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Michael Stewart
Hello, hello everybody it’s Mike Stewart here at Mike Stewart dot live. I am so happy to be here. I’m really excited about today’s show. I’m going to tell you I have been calling myself the video guy since 1998. In fact, I bought the domain name internet video guy.com back then, by one of my mentors, a guy named Alex Mendoza and said, Mike, you’re the audio guy and I thought well, I’ll buy the video guy maybe maybe someday video being online thing. Well, you know, video is here video is here to stay. Well, unbeknownst to me, there was a guy in America named Ray lane, who was also a A video guy, a great one, by the way, he’s a colleague, he and I have done a lot of business over the years. I trust Ray. And you know, I’ll tell you what he knows better than me. He knows YouTube better than me. You know, a lot of the things I’ve learned about YouTube, I’ve learned from Ray, and I just can’t give him a higher recommendation. So rather than me rambling about, you know what I know I’m going to bring on an expert and I’m going to grill him because I need to know these things, just like you need to know. So welcome to the virtual stage, my good friend, Ray lane, the video guy.
Ray Lane
All right now that is an introduction. And you know, it’s funny you you mentioned Alex, I haven’t I haven’t heard of or talked to Alex in a long time, but I used to do a lot of stuff with him as well. We used to, I used to produce his videos where he would sell his his products where he would, he was kind of the the guy that talked about, Hey, you got to take and reproduce everything that you have. If you got videos, turn it into audios, turn it into books, turn it into courses, get it all out there. Good to hear that name haven’t really said haven’t heard a lot from Alex lately. So, hope he’s doing well.
Michael Stewart
You know, Now see, I didn’t know that about you, brother. I knew I met you through the jvzoo world. Yep. And then of course, we went to Derral Eve’s event together, which Darryl is, is a monster when it comes to YouTube. I mean, he, his video channel is just so full of great stuff. It’s like I said here, and I’m overwhelmed at my age. But I didn’t know you knew Alex. I mean, the quick story for those that don’t know. Um, I was on a recording studio for 20 years in Atlanta, and in 98, I got rid of my studio 99 and I started building websites I built my company’s called sound pages, audio video websites back in 99. It was very primitive back then. And I met Alex through the internet. And I said, Why don’t you guys make audio buttons on your websites. Cuz I said audio streams with flash. And I use it with all my local business customers we used to play I used to call it I had a website called sound testimonials.com where I would produce audio buttons for my local business clients. And Alex said, you need to go to the seminar called the system seminar. Come as my guest, and I’ll never forget, Alex said, you know, you’re the internet audio guy. He says you need to go buy that domain name. And I’ll never forget, it was September 11 2001. I bought internet audio guy and I bought internet video guy, not knowing what I would do with it really hadn’t done a whole lot with it. But I got known as the audio guy and I tried to be known as a video guy and I know enough video to be dangerous but but I’m an audio engineer here. In fact, I’ll give people a little quick tour. I am doing more and more music now that I’m in here in Nashville. This is my new studio setup, which now basically that’s What recording studios, they’re all virtual, crazy. But Ray, I just I want to talk to you about YouTube. And what’s new. And and I’ll tell you, there’s two things that I got to do for me personally. So I want to hear what you have to say is number one, two people forget that. YouTube is a search engine. And people are constantly let me turn this off here because it’s gonna cause a problem. Yeah, there you go. Um, YouTube is a search engine, and you can get a tremendous amount of traffic, tremendous mal relationships. And it is a huge part of content marketing. So what is new things that we need to be aware about with YouTube today? And then, of course, you know, the two biggest things how do you build your YouTube channel up? I’m not so much interested in the making money from the advertising chair. I know a lot of YouTubers love making money from the ads that Google Shares revenue. I’m more interested in about building relationships but talk about it all what’s new, what do we pay attention to is, is video people. Yeah and
Ray Lane
and and I’m in the same boat with you by the way, I don’t really mess with, you know, YouTube paying me one penny for every thousand views or anything like that it’s just in the industry that I’m in, there’s not enough people that would care enough to ever make me any money doing that. So for me, it is much more about the traffic, it is much more about getting people to see products to learn about products and to purchase products that we offer through YouTube. And of course, we do a lot of YouTube with with other businesses, local businesses, most especially. And the biggest thing to me, and this is not a new thing. This is actually an old thing. But it’s something that everybody has to pay attention to. And that is just like you said, it’s a search engine, just like Google is just like, you know, iTunes is a search engine, just like Amazon is a search engine. This is one of the biggest search engines in the world and you need to be able to be to create content that can be found. And I see so many people that there, they do web marketing. And they’ll spend a ton of time doing SEO on their websites and making sure that they’ve got backlinks, and they’ve got the headlines and they get the keywords and they go, and then they’ll go, and they’ll use video and they’ll just throw a video up there. And it’ll say, you know, migrate video dot 01. And why are you wasting all that time? You know, you if you know how to do SEO on your website, why aren’t you doing that with your videos, you know, videos need to be treated just like you would have website, you need a good title. You need good content in the in the text area, you need to start backlinking to it you need to do all the things that you would do to a website to that YouTube video. Because not only are you going to be able to rank it in youtube so that people find it when they search there. But you get the opportunity to rank in the biggest search engines in the world, you know, especially Google and And of course, Bing is out there and some of the other ones. But if you can rank on both YouTube and Google, the traffic is going to be huge. And no matter how great your website is, you’re probably not going to have your website show up when people search on YouTube. just just just guessing that that’s not going to happen. But you can have your stuff show up on both if you do YouTube videos, and you do them properly, and you SEO them. And you can get a lot of traffic from that. And it’s not always even about the video itself. You know, this is one thing that that people need to think about here is we’ve we’ve used YouTube videos as a way to rank on Google, where half the time people don’t even watch the video. You know, it shows up on page one of Google they see who it is, they see the phone number and they call right then in there, they don’t even watch the video and they and they give a phone call. So you’ve got a lot of opportunity. Now that doesn’t mean you know, you just throw garbage up on YouTube so it shows up on Google but you can have great Rate content, and you can have it show up on you on YouTube. And you can have it show up on Google. And even if people don’t watch the video, you have an opportunity for them to call you on the phone to click to your website, etc, and get some of that traffic. And to me, that’s the biggest part of YouTube is getting that traffic to know you, to like you to trust you so that they will come back, they’ll purchase your products, or they’ll join your courses, or they’ll listen to your podcast or whatever it is that you want them to do. But it all starts with making sure that you’re doing your SEO work on your videos, just like you would with a website.
