Dale Davies
Hello, welcome to our Friday live stream, where we’ll be talking about digital marketing. And in particular, today, we’re going to be talking about YouTube for your business.

We are going to be doing our usual giveaway for a copy of How To Get To The Top of Google. So if you are active in a chat today, we shall enter you into a prize draw which we’ll do at the end. If it’s your first time here, make sure you do hit Like down below so you can let us know that you’ve appreciated and enjoyed and learned something from today’s stream.

Also, if you haven’t done it already, hit Subscribe because we’re on a new YouTube channel just for our live streams and webinars. So please do hit subscribe down below. Even if you’re watching us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Twitch, all those places, come across to YouTube and just hit Subscribe.

Dale Davies
I’d love to know where you’re watching from today. I am in a lovely and sunny Edinburgh, which I can’t see because the curtains are closed now, but I’ve been reassured that there is some sun out there. But I’m not doing this alone today, I’m doing this with someone else, only the best for our digital marketing live streams, and that is Jess Percival.

Jess Percival
Hello. Hello. Good afternoon. I’m back again to impart some knowledge.

Dale Davies
(singing)

Jess Percival
Indeed. Indeed. It’s sunny here too. I’ve been out for a walk today, which has been super, super nice. And I took the long route, which was even better. I saw a cat, and it didn’t run away from me.

Dale Davies
Winning.

Jess Percival
So basically great, great morning and great early afternoon, I suppose. Hello, yeah.

Dale Davies
Indeed. Got a few people joining us. We’ve got Gabriel from Luton, UK, we have Phil from a balmy Tokyo. We’ve got Jess Percival from Grantham.

Jess Percival
Yeah.

Dale Davies
But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. I just realised that we got to get this transcribed, so very shortly you will not hear much more from me. You’ll hear from nobody but Jess Percival.

Jess Percival
Thank you.

Dale Davies
Jess is going to be talking to us about how to promote your business using YouTube. Jess…

Jess Percival
That’s the one.

Dale Davies
… take it away.

Jess Percival
That’s the one. And just so everybody knows, feel free to ask questions throughout this talk, but we will be answering them at the end. We should have time. I’m a fast talker, so please ask questions in case we need to fill up time at the end. And of course, as Dale already said, if you have any questions and leave them in the chat, you’ll be entered into win a copy of our book, How To Get To The Top of Google, which you can also download for free in the description if you can’t wait, if you don’t want a physical copy and you prefer an e-book version.

Jess Percival
So, let’s get into the background. Because you’re all here, I would assume that you already know what YouTube is. But if you don’t or if you want to know a few more facts about it, we’re going to cover a few of those right now. If you didn’t know, YouTube has 1.9 billion monthly active users. So that’s not the number of accounts, that’s not random people, that’s people who are using YouTube every single month. And so, that’s one reason why YouTube is such an incredible platform for you to be using to advertise your business. Not only that, it’s suitable for every single business type. You might be wondering, “I don’t think it’s suitable for my accounting or something else,” but trust me, it’s going to be suitable for you, and that’s one of the things that’s so wonderful about it. And it gives you a bunch more ways to connect with potential customers.

Jess Percival
Of course, you know about YouTube videos. I assume you know about YouTube live streams because you’re watching one right now, but there’s other ways that you can connect with people on YouTube. You have the comments section. You have polls that you can run. You have the community tab where you can post gifs, pictures, kind of treating it like a mini little Instagram, Twitter, that kind of space. And you compose Shorts the same as you compose TikTok or Reels. So YouTube’s really becoming this almost full-service social media channel that you can use for a variety of things. And on top of all of that, it’s free. It’s free to sign up, free to create. The only things you have to pay for in YouTube is if you’re running ads or… I can’t even think of any examples. No, you don’t have to pay for YouTube, you can just do everything on here for free. So that’s just a bunch of different reasons why YouTube is relevant to you and pretty much any business you can encounter.

Jess Percival
Oh, I wasn’t sure if Dale had something to add.

Dale Davies
Don’t even know how I did that. I’m so sorry.

Jess Percival
He was just like, “Hello. I would like the attention on me right now, everyone.”

Dale Davies
Yeah, talk about me.

Jess Percival
I would like to say, though, Dale is absolutely cracking at YouTube stuff, behind the scenes YouTube stuff, SEO, all that… Well, SEO, I wouldn’t call it SEO, but planning and research. So if you did want to input any time, Dale, you’re more than welcome to. But anyway, I shall continue onwards. So we’re going to go through a few different ways that you can use YouTube today for your business. And like I said, these are for any business. Pretty much any business can make use of these.

Jess Percival
The first thing we’re going to cover is sharing your expertise. Now, if you started a business, I would expect you to have a little bit of expertise on your business and what you’re selling. If you don’t, it’s definitely time to have a think about it and get some knowledge about what you’re selling and what your company is all about.

Jess Percival
You can share your knowledge with your audience in video form, and it really helps you build trust with this audience and also establishes you as an expert in your space. If your video is the first one to come up when somebody’s like, “How to do accounting. How to apply for small claims court. How to get house insurance,” then all these different things are going to make you look like a real expert in your field and people will think of you kindly when it comes to actually using these services and potentially paying for them.

Jess Percival
You can also share how-tos and DIY so if you offer a practical service, like you’re plumber or you do woodworking, something like that. You could actually show off the start to finish of your process. How to use your products as well, so if you’re selling a SaaS product or let’s say you sell screws for a specific thing, you can show how to use them in all sorts of different ways. And also, you can just upload short tips and tricks.

Jess Percival
A question we get asked quite a lot is, “If we’re showing them how to do it themselves, won’t they just do it themselves?” I mean, yeah, it’s DIY so… ” Are you stuck on the screen now, Dale?

Dale Davies
I’m okay.

Jess Percival
I just looked over and saw you like…

Dale Davies
I’m just gesturing, keeping myself part of the stream without actually talking and making the transcriptor’s job harder.

Jess Percival
I’m sorry, yeah, I shouldn’t-

Dale Davies
So I’ll be emoting over here.

Jess Percival
I shouldn’t have interrupted you-

Dale Davies
I’m still part of it.

Jess Percival
… apologies. “So won’t they just do it themselves?” The answer to that is, not necessarily. So one example that we used and we actually covered this in the blog that’s partnered up with this stream that talks about a bunch of different businesses that are absolutely nailing it in the YouTube space. Blacktail Studio is a… well, I would say a company, it’s just one guy who makes really, really fancy wooden furniture, mostly tables which are basically just huge planks of wood with resin poured on top of them. I made them sound really boring, they’re actually fantastic. But they have over 1.6 million subscribers, and the person behind the channel, Cam, actually said, “I was a bit worried that people would just take my ideas.” But the more he started sharing, the more he realised that people who were looking to make their own furniture, were looking to make things out of resin came to his video, saw the process and were like, “I do not want to do that. I’m going to get this dude to do it because he’s a lot better than me. I know he’s going to do a good job.”

Jess Percival
Even though he was sharing all his secrets and all these little tips, you can see some of them there, like how to stop an epoxy leak, how to saw a track saw, make any sort of track saw, so he’s sharing these secrets but he’s also sharing the ins and outs, the good, the bad, and all the reasons why somebody might not want to DIY this. Even though he’s giving away his secrets, he’s still making around $15,000 a month just from this business, just from his physical business. That doesn’t include the ad revenue and whatnot that he’s actually making from YouTube. And he said that some of his tables can go for $15,000 because he’s built himself up as such an expert through his YouTube.

