. Like that is great goal.

51:36
But is that your goal? If that’s your goal, you want to make different content. You want to be more general. You want to do things that more people are going to want to watch. If you’re trying to sell a course, if you’re to build a clientele, be okay with like, I’ve made, you know, tens of thousands of dollars with a channel that has like 2k subscribers. that’s what your goal. Yeah. I mean, I, I just realized I’m kind of limiting myself reach wise by just talking more on e-commerce topics. And if I just talked about like personal development or something, it could be a lot bigger, but you’re right.

52:07
It’s this battle between ego versus what works, right? So Zach, this is very helpful, So happy that I met you at selling scale. I should go to more events because every time I go to an event, I always meet someone cool. And how lucky was it that I was sitting next to you at a Gary Vee? I mean, I guess I have to go watch Gary Vee again now. Yeah. We missed like half of it. Yeah, exactly. But I’d rather talk to you actually than listen.

52:36
appreciate that. Zach, if anyone wants to reach you for your services or find you, where can they find you? Yeah, so LinkedIn at Zach Mitchum is probably the easiest way to find me. You can find my YouTube channel. Like I said, it’s Crash Test channel. So there’s good stuff on there. Just don’t don’t judge my results based on that because it’s Tesla. Thanks. We are video makers. We can find me there. But on LinkedIn, I share my best tips. I have a newsletter on there and you can get on my email list. So let’s start there.

53:07
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now just to give you an update on my YouTube channel, last month I made $29,000 on just AdSense ads alone. So from a content perspective, I would say that blogging and YouTube are excellent channels to make money online if you can get through the slog. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 434. And once again, I want to remind you that my annual e-commerce conference will be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 23rd to May 25th of 2023.

53:34
I really want to hang out with you guys in person next year, so let’s meet up. Go to SellersSummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for eCommerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

54:02
Now we talk about how I these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.