Michael Stewart
Well, you know, I’m guilty of exactly what you’re talking about on neglect. I mean, I know how I knew how to make video content. I knew, you know, the basic structure of trying to build you know, it’s all about building relationships. But, you know, let’s, let’s review what you said here. really pay attention to titling the setup of your YouTube channel. I’d like you to talk a little bit about that. Yeah, see so many business YouTube channels of marketers or local businesses, whatever. And, you know, there’s no header graphic, there’s no, they haven’t gone through the steps, you know, kind of give us a little checklist of what we need to do to get that channel right. But you like you said, the description says another video. I mean, that’s crazy, right? successful people have multiple what I call backlinks to things that make them money. So you know, every time you put up another piece of content in YouTube is an opportunity to get links to the things that make you money. And, and of course, there are some internal things that I got some questions about, but, but number one, give us a little checklist about what is optimized YouTube channel and the links to things that make you money opportunities. Sure.
Ray Lane
So the biggest thing you’ve got to do with your channel is you’ve got to, for lack of a better word, turn it into a channel. When you get a YouTube account, you can upload a video And not have a an actual channel yet, you need to go into the back end you need to turn that channel on. Let YouTube know that, hey, I’m creating a channel, you got to give that channel a name, you got to put that nice graphic in the background, fill out the About Us section, make sure that it’s got enough information so that people and Google know exactly what your business is about. You can add links to Facebook, you can add links to to Google My Business, which we do with a lot of local businesses. You can add links to Twitter, and your website, anywhere where you can get more information out there, you need to do it, fill out that ABOUT SECTION fill out those links. There’s an area to put in an email even if you have a business email. And you’re not afraid of people contacting you which way that 50 sometimes but you can put a YouTube an email in there so that people can contact you directly from your YouTube channel. So All of these things can make a major impact in how your videos do, making sure that that about section is keyword rich and really tells people about your business is going to be a big help, it’s going to help Google to know more about your business, so that they can actually promote your videos and promote your channel. You want to make sure that once you get that channel up, you’ve got some videos in there, that you actually use the channel and you can see Mike just pulled up my channel which which by the way I call the most neglected channel on the internet because I tend to you know, start working on everybody else’s except my own like the carpenter without the
Michael Stewart
other all the
Ray Lane
time. Yeah, here you can see and Mike, if you want to look at the top there, you can see we’ve got a banner at the top there, which is very easy to create. There are templates out there. If you use Canva, which is a free software, you can create your channel background very quickly and easily. And as you can see, you know, my channel background that’s not the greatest, most artistic, most beautiful background in the world, but it’s there and you can see See, on the on the right hand side at the bottom of the banner, a link to different websites. So we link to my website, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. And the last one. I’m not even sure which one The last one is off the top of my head, but it’s got a logo of me so it might be get free music for your video music for your video. There you go. So you can actually get some free music. And if you scroll down, you can see that this is set up like a channel. And what I mean by that is right up front there’s a trailer video that’s right there that’s got information. And this by the way, you know when you’re getting started the trailer video that you put on here, there’s a couple of different things you can do for new visitors. So the first time that they come to your channel, you have what’s called a trailer, the trailer video is what they see right up front. It’ll play right there for you. This is your opportunity to really introduce yourself, tell people what they can expect. Now a lot of people will just throw a video in the trailer and do that if that’s what your options are. Right now but think about doing one that really is a trailer and what’s a trailer for a trailer is to show people what’s going to be coming soon. You know whether it’s a, you know a trailer for the next Star Wars movie, it’s going to tell you what that movie is basically going to be about get you excited to come and watch Star Wars. In this case here. This trailer video is about the channel itself. What are we going to have on this channel? What are you going to see in this channel? How often are we going to make videos? What are our videos about what are you going to learn? What are you going to get? That’s the type of thing you want to put in this trailer. Now if you’re a local business, you might want to modify that a little bit. If you’re a plumber, you might want to talk about your plumbing business a little bit more in a very general sense an overview of the channel. And hey, you know, this is this is Mike’s plumbing and on this channel we give you tips on how to make sure that your drains don’t get stopped up. We give you tips on this. We put out videos showing you common causes of X, Y and Z. And of course you know we give you information about hiring us as a plumber. That That type of thing you want in that trailer give people information of exactly what to expect. And you’ll notice Mike opened up that video there. The structure of the video itself is a little bit different. And you can see veg Mike, if you want to even just hit read more there for a second. And that’ll that’ll kind of show some of that scroll on down past the video. So and then hit the Show More button sorry. Make might make my dance here. So you can see the structure of this video is very, very different. I just talked about how videos should have a lot of text and a lot of you know a nice title. In this case here. The goal is slightly different with the trailer video. The trailer video is to give people more information, which is why right up front, you see all those different links. And you know that’s