Jess Percival
He also said in the same video, which was from… Can’t remember who this video was from. Dale might be able to pop the link in the chat, because he’s the one who sent me the video, but unfortunately, I cropped out the channel’s name. But in this video, he actually said that he’s focusing more time on his social media presence. He would rather just make tables to film that are a good video because he’s making more money off of YouTube than he is from his table business, or they’re equaling out. So I did think that was very, very, very interesting.

Jess Percival
Realistically, you can show your value and sort of share your USPs as well, show what makes you a good business while you’re sharing your expertise. You don’t have to share everything. So if you do have some little secret steps that make your products awesome or make your, in this case, tables awesome, you could just dilute it, like say, “Now I’m going to do this step off camera that’s my secret super step that makes this 10 times more durable.” So you don’t have to share everything, but it’s good to share a lot. You’d be surprised how many people still want to buy from you even if you do share all your secrets.

Jess Percival
And finally, be honest about the process. If it is a tough process, you don’t have to show everything as being absolutely perfect. Thank you, Dale, for sharing that YouTube link below. But yeah, you can be honest about the process. Especially if you do show some of the bad parts, maybe not your mistakes but some of the more challenging bits, that encourages people more to go with you rather than trying to do it themselves. So yeah, that’s the first thing that I would say. I think any business can do that, whether you do accounting software and you want to show people how to do their accounting manually but really your software makes their life a lot easier, that’s an example of how you could do something like that.

Jess Percival
So next up, adjacent to this, is giving out free information. So it’s kind of what we are doing right now. We are giving you out some free information that you can use and that’s super actionable. Dale was making sure that you truly know what we’re talking about right now. So yeah, we can give out free information and then essentially charge for better information. You can share simple or basic information on your YouTube channel, and then those that want to advance their skills can do so via your paid course or tool.

Jess Percival
And what makes YouTube even better for that kind of thing is they’re actually seeing you give out that information. Especially if you’re teaching a skill, teaching… I guess everything you teach is a skill. Yeah. So if you’re teaching a skill, then it shows that you are an expert, same as what we were talking about before, you’re an expert in your field, you’re a great teacher, and then people will expect the same from a paid course or tool.

Jess Percival
An example we used here was in a channel called Accounting Stuff, who shares videos about accounting. He’s got some videos here that are accounting basics, the accounting equation for beginners, more accounting basic stuff. He even uploaded a five-hour video about doing accounting, like the ultimate accounting thing, and this is all free. But those who get free value from this know they will get even more value from his paid stuff.

Jess Percival
So he’s got these cheat sheets here. And even though these range from like $3,50 to $5, and then the full all-in-one cheat sheet is 36, when you look back at the views that he’s getting on these videos, if even 10% of these people, so like 8,000… Maybe that’s 1%. I don’t know, but anyway, if a fraction of those people buy this bundle, that’s money. And these videos aren’t going anywhere, these videos are always going to be relevant. All of these I would expect are going to be relevant to people getting into accounting. So this is passive income not only on his YouTube and on the ads he will be running, but also for things like this. So that’s another way that YouTube is super, super handy. £85,900 pounds. Thank you, Dale, appreciate the quick maths for you there.

Jess Percival
So next up we have objection handling. Now, objection handling is something we talk about a lot of in Thinkplus because we don’t see the point in leaving these things out when you can nip them in the bud right away. So it’s actually really important to think about the kind of things that your potential customers might not like or concerns they might have about your business and then covering those before they even have chance to go, “Oh, well, I’m not sure.” Nip them in the bud. YouTube is actually a really, really great way to do that. So you can use video to answer questions without your audience needing to actually come and ask you through whatever that’s a phone call, whether that’s via an online chat or email.

Jess Percival
Instead of you having to go through that process where they have to wait for a response, you can use video to answer that. I know you’re probably going to think, “Well, can’t you just write that in text?” Yeah, but video’s really cool, and it can show things that maybe you don’t even think to write down. But if you’re showing off your full process on YouTube and then embedding that onto your website, then that’s one way that things like… We’ve got an example coming up about pool cleaning, but somebody might be like, “Does this trash my garden? Wait, is it going to damage my grass?” And then they’ll see the people working and doing the process in the video and be like, “Oh, their grass looks fine. Okay, I’ll go with this company.”

Jess Percival
You can also use it to cover questions about your process that come up really often. So if you find customers asking really similar questions, you can have a video on your site homepage that can answer a bunch of those, whether it’s FAQ. Or you can do it in a more casual way. You can say, “Maybe you think that cleaning a swimming pool trashes your grass, and I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t.” But we’ll go through some of the questions that people might think about. For instance, if they’re thinking I want to get my pool cleaned, so some of the questions that might pop up is like, “What does the process look like? How long will it take? Will this company do a good job? Or is my pool too far gone, has it turned into an absolute swamp and I won’t be able to get it cleaned?” And here is some of the answers to that question.

Jess Percival
So there’s a chap called The Pool Guy. I’m obsessed with his videos. He has a great TikTok as well. He’s just this really chill guy. I don’t know what his accent is, but he just sounds like a really down-to-earth chap. And he cleans people’s pools. Here are some of the video titles that he’s included like The Dirtiest Hot Tub I’ve Ever Had To Clean, Cleaning Grandma’s Filthiest Pool. That one was a really viral one on TikTok because everybody was always asking for updates on grandma’s pool. A pool that’s been left for eight years, showing the before and after of a pool that’s green and how it looks when it’s clean, or like Swamp or Swimming Pool.

Jess Percival
All these videos are showing pools that are really dreadful, like the worst they can be, and then showing what they look like when they’re clean. So if your pool is even a little bit less dirty than these horrendous pools, you’ll know that it can be clean just by watching these videos. He shows a bunch of the process, like shows them climbing in the pool, shows them cleaning the outside, shows them doing stuff in the pump room. I do not have a pool, I’d just like to add. Don’t know anything about pools. Everything I know about pools is from this person’s channel. But all of this helps put customer’s mind’s ease in ways that you can’t necessarily always expect. So people who do want their pools cleaned will be watching things like this one-hour video that shows pretty much the whole process in real time, and it will help answer a bunch of their questions.

Jess Percival
Something else that I noticed about this too is if you’ve got a stranger coming to your house, that can be scary for me. As a lone female, that can be quite scary. So if I did have a pool and lived on my own, I’d feel comfortable with these people come into my house because I’ve seen them in the YouTube videos, seeing how they act with their customers and seen how they are. So it builds up this extra level of comfort. I don’t know, that was just one thing that popped into my brain while I was researching this.

Jess Percival
Another thing that’s awesome about creating videos like this is you can add them to your website and service pages. If you’ve got a compilation of all the work that you’ve done, you can put that on your homepage. But, of course, if you’ve got individual services, you could put the individual videos for those services on the pages. That way, visitors are getting the videos in the places they’re already looking. And also, hosting them on YouTube gives you the chance for extra reach. The Pool Guy gets, as you can see on some of these, you can’t because they’re cropped out, but he gets millions of views on these videos. A lot of them are people that aren’t interested in or they don’t have a pool. They’re not going to ever use his services. But there are a lot of people in those comments as well who do want to get their pools cleaned and do want to use these services.

Jess Percival
And so, it’s just another way to get more reach as well as getting some extra ad revenue as well. I know I’ve said before, but you can get passive income on YouTube. I’m not afraid to say, maybe Dale’s going to tell me off, but we get a bit of passive income from YouTube too. And it’s really, really nice. Oh, Dale’s found The Pool Guy. He’s going to put some videos on. But you can see he has 549,000 subscribers and there’s almost a guarantee that some of those people are people who own pools. Yeah, he’s worked with Joey Essex. He’s done some stuff with Stacey Solomon as well. So he’s done a weird bit of influence marketing. And he did something with Toby Carvery as well where they went to a Toby Carvery to stock up on food before they went to do a pool cleaning thing. Yeah, so look, he’s getting like 36 million views. And stuff like that satisfying pool cleaning compilation has 15 million views.

Jess Percival
Like I said, not all of these will be people who want their pools cleaned, but even if the people watching aren’t people with pools, maybe people in their lives have pools. I think the grandma pool one there with 5.6 million views, the girl who got him booked in to clean the pool and found him on TikTok, that’s not a pure fact, but I would like to say I think that was one of the things that happened. And yeah, Dale said it’s the entertainment factor. That’s another thing as well. He has such a great personality. We’ll touch on that a little bit later, but even if you feel like you don’t have a good personality for camera, after a while, you do start to build up your confidence and get into it. But we’ll touch on that more a little bit later on.

Jess Percival
The next tactic we have is targeting your audience’s interests. Now, everybody’s target audience has interest outside of just your specific product, and one thing that you can do is do an audience profile and really think about everything that your audience does like, what’s the first thing they do when they wake up? What are their hobbies? Are they outdoorsy people? Are they people who tend to stay in? There’s all sorts of different things that you can do to figure out what makes your audience tick. And they all have different hobbies and things that they’ll be looking for on YouTube even when they’re not really thinking about your product.

Jess Percival
So as I’ve said, yeah, your audience, they’re very likely to have interests outside of your business and related to your business if they’re already looking at your product, so think about some ways you could create content combining those interests with your products.

Jess Percival
A great example that we have is vidIQ who we actually use on our… Gosh, sorry… who we use on our YouTube channel. They have a product, a tool that helps you grow on YouTube by showing you some stats, showing you some trends. It’s really, really good. I was actually using it last night for my personal YouTube channel, and there was already a bunch of stuff that I was like, “Oh, I wish I was paying for the pro version, I want to unlock it.” But yeah, what they do, instead of just making videos where they’re like, “Hey, this is how to use our product. This is what you do, blah, blah, blah,” they make videos that YouTube creators who are likely to want to use their product will find interesting. So you can see some of the examples of the videos here that are like How To Get More Subscribers on YouTube, How I Get Legit YouTube Views for Free, How Mr. Beast Beat The YouTube Algorithm, The Right Way to Start YouTube. These are all people who will find use out of the product alongside this information that’s being given out for free on YouTube, which is super, super helpful. Dale’s now doing more research.

Dale Davies
Oh, I just realised I’ve shared the wrong one. This is TubeBuddy, this isn’t [crosstalk 00:22:03].

Jess Percival
Yeah, it is TubeBuddy.

Dale Davies
I’m sorry.

Jess Percival
It is TubeBuddy, which is similar, but not quite the same.

Dale Davies
Sorry about that.

Jess Percival
No, it is all good, it is all good. But basically, it shows some similar things to that. It shows some different stats and whatnot. It’s all good. Don’t fret about it. But yeah, so that’s another way that you can connect with people, find what’s adjacent to your business, make awesome content about that. If you’ve got a product that’s boring or it’s hard to make loads and loads of videos about it, like vidIQ, if they just made videos about their product, it’s not going to work, whereas what they do is they say, “Hey, this thing that I’m teaching you right now would be so much easier if you paid for our product.” And they don’t make it impossible. Okay, so Dale’s showing us a few of the different things that come up with vidIQ. I always want to call it vidQL. Every single time I read it, it changes to vidQL, it’s really strange. But it shows you different trends that are happening. When it’s loaded, it’s shows you the different search times that people have searched to find these videos. So, it basically has a bunch of different stuff.

Jess Percival
Dale, I think somebody’s having trouble with the video on LinkedIn. If you could drop a message in the LinkedIn chat and just say, “Come over to YouTube, it’s definitely working here.” But yeah, so that’s another thing that you can do on YouTube. So the next one I think people don’t really talk about as much as they could. Basically, it’s putting customers minds at ease before they use your service. So as much as we don’t want to admit it, some services do have fear attached to them, whether that’s going to the dentist, going to the doctors, or even just going to do something new, going to take your dog to be groomed, which is the topic we’re going to cover next. There’s also customers who have been burned by another business. So sometimes we say about some of our customers that we are the first day after a bad breakup. They’ve been with a marketing agency who has wronged them a bit, they haven’t had any results. Then when they find us, they’re like, “I kind of want to do marketing, but I’m a bit scared because I was with this other agency and they didn’t really help.” We use our YouTube channel to tell people, “Hey, look, we are experts. We know what works. We know what doesn’t. Here’s some awesome people that we’ve worked with. Here’s some success we’ve got.” And so that helps put their minds at ease.

Jess Percival
And if you are the person that puts their mind at ease, they’re going to be more likely to want to come to you and want to use your service. Let’s say they’ve had cowboy builders in the house and you make a video series on ways that you fixed cowboy building, they’re going to be like, “Wow, I want to hire that builder because I’ve had those problems. I can see that this person is trustworthy and will fix my problems.”

Jess Percival
The example I used here is a video of a channel even that I absolutely love. This is one of those channels that if I don’t know what to watch and want to put something on, I put Girl With The Dogs on because she’s so lovely, so funny, and the videos are just so, so relaxing. The reason why I included her here was we’ve got a bunch of comments of people saying that they would recommend her services, that they know that she grooms cats and they would recommend that cat owners go to her. I will read some of the comments in a moment.

Jess Percival
But she’s a great example of someone who just films a bit of her process, talks about some of the challenges she faces, some of the challenges that pet owners face, and she shows physically in video form how she calms these pets down and how she makes the experience better for them. So one of my favourite comments was this cat was extremely tolerant for having driven two hours, which basically means that these people found her online and then were like, “We will travel, we will bring our pet two hours because our pet has such horrible time at the groomers and we know that she will take care of them really, really well.” Another thing to say about Girl With The Dogs that isn’t included in this in this slide but I think is really great to talk about as well, is that she uses YouTube not only to promote her grooming business, but also to do some affiliate marketing and to sell some products on her store.

Jess Percival
She’s based in Ohio. And something I cover in the blog is that there’s only so many pets in Ohio, right? There’s only so many pets that you can groom in Ohio. So the way that she’s making extra money from her channel and from this global audience is by selling the products on her online shop and also making some money from YouTube ad revenue as well. So she’s basically covering all bases. Dale just posted a comment saying, “We had a comment the other day from a nail salon owner who had a client drive halfway across the UK to use them.” That is such a good example. And yes, I remember that comment. I can’t remember what it was to do with, Dale, but it was absolutely fantastic comment where somebody had looked up a specific problem that they were having with their nails, and because this nail salon came up first using our YouTube channel as guidance of how to optimise for SEO and how to touch on customer pain points and issues that people might be having, that person drove halfway across the country to go and have their nails done that so long because they knew that person was an expert who had put their mind at rest with their particular fears.