going to drive our traffic. Use the videos to give information. This is your trailer This is your pitch. This is your opportunity to say hey, this is who I am. This is what we do. Take a look at all of our stuff. So the the structure of that video I did very differently, it doesn’t have giant paragraphs of information it has where to go for more stuff. It’s very direct. And the reason for that is when we go back to the channel, like you see here, in that little preview area to the right of the screen, it has all those links so they can get to my website, they can follow me, they can see what it’s about right there with, you know, without just a ton of information that gets cut off, because it’s going to cut off very quickly. So the fact that we’ve just got links there, boom, people can jump in, they can click those links, and they can get right into it. So that’s your trailer video. Now, in addition to a trailer video, you also have an opportunity to put some featured content. So if you come to my website or my channel the first time you’re going to get that trailer video. The next time you come to my my channel, you’re not going to see that trailer video you’re going to see featured content. And you can give a couple of pieces of content that you want people to see next. And that’s going to be what you want to do next is after they see the trailer. And Mike’s not signed in. So he’s, it’s gonna keep showing the trailer each time. But
once you once you get there the second time, you want to put some content that is going to give people more information, and really help them to take the next step. Now this is where it could be, you know, if you’re the plumber, you could immediately have the next thing be you know why we’re the best service in the world. Or it could be you know how to five steps to make sure that you do, you know, do well with your plumbing, or what have you get that featured content in there. And that’s what they’re going to see the next time. And then once you have all of that you got to use the whole entire channel. And what I mean by that is if you go to just randomly pick a channel out there, especially one that’s not, you know, a big popular channel, and what you’re going to see is you’re going to see that maybe they have the banner at the top, maybe they even have a trailer and then below that they’ve got you know, uploaded videos and a string of videos and that’s it. Well, there’s so much more that you can do and the more that you do The more YouTube is going to take notice and say, Okay, you know what, this is a legitimate channel, they’re taking the time they’re taking the effort, we’re going to help them out by promoting their videos more, by sending people there more by having them show up in search more. And, you know, nowadays, even that banner up at the top, if you don’t have that banner, and you don’t have your little icon with your logo in it, they’re not even going to open up some of the features of the channel until you do, they’re just going to lock you out. So until you do these things, they’re not going to give you access to everything that you can use to promote your videos and your business. So you want to make sure that you do these. Now down below that trailer, there’s an area called sections. And what sections are are featured types of videos. These are almost like categories basically. And so you could have you know, if we go back to our plumber, you could have a category called you know, plumbing tips, and have all the videos that are plumbing tips. It could be the next one could be how tos and how to fix this, how to do this, how to make this how to do it. Install this. And then your next category could be simple solutions and have solutions to problems people are having. And if you scroll down my page here, you’ll see going down there, we’ve got the free market, free video marketing giveaways is the first of the categories that we have in there or the sections as they call it. And as we go down the page, you see you got YouTube tips and tricks. And we keep going down there, you’re going to see YouTube marketing support, and you’re going to see free stuff Friday, and then you’re going to see video production tips. And all of this is going to allow you to categorize your information so people can find it quickly and easily and get exactly what they’re looking for. But there’s a much greater thing going on here too. And that is, well, at least in the way that I do most of these is those sections are usually playlists. Okay? If you don’t know what a playlist is a playlist is a collection of videos. So you go into playlist and you create a playlist for your plumbing tips. And you put in all of your videos that are plumbing tips into that playlist. Now you’ve got a playlist for those. And you can make a section for those in your playlist, you can fill out all that information again. So everything that you would put in a video to get it noticed, you can put in the playlist. And if you notice, where it says free marketing, video giveaways, there’s a little bit of a paragraph directly underneath that. That little paragraph there. Under under YouTube tips and tricks, it says video marketing for all means blah, blah, blah, that that actually is a full complete description, you know, multiple paragraphs with links and everything else they truncated on here. But if you went to the playlist, it actually is a big long description. And that information is still on that video on on that section there. It just you don’t see it. But Google does YouTube does. It’s there on the page. And each one of those, you know, at least the more popular ones. We actually do that within this probably playlist on here that are just playlists. But when we’re going to feature a playlist we make sure that that is optimized Just like a video, full text, links and everything else.
Michael Stewart
So I got a quick question. So the short featured content on the homepage of your channel. Those are playlists that you cherry pick
Ray Lane
correct? No just individual videos you just choose a couple of videos about featured videos is different than a playlist. featured videos is different than playlist Yeah, featured videos is literally it’s just I want to feature this video in this video. That’s it
Michael Stewart
got multiple videos that you can do.
Ray Lane
Yeah, so if you scroll back up when you’re when you’re logged into your return instead of the trailer, you would see the next featured video in there in these these the free market giveaways on YouTube trips. Are those playlists are those playlists that have been turned into categories? Yeah.