Jess Percival
And yeah, it’s just a great thing to do. And if you could do it in YouTube form and video form, it’s even better. Because then instead of just saying, “I’m good at this, and I’m better than the competitors,” you are showing how much better you are, how much more comfortable they’ll be with you, how much safer they’ll feel. And they show the before and after, which is even better.

Jess Percival
So I am getting through this quite quick. I can see that Dale’s been saving some questions. Last but not least, and I think me and Dale will both say this, it’s really, we really love making YouTube content. We really love working on the YouTube, coming up with ideas, doing live streams, all this great stuff. It is genuinely really, really fun. I did say it can be a lot of fun, sometimes it’s a little bit stressful, but most of the time, it’s just great fun. Something that I think is really important to talk about as well is that it helps you broaden your skills and understand your target audience better.

Jess Percival
So in terms of broadening your skills, if you’re a little bit scared to talk in front of a crowd, let’s say you want to start attending conferences, really want to be a thought leader in your space, YouTube is a great way to get yourself in front of a camera and just talk. Something else that’s fantastic about it as well as you can see your progress. As you go along, you get to see your progress and how much you’ve improved. We actually held a virtual event, Dominate 2022, which was hosted by Dale. But I hosted some round tables for that, and I was like, “Wow, I can actually do this. I feel like I have the confidence now to do this in real life and actually do it on a physical stage or host on a physical stage.” I wouldn’t have been able to get that practise in in a more chilled environment without YouTube. So I do think that’s really important.

Jess Percival
The other thing is understanding your target audience better. You can really connect with people on a personal level. “Jess is a true pro.” Not quite. But right now while we’re live, we’re getting feedback from people in the comments. We’re getting comments on our YouTube videos constantly about people saying, “Hey, we’d love to see this,” or making comments about stuff saying how great we are. And so, it is really nice to be able to understand your target audience better and see the same questions coming up, the same comments, the same requests, and then being able to make content targeting those people. Or there’s a new trend that you weren’t really aware of and, suddenly, people are all asking about it, you’ve got a new service offer to offer.

Jess Percival
One that I didn’t include in this presentation because it’s a contentious issue, but that’s exactly what Kylie Jenner did with Kylie Cosmetic. She created the YouTube channel because she knew she wanted to launch a beauty brand but wasn’t really sure what to do. And from the comments and interactions on her YouTube content, she realised people really wanted lip kits because they wanted to have the same look that she had. So she created the lip kits. They sold out in one minute. And that was just from communicating with her audience on YouTube and building her herself up as a thought leader in the space and being good at makeup and understanding what her audience actually wanted.

Jess Percival
So yeah, I think that’s really important. Hopefully, if Tim is here, apologies, Tim, for us to exposure you like this. But here’s a screenshot of our first YouTube video from 2017 followed by our most recent YouTube video over on our main Thinkplus channel. And you can see even by Tim’s body language, his lighting, everything, the camera quality, in those four or five years, he’s really come a long way in terms of how he speaks. I think our first ever video he’s not even in the video. It’s just like a presentation, you can hear his voice over. I mean, Tim’s in the comments, cool, but I’m sure he would also say that his confidence and presence on camera has grown a lot since his first YouTube video.

Jess Percival
And I would say the same about me and Dale. I used to get so, so nervous about doing these live streams. Now I’m just like, “I’m here. It’s chill. I can just rock up.” I was a bit nervous about this one today, but it is what it is. But you get more confident. You get better at speaking. Don’t let a few bad videos get you down. I’ve got some videos on my personal YouTube channel from years ago that are just embarrassing. You just private them, it’s fine. If they’re bad videos, you can just private them, move on and keep growing. So yeah, that’s also important.

Jess Percival
I’ve realised we are nearly at the end, so I apologise for that one, but I’m sure there’s plenty more we can discuss. But in summary, there are multiple ways that you can use YouTube for your business. So if you think that your business can’t use YouTube, type in some keywords into the search and see what comes up, because I can guarantee you, something will come up for your product. I’m trying to think of some of the things I’ve searched on YouTube, like how to change a tyre or how to clean your washing machine, like all these things that you need a visual explanation. My mom’s washing machine broke, and we were on YouTube looking for videos of how to fix this specific washing machine. And we got it fixed ourselves.

Jess Percival
But if that was a plumber running that channel, we’d be more likely to be like, “Hey, let’s pay for this plumber’s services because they helped us when our washing machine was broke.” Even though they didn’t actually help. So yeah. In summary, here are some of the different things you can do. You can share your expertise, give out free info, handle objections in video form, target your audience’s interests that are adjacent to your brands, put people’s fears at ease by showing why you are the best person for the job, and just have fun, pretty much, just have fun with it. It genuinely is fun. You could be creative. It’s not a formal platform as something like LinkedIn, so you can be a little bit more daft on YouTube, I would say. So, yeah, we’ve got some time for some questions now because I did absolutely whiz through that one. But yeah, please feel free to pop some questions in the chat. I know we have a couple of questions and hopefully if we don’t have that many me and Dale can just discuss more YouTubey things.

Jess Percival
You’re muted.

Dale Davies
That’s rude. Super cool. So yeah, we’ll go through some questions and answers now. And if you are active in the chat at any point, you will be entered into a prize draw. We’ve had 10 people be active so far, so that means one of you will be getting the book.

Jess Percival
Amazing.

Dale Davies
Although I’ve been active with the Thinkplus Twitch channel on YouTube, so about five of those are probably just us. If you’ve enjoyed what Jess had to share with you today, just make sure you do hit Like down below so we know that you’ve valued and learned something from what Jess had to share.

Jess Percival
Indeed.

Dale Davies
But we will go onto those questions.

Jess Percival
If you are stuck with your own marketing, please feel free to submit your website for a free website marketing review. You can do so at the link above, exposureninja.com/review, and you’ll get a 10 to 15-minute review of all your website, your marketing, and it’s done by a person, not a tool. So it’ll be done by a real person who is taking into account all the different aspects of your website. Oh, yeah, very cool.

Dale Davies
Splendid stuff. Okay, cool, I got some questions and answers. I’m going to make sure that I’m blocked off because I’m the [inaudible 00:34:43]. That’s better. Cool. One of the first questions we had was, “Is there any guidance on typical video duration?”

Jess Percival
That’s a really such great question. As you saw with The Poor guy, for example, here’s video duration varied quite a lot. That’s because he’s got different videos that serve different purposes. So he’s got these really short videos that he’s repurposing from TikTok that could be like satisfying pool cleaning videos, like mini ones, that he just uploads as YouTube Shorts. Then he’s got some that are 15 to 20 minutes in length where he shows the full process. On occasion, he’ll upload videos that are an hour long when he feels like he wants to show a bigger process from start to finish. So it’s really about how much do you want to show, and do you have enough to say to keep people invested in your video?

Jess Percival
With The Pool Guy, one of the reasons he can upload longer videos, whether that’s 15, 20 minutes, is because people want to stay around and see what happens at the end. They want to see the pool cleaned at the end. Accounting stuff, for instance, can share longer videos because people know that by the end of it they will have learned a new skill. So there’s different things. I mean, we say this with blogs as well. We only make our blogs as long as they need to be. We don’t write things for word count. Like Dale always tells me off for being like, “I’ve written this many words.” I just like to see that I’ve written a load of words because I feel proud of it, but realistically, if I could tell the same story in 300 words and get that information across, then I would use 300 words. So it’s the exact same thing with YouTube. You can create really long videos or you can create really short videos. But I would say if you’re uploading minute-long videos, people might be, “Huh, that’s kind of weird.” Unless you’re doing it on YouTube Shorts, for instance, because YouTube Shorts has a limit of one minute. But yeah, unfortunately, there’s not a magic number as to how long your video should be. [crosstalk 00:36:54].

Dale Davies
In my opinion, the best thing to do is to get started and start producing video, and you can put out different lengths. So, in the same way that we might want to test the website to see how we can improve the conversion rate, we might do an A/B test, so do one design of a page and another design of a page and see which one wins in a battle between them, I would do the same with videos. You can create something long, you can create something short, and see how people respond to them. YouTube analytics’ actually the best it’s ever been. So now you can go into a video and you can see what the average viewing duration is. You can see what the retention is like. So videos, 70% of the people might drop off in the first six minutes of your video, okay, maybe your video is too long. Or you might have an hour-long video, the retention is still at 50% 45 minutes in. So it really depends, first of all, on the subject matter that you’re covering, how much depth you going into as well, and then you can decide which is best for that topic.

Dale Davies
But then as you get into routinely creating videos, you’ll start to spot, “Okay, my video that are shorter do better than the ones that are longer.” Some of our longest videos, the retention rate by 30 minutes in sometimes could be as little as 40%, 30%, 20%. So that’s telling me, “Okay, 60% of the people watching videos aren’t getting anything by that point, so many the videos are too long. Or we’ve covered it well enough that they’re going to see something else.” Or, as with anything, as with content creation for your website, use analytics to inform your future content creation process, whether it needs to be longer or shorter or not. Another thing you can do is just look at what videos are out there already and see if they’re shorter or not or longer, and then see if you want to conform and be the same length or do the opposite and be the outlier and do longer, more in-depth videos.

Jess Percival
Yeah, complete. Basically, what we’re trying to say is don’t cut your videos too short just because you feel like you need to hit a certain number, and don’t make them long just because you feel like you need to hit a certain number. YouTube rewards videos that make people stay on the platform. That’s what it’s all about. And if you create a video that people don’t learn anything from and then they close YouTube because it was too short, it’s not going to get pushed to the algorithm. Like I said, unfortunately, it’s not a straight answer. You do really have to test a bunch of different things, as Dale said. So yeah, next question.

Dale Davies
Another question from Lee is asking, “Do you need to drive traffic to your YouTube channel, or is it that people find you through the YouTube search tool?”

Jess Percival
Yeah, that’s a really, really great, great question. YouTube is actually our biggest social media platform. Of course, we do promote our YouTube videos across our other social media platforms. I think we maybe get 5 or 6% of our traffic through our social media platforms. Dale will probably correct me on this, but I think either most of our YouTube traffic comes through search and then second, it’s recommended… or suggested, which will basically be searches when people search around your topic. And then recommended is that little bit down the side that says things that you should watch next, or when you open up YouTube and it shows you the recommended videos that you can watch.

Jess Percival
So yeah, that’s our two main ways of getting traffic. So really, it’s all about looking what’s in your space, but not only looking what’s in your space, looking at those videos and then seeing in those search and suggested… sorry, the recommended and suggested boxes what’s being recommended. What are people watching that’s similar to what you’re posting or people that are in your niche. So yeah, people can definitely find you through the YouTube search tool, but don’t underestimate the power of the suggested or the recommended videos as well and see if you can create content that’s going to appeal to those people. I can see that Dale’s trying to do something in the background to show off our stats, but I’m not sure that it quite worked.

Dale Davies
Yeah. I’m getting stopped by Google trying to verify my account.

Jess Percival
Ah, yes, of course, of course.

Dale Davies
What I was trying to do was to see what our percentages look like within YouTube’s analytics.

Jess Percival
That’s absolutely fine. I’ll leave you to sort that out. There’s a couple of ways that you can really optimise for search, and unlike other platforms, it’s not necessarily about having the best hashtags or having the best description. It’s not like SEO, but what you do need is fantastic titles and fantastic thumbnails because that’s what people are seeing in those results when they’re looking for searches. Last night, I was looking for Sims 4 building videos, which obviously isn’t related to business, but it is related to me, and things that I was looking for in the thumbnails is how good does the finished thing look, does the person in the video look nice? Are they going to actually talk to us? Is it going to be interesting? And so, you can get a feel for that from the thumbnail and then the title would be explaining what they were building and I’d be like, “Huh, okay, that’s what I want to watch.”

Jess Percival
But anyway, Dale’s going to show us some of our stats. So you can see, we get most of our traffic by quite a big margin, nearly 34% of our traffic, is from YouTube search, so people searching for terms around marketing. I would expect we do run some YouTube advertising as well. You don’t have to do that, but we do like to do it on videos that we’ve put that time and energy into them. So really it’s a good plan to put some money behind it. If you are putting ad spend on other platforms, why not put it on YouTube? And as you can see, 17% is also suggested videos, which is the type of stuff that comes up next to the video where it says what you should watch next or what pops up at the end of the video. So yeah, external is, yeah, 7%, I was right… well, nearly 7%. [crosstalk 00:43:06].

Dale Davies
So, 35% of the external traffic is actually from Google search. So Google is showing more videos than ever in the search results. Plus there is a Videos tab. So not only are you getting views from YouTube search engine, which is the second biggest search engine in the world after Google, you’re also getting them from Google as well. So there’s always potential there too. And then suggested videos. So, people have watched this video, which is also another one of our videos, and then watched another one of our videos based on that sidebar of suggested videos as well. So, as you can see, there’s a lot of traffic options. You can rely entirely on YouTube search. 33% is a hefty amount of traffic when you think that we’ve been seen by 7.2 million YouTube users last year. This is all of 2021. That’s a hefty amount. So 33% of that is going through to our channel, that’s mega.

Dale Davies
So you can get started and just start producing videos based on search queries that you know people are going to go to YouTube before because they’re informational or they want to see how our process works and so on. Or you can start to think the other way, which is, how do I get promoted by the browse feature? So when you go onto the homepage and you see all those videos in front of you, that’s people browsing. That’s Google… sorry, YouTube or Google suggesting videos to you. And the more entertaining your videos are, the higher the retention rate, and all that kind of stuff, engagement is strong, the more likely they’re going to recommend you in this browse area, and that percentage can actually be your top traffic source.

Jess Percival
Absolutely.

Dale Davies
I’ve seen channels where browse is their leading… Okay, Mr. Beast, who we’ve been watching a lot of videos of recently, I imagine browse is probably the number one place where they get their views from.

Jess Percival
Yeah.

Dale Davies
People aren’t going onto Google… sorry, onto YouTube to search people giving away money in the street and stuff like. That’s not what people are searching for. So depending on what you’re-

Jess Percival
Like [inaudible 00:45:24] boat with sharks, that was one he did recently.

Dale Davies
Yeah. Yeah.

Jess Percival
People aren’t searching that, but they’ll see the thumbnail and the title on their YouTube browse and be like, “What on earth?” And then they click.

Dale Davies
Yep. Absolutely.

Jess Percival
So yeah, very, very good points there. Next question: “Is there any way of targeting activity geographically on YouTube?” There are some ways you can include in your video data when you upload your video where it was filmed and the language it was filmed in, but there’s not so many ways to target those things organically, unless you are creating content about that country. But then again, that’s probably going to attract tourists and stuff. But it really depends on your business, but, yeah, you can add the country that you filmed in and that might help.