Michael Stewart
So here’s, here’s what I’m the takeaway, and then we’re gonna have a little station break and we’re gonna come back and I got a couple more questions and we’re gonna take some questions. My gosh, you know, I’m gonna have to have you a second time because I try to keep the show to a half an hour and we’ve already got 20 minutes. That’s it. So let me let you know titling multiple links, trailer video featured video for your channel, building playlist, grouping videos together. And then when you get these playlists on the homepage, those are called categories. So these are all things that most people never pay attention to. And, you know, if you really want to have an optimized YouTube channel, you got to do all these things. The banner graphic thinks back you got to go through some hoops I can tell you I know for a fact, you got to associate your channel there’s been some new rules that I want to ask you some questions back, but we’re gonna take a little word from today’s show is brought to you by the mike Stewart everything club. So let’s hear about that for a moment and we’ll be right back with Ray lane the video guy. Hey Mike Stewart here with the mike Stewart everything club today’s sponsor, you know, it’s a way for you to own all of my products for one low monthly subscription price. You know, I looked at that Netflix model they charge you a monthly fee and it gets you access to all they do from now on as long as you stay a paying member so you can go to the website Mike Stewart everything club calm and watch the video to learn more about it. But basically for 1997 a month, you’re gonna have access to podcast install, mastering mobile video, instant video blogger, easy follow up video, tablet video membership sites, to both things over 500 tracks of legal music using YouTube videos, sales videos and podcasts, local domain reseller how to make money every month selling domains of hosting through GoDaddy and marketing wisdom from my partner how Coleman and myself with the next level marketing workshop plus coming real soon, I’m going to be selling dot live secrets for 497. And as a current member of paid member, you’re going to have access to that as well. Plus a whole lot more in the works. And it’s all included with your monthly subscription to my store to everything clubs, so be sure to check us out at Mike Stewart everything clubs.com
Hey everybody, we’re back. Thanks for listening. Hey, I’m gonna go a little bonus going right now for people that watch this video. If you go to Mike Stewart everything club calm for a limited time. I’ve got $1 dollar trial that you can try it out for a month. And then of course it’s 1997 a month. But basically the my everything club is everything I ever create. You get access, if you’re it’s kind of like the Netflix of my trainings. So anyway, I hope you’ll consider checking that out. And then of course you want to hear more from from our good buddy here, Ray lane. Um, so right. These are the things that I have had some questions about, talk a little bit about in cards, and talk a little bit about I cards. Sure. And you know, one of the things that I’ve seen happen I will was given the opportunity to do the I cards, which are basically links that pop up in the middle of your video at a specific program time. And Google and YouTube took that away from me, because I didn’t have enough subscribers. And of course, nowadays, you know, talk about this challenge getting a like, I see that you have Ray, the video guy is the name of your channel, and that’s your URL. They won’t let me have one yet until I get enough subscribers. Yeah, so talk about things that you got to do to make it better, you know, better URL, I cards in cards, and other things that you can do to help make your you know, one of the things about in cards is keeping people you know, like one of the biggest problems I had, I’ve had people ask, you know, how do I get all these other non related videos popping up at the end of my video. And so just talk about those things and then I don’t want to Don’t let me forget What you did for Pac Man, I’m you can see my gold record here but behind me, I was in a band called Buckner Garcia and Ray helped us with a video we did like five years ago. And I want you to talk about what you did I think you spent $50 and that was the catalyst to get that thing up to about 12 million views as of now that’s not earth shattering compared to Justin Bieber and some of these people who just get billions of views. But for Oh, rockers like us, that little $50 What can we do just so talk about everything we can do to make it better in cards, I cards, avoiding getting a better channel, what are the new YouTube rules? Hey, there you go. I just bombarded you with a whole bunch of stuff to talk about.
Ray Lane
That’s That’s good. And and there is a lot you know, and in the old days, YouTube had gotten a little bit lacks with things they allowed us to do anything we could go and we could get our, our, you know, youtube.com slash whatever. Anytime we want it. They just allowed us to do that they allowed us to do connect our website, they allowed us to have all these features. People abused them, of course. And that caused a lot of issues. And one of the things that YouTube wanted to do was they wanted to stop the average everyday person from coming in and getting youtube.com, slash whatever, locking that up, and then never doing anything with it. You know, now, you know, if you think about it this way, and obviously, this would never happen. But imagine if it did Imagine if I went on and I got youtube.com slash Walmart. And then I just, yeah, I didn’t do anything with it, and it just sat there. Well, now Walmart can’t use that when it’s their business name, because it’s already taken. But nobody’s doing anything with it. Somebody just took it. So they wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen. Now, obviously, you know, in the case of Walmart, they just turn around and sue you for using their name. But in the case of Mike Stewart, if somebody went and said, got YouTube comm slash Mike Stewart because their name was Mike Stewart, and they posted a picture of their, you know, child’s sixth birthday and that was the only thing they have posted Well, now, they’ve got that locked up. And Mike Stewart, who’s doing all this stuff with YouTube doesn’t have access to that. So they wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen. So now, in order to get that you have to do a lot of different things. This is where it comes back to what I talked about earlier, you need to first and foremost have that graphic in the background, you need to have that icon. If you don’t have those things, they’re not even going to give you things like I think the thumbnails, they won’t give you the custom thumbnails until you have that. So that feature will be taken away, you get that done, you verify your account with your phone, they’re going to give you longer videos, they’re going to give you the custom thumbnails. And now you’ll have access to that which by the way, that’s a huge thing that needs to be talked about too is thumbnails, you need to do thumbnails, and you need to do good thumbnails, YouTube actually goes out and they pick videos to feature and they’ll put it on the front page or it’ll be you know, when somebody’s watching a video and they feature videos on the side. A lot of that stuff is hand chosen. And it’s done through the title, and the thumbnail. So those are the two most important things that don’t forget the thumbnails. But you need to make sure that you’ve got that channel set up, or you’re not even gonna have access to those. Now, the next step of that is when we’re talking about the AI cards. And when we’re talking about the end screens, now, I’m surprised to hear they actually took the the feature away from you, Mike, that that’s kind of surprising. I hadn’t really heard of a lot of people getting it taken away. But one of the most powerful things that you can do is to have those icons or the end screens where you can have people link back to your website. You won’t be able to do that until you have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time in a 12 month period. That’s a lot of watching. So you think about