Jess Percival
I know that with TikTok, for instance, obviously TikTok is not the same, but your videos are more likely to be recommended to people in the country the same as the one that you’ve made your account in, so the one that’s attached to your account. I can imagine YouTube it’s somewhat similar, but yeah, you can say where it was filmed. So there is some ways, and I’m assuming with advertising as well. Not really familiar that much with YouTube advertising, but I’m guessing you can target geographically like you can with every single other platform pretty much.

Dale Davies
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s similar to the way Google search works. If you’re searching from a certain location, it will update the search results based on your location, based on the language that you searched in. For example, a lot of SEO, the video’s the highest SEO traffic, like SEO search terms on YouTube, it comes mainly from India, Pakistan, places like that. And the videos in Hindi and Punjabi and those languages do incredible views because when people are searching for SEO subjects in Hindi, Punjabi, and so on, they’re being shown those videos and less, say, ours or any other channel that ranks for SEO search queries.

Jess Percival
Absolutely.

Dale Davies
So yeah, if you do have a geographical focus, you can start to embed that into the settings on the back end, but also Google… well, sorry, I keep saying Google because it’s the current buzzword. But YouTube will figure that out and display your videos in the right place as well.

Jess Percival
Absolutely. And one thing that I notice every year is YouTube will release a list of the most popular channels just overall, and there’ll always be people on like Twitter who are from English-speaking countries who are like, “Why is this person on the list? I’ve never heard of them.” And they’re the biggest streamer in the whole of Germany, and they’re the second biggest account on the entirety of YouTube and people are like, “Who is that?” And it’s like, “Well, no, they are famous, just in their country, and their videos aren’t going to be recommended.” I couldn’t tell you the last time that I had a video recommended to me on YouTube that wasn’t in a language that I speak, because it’s just that good. Do not fret about it too much if you’re trying to target people in a specific country.

Jess Percival
Like I said with some of the other YouTube accounts, they find ways to monetize their audience who aren’t local or who aren’t in their demographic, whether that’s through the YouTube Partner Programme or if you’re just selling stuff. Like Accounting Stuff, his accounting cheat sheets probably apply to other people who aren’t in the UK where he is. So there’s a bunch of different ways that you can use YouTube for that. Next question, Dale.

Jess Percival
“Is there a difference between keyword research for blogs and for YouTube?” Absolutely. There is some crossover, and we do a bit of crossover because we’ll write a blog first and then do a YouTube video. But if you did want to do things differently… Dale’s smiling, he’s like, “Oh, Jess just said something really confidently and now that she’s speaking has realised that maybe she’s wrong.” So let’s say you’re typing things on Google, right, that’s different to what somebody might search on YouTube. You may even find that your YouTube audience and your blog audience are slightly different. We probably wouldn’t turn every single blog into a video, although we do because it’s nice and we’ve already written the script for it and done the research, so it does make things easier. Okay, I’ve messed that one up. There’s a crossover in what I would say, actually… Sorry, Gabriel, apologies. I think Dale’s going to sweep in and save me now.

Dale Davies
I would say the keyword research for blog posts on YouTube is exactly the same.

Jess Percival
There we go then. [crosstalk 00:49:52].

Dale Davies
I would say that if I was doing keyword research for, say, some of our biggest videos, that research would’ve been exactly the same for a blog post. So what are people searching? I’m looking at search volumes. I’m looking for competition as well. So if you do keyword analysis, don’t know which tool you’re going to use, so we recommend Semrush because I think it’s the best SEO suite of tools, but you can use SE Ranking to… It tells you how competitive that search term is, so how many people are bidding on the ads that would appear there. There are ads on YouTube too, so there’s a competitiveness as well that you can measure. And you can determine which keywords to rank for based on those metrics, so search volume, competition, the bid value, the how much a company’s paying to have their business feature in the first position, second position, and so on.

Dale Davies
I’m using all the same kind of data to influence the keywords I want to put a focus on. This also comes down to knowing my target audience and also knowing what my sales funnel looks like as well. Jess has an upcoming blog which is just super on understanding what your target audience wants and what kind of content you need to be doing. So keep an eye out next week for that.

Jess Percival
Yes, I’m very excited.

Dale Davies
exposureninja.com/blog, and it’ll come up there. But yeah, if you go through our most popular videos… Actually, I can do that here. Bear with me a second.

Jess Percival
But while Dale is discussing that, I’d like to clarify what I think I was trying to say, which is that there will be differences in this content. For instance, how we title a blog post and how we use those keywords, may they’re very, very different to the YouTube video. For instance, the YouTube video that we’ve got coming up on Monday that we’re super excited about is about comparing different SEO marketing tools. The video that we’ve got for YouTube is going to be titled something like SEO Marketing Tier List, because we know that tier lists are popular video type on YouTube. But if we were to turn that into a blog, normally it goes in reverse, we write a blog and then turn it into a YouTube video, but if we were to do it in reverse, we would probably title it differently. Rather than calling it tier list or using YouTube buzzwords that are popular, we would title it with something like Comparison Of The Top Marketing Tools, something like that that’s a bit more bloggy and less YouTube grabbing people in the title the same kind of way.

Jess Percival
For instance, yeah, Dale’s highlighted the Patagonia one over there. I don’t know if that’s what intended to do.

Dale Davies
Yeah.

Jess Percival
But if we were to upload that blog, we would write Patagonia’s Marketing Strategy Deep Dive. Whereas, on YouTube, we can get a way of saying, Good Ethics, Poor Digital Marketing, because we’ve got that image too. So yeah, there’s a bunch of different things. So I think that’s what I was trying to get at Gabriel. So it is slightly different in terms of how you then use those keywords in these two formats.

Dale Davies
Yeah. I would say, when it comes to writing your titles for your videos, we’re actually going for experimentation now of doing the reverse, as Jess said, so focusing on the title and the thumbnail first, and then creating a video script based on that. And as Jess said, you can get away with not having the word Patagonia in your title because you’re hoping to get that browse, people going to the homepage, they see that from there and go, “Okay, I want to understand what that means,” versus people going to YouTube and searching for Patagonia marketing strategy. That video will come up and should hopefully capture them anyway, but for other search terms like how to write metadata, page titles, how to find your target audience, how to get to the top of Google, you do want to be focused more on, “Okay, that’s search traffic I want to capture.” You want to use your keyword focus, your search queries in your title and in your thumbnail too.

Dale Davies
For example, I’ve designed those thumbnails and tried to focus on… Normally, you would try and put the entire title in there, but the only problem with that is that when you’re scrolling from the mobile device, it’s so teeny-weeny that you can’t read it. So you then just pull it back to just a handful of words like Rank Number One In Google or Write Perfect Meta. So in the same way that you would write a page title to appear in the search results on Google, you use the keyword phrase in the title itself. The same here you would use in the thumbnail to hope that people see those words as they’re quickly glancing across 10 results and see, “Okay, Perfect Metadata or Audience In Six Questions, Rank Number One, it matches their search intent.

Jess Percival
Absolutely. Thank you for rescuing me on that question there, Dale, that I answered with such confidence completely wrong.

Jess Percival
But yeah, so there is a lot of similarities in that instance. Phil says, “I see a lot of ads on YouTube, in fact, for making cartoon YouTube videos. Do you think this is a good idea? It seems slightly gimmicky to me.” That is very much about your target audience, and I think part of the fact that you’re saying it feels slightly gimmicky maybe means that it could be. I know that these cartoon explainer videos were really popular a few years back, so it would be worth just looking in your space and see the recent YouTube uploads for the search terms you’re trying to target. And if none of them are these cartoon videos, then it’s probably just not for you. I know the whiteboard videos were really, really popular for a while, and now whenever I see them, I’m like, “Oh God, that’s so outdated. They’re a bit behind.” And maybe that’s just me being judgemental and being a bit younger. No worries, Lee, thanks for being here.

Jess Percival
But yeah, maybe it’s because I’m a bit younger and a bit more like, “Oh, that’s cringey.” Maybe your target audience would actually really like that. So there’s a few different things that you can look at to decide whether that would be a good fit for you, whether that’s your own gut feeling if you feel like it’s gimmicky, or whether when you search things on your YouTube you can see. Oh good old Dream, or not really. I want to know why Dale brought him up.

Dale Davies
I actually brought up Paddy Galloway. Paddy Galloway is somebody who does YouTube channel analysis, like how did these YouTubers get to the level that they are? How did they get this amount of views, subscribers, and so on. This is voiceover stuff. It’s a combination of whiteboards but also the B roll of footage taken from the YouTubers themselves. There are millions and millions of use here for a 10-minute video. You can use this cartoon style, but I wouldn’t use it as the basis of your video. I would look at how you can use it as maybe the bedrock, but then adding the B roll and extra stuff that makes it more enjoyable. Because at the end of the day, people are coming out to YouTube, they’re only going to stick around if it’s entertaining. Even for informational search queries, they still want to be entertained by the video.

Jess Percival
Yes, absolutely.

Dale Davies
So you can go basic. They can be cheaper to do. But I would say that you are probably going to get higher attention rate, higher views by sticking your iPhone in front of you and hit your record than you would by using one of these cartoon sites. We’ve used them before. We’ve used them for our clients before, and it can be useful, but mainly for an onsite video, so a video on your website where you’re trying to compliment the landing page or the service page or whatever it is and say, “Oh, here’s a bit more information about the service I offer.” You can use it there. But in terms of discovery on YouTube and people searching on YouTube, if you were YouTube, you’d probably prioritised somebody who’s created a better quality video that has a higher retention rate, which has a higher average viewer rate, viewer duration, all that kind of stuff.

Jess Percival
Absolutely. Absolutely. “What’s the best way to get started with YouTube when you don’t have an existing audience?” We discussed this a little bit before, Ian. A lot of our viewers come from YouTube search. They don’t come from our other social medias, don’t come from our other audiences, they come from YouTube search. So anybody can get started on YouTube even if you don’t want to promote outside, but obviously, promoting outside is good, and it also means that you can repurpose this content for short clips on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, if that’s what you use. Yeah, there’s all sorts of different ways that you can use it to build an audience all over the place. Yeah, I hope that helps. I feel like you were here for the other answer. I don’t think I need to elaborate anymore. So yeah.

Jess Percival
“In yesterday’s Guardian, it claimed book sales were up 5% due to TikTok. How does a newbie YouTuber get started promoting books on YouTube? Book trailers, et cetera.” I can only speak from a little bit of experience in terms of my sister, but my sister has never been a reader, she’s never really been interested in reading books. She has read maybe 10 books already this year because of what’s called book talk, which is people reviewing books, discussing books, and talking about books on TikTok, right? I would say that there is absolutely a space on any video platform for promoting books, but not necessarily using book trailers. Maybe book trailers could be part of it, but the way that I feel like videos draw people in are like the top five books for this. Like, if you loved Game of Throne, then you should read these five books. Or if you loved this series or if you loved this author, you should read these books. And then include your book in there. Or even if all five are your books, that’s absolutely fine as long as you’re giving enough information for people to understand what’s great about them and why they should want to read them. Don’t say, “If you love Game of Throne, you’ll love this,” and then it’s a cookbook. That’s not really going to help unless it’s a Game of Thrones cookbook or a mediaeval cookbook. Make sure it’s relevant.

Jess Percival
But some of the stuff that I’ve seen on TikTok are like, “If you’ve loved this, you’ll love this. Have you ever wanted to read a story about X, Y, Z? Then this is the book for you.” So there are a few ways to do it, and it’s very similar to what we were talking about earlier with actually vidIQ and how they create content for their audience who are interested in creating YouTube videos. You should create content for your audience who wants to read books like yours. So if they’re interested in fantasy, what other fantasy content could you create based around that. Hope that helped. But yeah, it was really fun to see that you said about the book thing, because my sister, it’s her birthday next month, and she’s asked me for a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I was so excited because she’s just getting through so many books because of TikTok. It’s fantastic. And she started painting because of TikTok as well, and she’s a fantastic painter now. It’s just really, really cool. It makes me really happy. So yeah, I hope that was of some help to you, but yeah, I’m really passionate about small businesses being able to harness TikTok and YouTube in different ways.

Jess Percival
So Phil… Sorry, Dale, we’ve run over a bit, but I don’t mind continuing answering questions. I’ve got time if you have. Cool. “What’s the minimum hardware set-up for making decent videos to camera? Or can you just get away of a smartphone?” Yes, you can get away with a smartphone, Phil. I’ll just tell you now, me and Dale will have the same 90-pound webcam. Yeah, and basically what we’ve done is we’re using just good lighting. Good lighting can make or break a video. I mean, yeah, it’s reasonable lighting though. If we were to be sat in the dark, this video isn’t going to look as good. And you can see that Dale has a couple more lights on him than I do. I forgot to turn my ring light on today. I mean, this blur is from my graphics card, which is kind of expensive, but Dale just uses the blur that comes with StreamYard. StreamYard’s free. You can record videos in StreamYard and do all the stuff that we do like this, but in your videos.

Jess Percival
Yeah, Dale’s showing his lighting and stuff. Yeah, he’s literally just using an Ikea lamp. He does have some fancy lamps. So I have… I’m trying to think… my microphone, which you can’t really see it here is a… sorry if that was really loud… Is a Blue Yeti Snowball* that I got secondhand for 25 pounds. My webcam is a Logitech 920*, something like that. My ring light is balanced between my wall and my monitor, and it was 20 pound off Amazon. But I would say try and make sure you are in front of good lighting and try and use a microphone. So if you are using an iPhone and you have wireless cellphones that have a microphone in, use that to record your audio, or buy a cheap lapel mic off of Amazon, use that, because I think audio can make all the difference.

Jess Percival
And even if you have the best camera quality in the world, if people can’t hear what you have to say, it’s not going to be great. I mean, I have an iPhone 11 Pro, so it does have a bit of a better camera on than maybe some other iPhones, but I would prefer to use my iPhone camera to film a YouTube video than I maybe would my webcam, depending on the situation. So yeah, anybody can get started. There was really long-winded way of saying anybody can make videos, but just make sure that you’re in a well-lit room with good audio quality.

Dale Davies
Yeah, absolutely. In terms of my setup, I just go into YouTube and search lighting setup for YouTube or lighting setup for live streaming and then work backwards from there. Okay, I need this kind of light or that light. Do I need a backdrop? Yes. No. I mean, it would be better if I did, but there’s no space in here to do that. But let’s just go back a moment, look at Tim’s first video compared to his latest video, that’s like a five-year journey. His first few videos that first year were intermittent videos…

Jess Percival
Let me see if I can find some of his [crosstalk 01:04:11],

Dale Davies
… but they built a multimillion pound business those videos.

Jess Percival
Exactly.

Dale Davies
The best thing, if you go to Think Media, which I recommend as a YouTube channel, Think Media.