that, if you have a one One Hour Video, it has to be watched 4000 times or take that math and break it down by minutes and you’re going to see that you Gotta have a lot of views. And it all has to be in a 12 month period. So if you do it in that first 12 months, but then the next six months, you do nothing, they can take that away, because that rolling 12 months, you’re not keeping up with that 4000 hours of viewing, so they can take that stuff away. But you want to be able to connect your website now. In the meantime, you can get access to the end screens and you can get access to the I cards. And I’m not sure I don’t recall off the top of my head, what the what the the threshold is for those particular items. But once you have access to that, you can use those without linking back to your website. So you can literally have icons that link to another video you want people to watch or link to your channel or LinkedIn, you know something internally, you can have an end screen that shows your other videos that shows you know a subscribe button for instance. So even if you don’t have access to send people to your website quite yet, you can send them to different videos and you can send them to your channel. And you can get them to subscribe, and all of that fun stuff inside of there as well. So they can be very, very powerful. I will be the first to admit, however, and Mike I don’t know, you know what your experiences with it, but I found that the cards
hit or miss, you know, they tend to do okay if the video in the video you go, hey by the way, if you hit the icon up here and you click on that you can learn more about this. If they’re they’re just there by themselves, they don’t tend to do all that well. YouTube used to have a much better, much better system for that. Unfortunately, they took it away from us and that was they used to have the annotations that you could put on the screen. So you could put graphics on the screen and boxes and text and things like that right on the screen. And people could click on them and whatnot. They didn’t work on mobile, and which is probably part of the reason they took it away but they took away the whole thing and you know a tear for that because we used to get just tons and tons and tons Tons of clicks, because of that stuff. But nowadays, we’re stuck with the cards and the end screens. So that means two things. One, you got to educate people on using the cards, which means in your videos, you really want to make people pay attention to that card that’s up there in the corner. Number two, in your end screens, you know, you need to get people to the end, they’re not going to see that in screen if they cut off your video halfway. So you need to create content that gets people to the end screen to be able to see that. And how do we do that? Well, you got to, you know, use a lot of your best marketing practices with that, you know, hooking people at the beginning and not delivering that until the end. So they have to stick around, you know, hey, In this video, we’re gonna give you you know, a PDF that tells you the five things you need to do to make a million dollars. And then you go into your video and remind them and at the end, we’re going to get to that PDF and then at the end, you finally give them that PDF. There’s your end screen so you kind of hook them into staying to listen to your content to get all the way to the end which is not easy to do. You know if you’re a local plumber, if you’re a dentist it’s just To get people to watch your entire video all the way through. And so end screens can be great. If you can get people there. My recommendation honestly is that people are still used to the description, the link in the description still seems to be the most powerful tool. I’ve had people watching the video, and you know, they’ll scroll past to leave a comment. And by the way, this is another tip to put your best link and your best call to action as your first comment. So go into your video, create a comment and say, Hey, if you want to download our free PDF on 20 ways to become a millionaire, click this link here, put the link in there, pin that to the top and I’ll tell you why. Because even though the link in the description is powerful, even though the the icon in the top could be powerful, even though the end screen can be powerful, I literally still to this day on a consistent basis. Have people that will watch the video that’ll have the icon and the icon in the corner, it’ll have the in screen it’ll have the little banner that pops up on the icon tells people what to do. And then in the description, I’ll say, hey, click here to get the 20. Whatever’s they will still scroll past all of that, go to the comments and say, How do I get that PDF on the 20? What, you know, it’s everywhere. How did you miss it, you had to scroll past it three times in order to even write this message. But people will do that. So make sure you put that in your comments. They’ll still do it even when even if the comment is right there at the top, they’ll still do it. But make sure you put that in there. And there’s a there’s a good reason for that. Not only from the standpoint of getting people to click, but it’s also a good YouTube SEO trick is to have your your comment on there, like your own comment, pin the comment to the top, give it a heart, all that kind of stuff, and that’s going to help you with SEO as well. But if you can do if you can do cards, do them, you know, do they always get a lot of clicks not not as much as the old stuff did. I don’t think unless really sit there and tell people to do it. But don’t be afraid to tell people to do it. You know, watch a lot of videos, you’ll see people will do that, they’ll be in the middle of the thing and say, and if you want to know more about how to unstop that drain in your kitchen, well, we’ve got a video, you can click the icon right here. And that’s going to take you to that video. So you can do things like that. And don’t be afraid to do that. It does help, it will get more people to click, because people just YouTube has not done a great job of training people to use that icon. And that that’s the big problem. You know, even though some people use it, people aren’t trained to click on it, they don’t know what it is. And and that’s the biggest problem right now. And I think they need to work on that. That would be a big thing. YouTube is paying attention to that. You know, Facebook has done a great job lately of doing TV commercials, on features, you know, join Facebook groups. Well, I think YouTube needs to go you know, the power of the icon or something and, and get that out.
Michael Stewart
You know, the biggest problem is that, that there’s a lot of things People leave blank, all the way from the titles to the header graphics, to you know, everything. And they they forget how powerful a search engine YouTube is they forget how powerful a content marketing opportunity is. And my, my thought process is don’t leave anything blank. And if the if the confusion is you don’t know what to fill out or what’s important. I mean, you know, I remember when the annotations were replaced with the cards and I believe the cell phone was the reason
Unknown Speaker
it’s certainly one.
Michael Stewart
Oh, that man, anything you had annotation was that all went away. Now, you know, if you got 1000 videos in your channel, you got 1000 things to configure that I don’t think there’s a piece of software out there that will that will automate 1000 videos. They got to be done one at a time. So it’s a lot of work to get this thing optimized. We got a lot of great questions. I don’t want to get long today, folks, but I don’t care because I got right here. He may never come back after I’ve grilled him so much. So I better capturing while I still got his attention Number Number one, you know, I have a question about his own here. Here’s the senior moment competent. I know one of them is was paid promotion of videos. You know, I know that you paid money to help us kick start I remember we found a great channel to run a pre roll ad on our Pac Man video. And that just kicked it into high gear and then it just started snowballing. So do you recommend that for small starting out channels to buy some some views?