Jess Percival
They’re really good.

Dale Davies
Yeah. Their indent… I can’t remember what it’s called, but there’s a little stinger at the beginning says, “Just hit record.” And I couldn’t agree more. Like Jess mentioned it during today’s presentation, the best thing to do is just get started and get those nerves out the way. So just record something. It might not be the most dazzling thing that’s going to win an Oscar, but it’s better to put something out there and just iterate and get better over time than to not do anything at all. So yeah, start with your phone, see what traction you can get, and if it starts to work out, invest more in a camera. Again, you can just use an iPhone camera forever, and I know YouTubers do.

Jess Percival
Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. Absolutely. I’m trying to find a clip of what my camera used to look like, but I’m not sure if any of these are really any good. If you start being successful on somewhere like YouTube, you can use the income you make from that to upgrade your kit. We suggest you don’t have to start with the best if you’re not sure YouTube’s for you. Start with what you have and then just keep at it. Because like Dale was saying… Sorry, I zoned out for a moment, so apologies if you covered this while I was looking for these clips, but you can make money from YouTube, right? Sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought.

Jess Percival
Dale was saying that Tim built a multimillion-pound business using those videos, and he could invest some of that money into making the YouTube videos better. The same that you would do. You make your products better, you make your website better, you make your videos better. So yeah, apologies for the waffle there. Got there in the end. [crosstalk 01:06:17].

Dale Davies
We’re good. We’re good. There’s a YouTube channel called… Is it English Like a Native?

Jess Percival
Yes. Yeah.

Dale Davies
Right. Talking about language and translation, stuff like. Phil, I know you have a translation business. Go and watch that YouTube channel and look at how invested their community is in their videos and watch-

Jess Percival
So good. So good, yeah.

Dale Davies
Sort their videos from oldest to newest and start watching how things would’ve been compared to now. You can see the journey they’ve gone on. It’s clearly worked for them, and I think it could work for you too. Not necessarily just YouTube, but maybe even TikTok as well. I know TikTok can feel like a buzzword thing to mention, but as Jess has covered and as covered in blog post on our website as well, so go to exposure.com/blog, and you’ll be able to see those, it can be incredibly useful-

Jess Percival
It can, for sure.

Dale Davies
… brand building, lead generation for SMEs. Our final question we have here is from Santosh. Great to see you here. I know you were having a little trouble with the video on LinkedIn, I’m sorry about that. “Can we place the YouTube videos in our website content? This helps for our website in YouTube traffic. Is this possible?” Jess, do you want me to answer that one?

Jess Percival
I mean, I can answer it partially as well, but you might have some more stuff to add. So yeah, as we said, you can definitely use this on your website and the benefit of hosting it on YouTube does mean that people might find out about you through YouTube as well. And you’ve also got your videos on your website so that people can find out about your YouTube through your website.

Jess Percival
Now, one of the things when we were looking at the statistics earlier, that popped up was, actually, quite a lot of our traffic does come through exposureninja.com, where people have found our YouTube videos potentially through our blogs or through different things on our website, our webinar page where we upload all these webinars once they are done. People can find us through that. So, yeah, there’s plenty, plenty of reasons why uploading your content on your website and on YouTube is hugely, hugely beneficial. I think there have been some studies to say that video can maybe help with SEO because it does keep people on your pages for longer if they’re start watching a video. So there’s another benefit as well. But like I said, the benefit of uploading it to YouTube specifically is that you can potentially get that extra traffic from YouTube that you wouldn’t potentially get from somewhere like Vimeo or other YouTube hosting websites. Yeah, anything else to add, Dale?

Dale Davies
Well, yeah, I mean, you’ve got it pretty much covered. I love adding videos into blog posts or just your websites in general just because it offers people a different way of engaging with your content. Some people prefer to read to learn, some people prefer to do to learn, and some people prefer to watch and listen in order to learn. So offering people different ways to learn from your content is, I think, the best strategy for engaging with people-

Jess Percival
Certainly.

Dale Davies
… and informing them. So that’s why we always like to use videos. Plus it increases your average duration time, so the amount of time they spend on your website can increase from five minutes just reading an article to 30 minutes engaging with it, watching it, and getting deeply invested in your brand as well. Yeah, if you go to any of our blog posts, I would say that they almost all have videos embedded in them. I can tell you, the session duration time on our site is pretty decent because of that. So yeah, I said just before we end I’d do the prize draw for the book. Unless anybody has any questions because we’re going to tie up soon but we do have… I can talk about YouTube all day long.

Jess Percival
Yeah, same.

Dale Davies
This is English Like A Native. They have hundreds of videos and teach people how to learn English or how to speak… I’m trying to think of the right word… speak with fewer errors, grammatical errors, and so on. But if you sorted their videos from oldest to newest, the quality difference would be quite large. Five minutes ago… five minutes ago… Five years ago it was probably just in the corner of the bedroom perhaps. I’m not sure, I’ve not seen these oldest ones. But that’s where it starts. And now they’re on 800,000 subscribers and climbing hundreds per day. Yeah, that’s building out your business, and then you can get people over to your website by using a call to action in the video. Ours is “Go to explosureninja.com/review, and you’ll be able to get a website review sent directly to you. Personalised and helping you to increase your traffic ranking, all that kind of business.” English Like A Native has the same kind of thing where you can join their conversation club. But there’ll be more things to purchase, like maybe translation services and so on, programmes, courses through that too.

Dale Davies
So yeah. We all start somewhere, this is where they started. You’ve seen how Tim started, and you should get your start this weekend as well. So just grab your phone, start recording about a subject that you think that people will be searching Google for. Because it’s better to just focus on YouTube search to begin with and then you can experiment with trying to rank on the homepage later on. In our case, we’ve done well with search as you’ve seen, now it’s time to focus on how we get that browse traffic. So yeah, hopefully, that’s been useful for you. I’m going to do a prize draw now if I can find the prize draw page. Anything you’d like to share with everyone before we close off for the day, Jess?

Jess Percival
We are now doing live streams on a Wednesday afternoon at the same time, so 1:00 PM, where we’ll be doing fix or rebuild and website reviews. So if you enjoy those, we’re doing those on a Wednesday now. Same time, one o’clock. Of course, Thinkplus won the prize draw. We’re also continuing to do these webinars over on this channel, so make sure you have subscribed and hit that notification bell so that you can be notified when you get those videos. Also, congratulations, Tracey, you have won a copy of our book, How To Get To Top of Google, 2022 edition. It’s absolutely beautiful book, I love it. And that’s a physical copy. If anybody’s disappointed they didn’t win the giveaway, you can also go down to the description and download the ebook. So Tracey, if you could email Dale at dale@exposureninja.com just saying that you won the book, and he will send that over to you and get that posted out to you. If you could just provide your address and your phone number, then Dale will get that sent to you.

Dale Davies
Absolutely.

Jess Percival
Anything else you want to add, Dale?

Dale Davies
No, only that if you click here, Jess, mirror me, come on click here.

Jess Percival
Oh, no wrong way. Here.

Dale Davies
Click here. No, a bit further out. The video’s going to be in this area.

Jess Percival
I’m trying.

Dale Davies
Click here to watch the next YouTube video and learn more about digital marketing, YouTube marketing perhaps, who knows? Where’s the button to end the stream? Have a great day, everyone. You take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you later. Take care.

Jess Percival
Bye.

Dale Davies
Bye.

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