Ray Lane
Yeah, definitely. And and you know, you have to look at it in different ways. Now, typically, if you if you think of promoting a video, you think of a YouTube ad. Okay. Most people think of an ad as what you would normally think of an ad on TV or whatever, it’s to sell a product. Well, that’s not always the case in YouTube. You can look at a YouTube ad in a totally different way. In the old days, going back, we used to spend quite a bit of money on a video that we wanted to do well. And what we would do with that video is we would put that video on YouTube, we make sure it’s optimized. And then we would go to like, Fiverr and we pay some guy $5 to give us like, 10,000 views of that video, and we pay another guy in Fiverr you know, $5 to do a whole bunch of backlinks and social bookmarking and things like that. So now we’ve spent 1020, sometimes $50 on one video to get it to work its way up. And you know, I’m a slow learner probably is probably part of the issue. Not the smartest way to do things and back Back in the day, it was a smart thing to do it worked. Was it the best thing to do? Maybe not, but it worked and you could do it. But YouTube, of course, got smart and and caught on to all these tricks that people were doing well. I sat there one day and I thought, Wait a minute. If I’m To pay this guy $5 to give me 10,000 views that really don’t matter, they’re garbage views, they’re robots, they’re this and that, why not just pay YouTube directly $5 to promote that video and get my views directly through YouTube, you’re going to get better views, they’re gonna like that you’re giving them money. And of course, you know, you still get the opportunity that if you’ve got a product that is selling something, if you got a video that’s selling a product, and you’re targeting it, by running these ads on YouTube, you’re not only going to get views, but you’re going to get views of people that are actually interested in what you’re doing. Which means you could get sales off of that, you know, we’ve done things where, you know, we we spent the $5 or the $10 to get YouTube to give us views that were somewhat targeted with the purpose of just getting views so that you know, more people could find it, but people bought the product, and so we made back way more than the five or 10 dollars that we spent, does that happen every time? No. But if you go into it not thinking of it as an ad where you’re going to get somebody to buy something, but you go into it as in, I’m paying to get more views so that more people will find the video, then you can be very, very happy with what you get out of that. And again, you know, if you’re, you’re doing this for a local business, a plumbing business, a dentist business, chances are, if that’s a targeted group that watches your video, they don’t need a dentist today. They don’t need a plumber today, so that you’re not going to get a return on that day. But a couple months down the road. They may remember Oh, wait, John’s plumbing was the one that you know had that video, let’s call John’s plumbing. And they’ll look it up and they’ll give them a call. So you got to go into it looking at it as you’re spending money to get views so that your video does better. But you could at the same time, get something back from that depending upon what you’ve got in the video. But yeah, I highly recommend you do that put money that way instead of doing so The scams that are out there, you know, because you’re gonna catch
Michael Stewart
on black hat and black hat always gets banned by Google. So So let me ask you this, and then we got to get some of these great questions, you’re gonna love these questions. Um, do those target to those paid views count towards your hours? hours, and you can, or you will, not only are you getting legitimate views by paying for them targeted views, but you’re also getting credit of building up your hours. Because like a, we’ve been doing some local business advertising and, you know, some of these videos are getting 100,000 views, wow, locally, and, you know, over time, so as long as those views so that that time calculation and those views do count towards your channel, you have no paying YouTube to distribute your video,
Ray Lane
or there are some things that they don’t count and some things that they do but when when you run an ad and somebody watches your video, yeah, that’s still abuse. So,
Michael Stewart
okay, what’s your opinion on what I’m doing right now? One of the reasons I do live streaming twice a month, um, and I could, you know, I Gary Vaynerchuk probably says you should do it, you know, every 15 minutes, you know, and that’s just not realistic for me. Actually, he
Ray Lane
doesn’t The funny thing is, is he says the biggest mistake he made was having people expect him to do something every day. So
Michael Stewart
well, you know, I you know, I’m making consistent because one, this is fun. I get together with old friends here. And we get to talk about my favorite thing of marketing and video. But, but this live streaming is forcing me to make relevant content, which I repurpose as a podcast, I repurpose it as a transcription. I repurpose it as a blog. But in other words, I put it to quote him be everywhere with this content. So it’s a you know, I mean, look at here We’re at 41 minutes, and it’s because there’s just too much call. There’s so much I want to talk about but anything new, exciting, good, bad positive about going live on YouTube.
Ray Lane
Live is great. And there’s a lot of different things that have happened with live, you know, they’ve added stuff like, and we’re talking about YouTube Live. I also highly recommend Facebook Live. I love Facebook Live. So that’s another great opportunity. But with YouTube Live, they’ve added things like the ability for people to pay you to get their question to show up longer. So in other words, if you’re doing a live on youtube, and somebody is watching live and and they’re on YouTube, and they go, Oh, yeah, hey, should I use the color blue or the color red? That’s just going to scroll through with all the other comments in there. But you have the opportunity to pay money to the Creator, content creator, to have that question pop up and stay there so that they see it. So it’ll stay for 10 seconds or 20 seconds and depending on how much you pay, it’ll stay longer. You can tip people while they’re doing live videos, so somebody can just send you $1 as a tip says A lot of really cool things they’re doing with that where you can actually make extra money just by doing lives but lives of course, they rank well. You know, it used to be the conventional wisdom was that if you did a live video, it would rank a lot better than a regular video. I, I don’t know if that’s truly the case, I’ve seen where regular videos do just as well, there’s probably a bit of an edge, but it’s a bit like two videos that have a good title. You know, maybe one’s got a slightly better title than the other. So it’s going to get a little bit of an edge, but realistically, it’s probably only going to be a small amount, it’s not going to be a huge advantage. But it is an advantage. So if you can do it, if you do a live video, it’s definitely going to be at least a little bit of a help. And of course everything is it’s like a big soup. You got to put it all in there. You got to have proper titles, you got to have proper descriptions, you gotta have keywords, you got to have backlinks you gotta have, you know, if you go live you that throws in there, I mean just all these different things. helped to build a channel and to get videos to rank better, but it’s a it is a lot of work. There’s no doubt about it. There was a lot of work involved and I don’t think much,
Michael Stewart
and I don’t know many people out there as skilled as you or Derral Eve’s or that will do it for people. It’s just, you know, it’s it’s clerical work that is just filling in the blanks and answering the questions. Well, speaking of which are answering questions where I want to answer a few questions, and we’re gonna have to wrap it up here, but, but people have stuck with us. That’s awesome. Jean said, What are the current number of views required to unlock features on your channel? Kind of give us a rundown? I want to hear that, you know, I heard that have 1000 subscribers and you said 4000 hours or thousand
Ray Lane
hours? Yeah, so that’s, that’s the big number is 4000 hours, that’s where you’re gonna get You’re really good. You know, that’s when you can associate your website and get all the real powerful tools. For me. I think that’s a lot. That to me, just seems like too much and I’m hoping that they’ll adjust that is some point in time, you know, before they left the door wide open now they’ve really shut the door on most people and I think they need to go somewhere in between that, you know, 4000 hours of view time and that’s a lot. But unfortunately, that’s what it is. Now you have a whole year to do that. So the more you can do it, the better. So can you see these questions? Okay, I can I can see them.
Michael Stewart
And I got to tell you a little bit my good friend here Carolyn bunting. Carlin was one of my video clients from I bet 15 I guess it was 2005 or six I can’t even remember it’s been so long. But he owns a you’re not going to believe the URL. He has Grand Canyon calm and video marketing. tickle the Carlin’s here but answer his question for in there.
Ray Lane
Yeah. Okay. So the question is about the centering of the graphics on the channel. And yes, YouTube has this thing and what they call it is they call it one channel. Okay, and so you create one traffic that works on TVs that works on websites that works on mobile that works on iPads, and the iPads and the phones are different. But what you do is you actually create a, a, an image that’s 2560 by 1440. So that’s a huge image. And you put your content right in the center of that image. So you got a bunch of space on the top and bottom, and you want to leave space on the left and right, you put your content in a banner in the center of that. And then when you upload it to YouTube, the good thing is that they actually show you what it looks like on each of the devices. So you can look at it and go, Oh, you know what? That center graphic is a little too much. It gets cut off on mobile. Go back into Photoshop, make that a little smaller, give it a little more space. But yeah, you do. You center it right in the middle of that and there are templates out there. Like I said, Canva will give you templates like that if you search YouTube channel art, you’ll find a graphic That you can bring into Photoshop and you can mark off, you know where things should fit. So that it’s not
Michael Stewart
I was really impressed with Canva has a template already built in. And as long as you stay within their template, you know, and you adjust it, you make it work. Jane wanted to give Jane another question here, say why pay for YouTube property abuse? How did you do that?
Ray Lane
Okay, so the targeted views, if you’ve ever run any sort of Google ad, and if you haven’t, I’ll explain it a little bit here. YouTube used to kind of run a separate marketing and advertising program inside of Google ads or what used to be AdWords. Now they kind of mix it together. But what you need to do is you need to go into you need to have a Google Ads account. So make sure you go create that it only takes a couple of minutes to do it. It’s not hard. Once you have an ads account, then you can create campaigns and bring in videos so when you go into go Google ads and you say, new campaign, it’ll ask you what kind of campaign you want, you can choose video. And you can just bring in your video, give it you know, an ad title and whatnot, you can choose the type of ad that you want. So you can have a pre roll ad, you can have a search ad. And then you just put a little bit of money towards it, and you keep it simple, $5 a day, $3 a day, run it for three days at $5 and spend $15, you’re gonna get some views out of that. It does have to be approved. So make sure you’re not doing anything too sketchy. But I will say YouTube is a lot more lenient, or at least it seems to be or used to be. Then traditional Google Ads now that they’ve kind of merged and that’s not quite as much the case. But the way the way that they kind of see it is if you’ve got a video on YouTube already, and they haven’t banned it, then they’re probably going to give you an ad for it. They’re not gonna have an issue. But you do have to do that through AdWords to open up an ad account. It doesn’t take long to create a nice ad that they used to have and And forgive me, they probably still do. I just haven’t used it in so long. And now that they changed the entire back end of YouTube who knows where anything is anymore, but they used to actually have a promote button on every video, which made it very simple to just throw $5 towards the video or $10 towards video, but I don’t even know if they have that anymore if you just have to go into AdWords, which is what I do anyway. So
Michael Stewart
yeah, yeah, yeah, if you don’t have an AdWords account, get an AdWords account today and learn your way around it. Well, we’re gonna take one more question, but I cannot believe it right. Just for two guys getting together talking about what they love. Time just flies by and I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of it. So we get any comments you want to have right back on another show? Put it in the comments. We’d love to have him. In fact, answer. Tom is a good client, good buddy of mine old radio guy does a lot with local business. Tom, I think Tom even mentioned earlier that he’s a customer of yours, right? I don’t even know there were hat. What? What do you mean by hashtags? Okay?
Ray Lane
Yeah, just like with Twitter and Facebook, YouTube does have hashtags.
I use them their effectiveness, it’s questionable. Some people don’t like them. And I’ll tell you why. So, let’s say that you make a video about, you know, your selling cans of spinach. And so you create a video about your spinach. And at the bottom of your description, you put hashtag spinach. Now, the good thing about that is potentially anybody who is, you know, looking for spinach might put in that hashtag and they might find your video. The other side of the coin is and this is where a lot of people don’t like it is. When that hashtag shows up on your video. A lot of times, they think, well, people are going to click that hashtag and they’re going to go away from your video. So you kind of have to weigh you know whether you want to give the opportunity for people to click away But measure it with Will people come to your video from hashtags. And what’s cool about the hashtags. And this is something by the way, I don’t recall ever YouTube ever announcing these, I don’t recall anybody ever talking about them for and then all of a sudden they would just there one day. And what it is, is when you put a hashtag and by the way, I discovered this by accident, and I’ll tell you how. So if you put a hashtag in your video, somewhere in your description of your video, you put hashtag spinach. What happens is at the top of that video right under the actual video player, before the description, it’ll show up to three hashtags right there under the video. And the way that I found those was we had a client who was, you know, like 123, Fourth Street suite number 500. And because we put lB 500 it turned it into a hashtag and showed up at the top and I’m like, What the heck is this? Why is this like pound 500 showing up here? And I realized, oh, they’re putting hash tags up there now. And so we started to do the hash tag thing. So what’s great about hash tags, and what I do is on mine, I put hashtag Ray, the video guy. So if they’re watching one of my videos, it’s not like, you know, other people have hashtag Ray, the video guy in their videos. So they’re going to click that hashtag and see only my videos potentially. And then we could do hashtag you know, video marketing. Now you do video marketing, now you’re gonna see stuff from everybody. So you know, you have to weigh that out. Now, the one other consideration with hashtags too, is another thing that YouTube will put at the top underneath your video is location. And so if you’re a local business, you can put in the address of that location and it’ll put a map pin underneath that video. So if that’s more useful to you, because it’s a local business, then you may want to stick with that instead of hashtags for that particular purpose. But if you want to be getting people into your content, I certainly do the hashtags. There are a lot of fun. Like I said, I discovered them by accident be using them ever since I think they’re cool. Um, one other thing with hashtags that I started doing before, hashtags were actually a useful thing in YouTube, is I used to put hashtags in and still do to an extent in my tags as well. And the reason I did that is if I put a tag of hashtag Ray, the video guy or hashtag this, nobody else is going to put that in there. So now what happens is on the side of your video, this side, I’m married here on this side of your video where it says those suggested videos on the side of your video, because you put unique tags into your tag area, and, and maybe even in the content itself. It’s going to find those other videos that have those unique tags. And you’re more likely to have your videos show up in the suggested side than other people’s videos. So that’s one of the thing that I’ve discovered that, you know, it’s not 100% it’s not like a Your stuffs gonna show up. But I did find that more of your stuff showed up when you did
Michael Stewart
that. So it improves things. So So just to recap real quick hashtags is just basically getting a key word with the little Tic Tac Toe sign. I remember David Letterman thought you just typed out the word hashtag No, no hashtag is putting the little numbers on a noun, symbol number symbol, whatever you want to call it, key phrase, and you’re putting the hashtag in the description. And also in the tags area of YouTube videos. Each video can have its own unique tags, its own unique hashtags, and is in pet three,
Ray Lane
three, well, you can have as many as you want, but if you want them to show up at the top underneath the video itself, only, only the first three are going to show up there. So you could put 20 of them in your description, but only the first three are going to show up at the very top.
Michael Stewart
Okay, great, great. Well, listen, I could talk all day but we I try to keep this to a half an hour and we’re almost the whole hour. But this is Ray folks are wanting you back. This is what Carlin said. You know, that’s the whole purpose of Mike store dot live. I tell you I’ve been doing webinars for years and the reason we did all did webinars was is to teach people things. And then we would, you know, pitch something, you know, and say, Okay, I’m gonna stay here for another hour until you buy something. And I’m actually in my retirement years here my slowing down, I would just rather create good content with good people. If you want to know how to support me. Subscribe to my YouTube channel, subscribe to Ray’s YouTube channel, go visit our website, Mike Stewart dot live links to everything that makes me money. dot live secrets is my new course here. I’m not pitching these things. I’m just telling you. I’m living and breathing what I recommend everybody do and I’m going to try to keep bringing people of the caliber here of Ray, but ray is one of the best and he and I said he is The video guy that I look to and I’m so glad you were here today so
Unknown Speaker
me too.
Michael Stewart
So let’s uh this was just a ton of fun and I would love to do it again but right now just folks do this for right go to Ray the video guy comm check it out, subscribe to this things, share this livestream. Share this with everybody subscribe to everything. And I want to build this into something that helps a lot of people. And then I figure that the sponsorships will help me stay white haired in my old age. Right thanks again, buddy. Any final copy before we we call it a day.
Ray Lane
And you know, the only thing I would say is the biggest part of all this is getting out there and doing it you know, you may not know all 30 steps that need to be done. But if you can take step number one, you can always add the others later. So get out there and start making content and then start building upon.
Michael Stewart
Well with that railing Have a great week. And I hope to talk to you soon. And thanks, everybody for all the great questions. And yes, I hope to catch all of you again soon. So, Mike Stewart with Mike Stewart law dot live, saying Good, good. Good day, good week. In two weeks, I’m the second and fourth Monday of every month. And between now and then I’ll figure out what the next show. So subscribe to my email list and know what the next show is. And be sure to check out right with all the things he’s doing. So have a great day.