Ep. 26: What I Learned From a Year of Weekly YouTube Videos & Blog Posts

Meg Casebolt 0:01
You’re listening to social slowdown a podcast for entrepreneurs and micro-businesses looking for sustainable marketing strategies without being dependent on social media. Social media is a double-edged sword. It’s a wonderful way to stay connected. But it also can feel like an addictive obligation. And it’s even more complex for businesses, your audience might be right there, but you’ve got to fight with algorithms to maybe be seen by them. So whether you want to abandon social media altogether, or you just want to take a month off, it’s possible to have a thriving business without being dependent on social media. This podcast is all about finding creative, sustainable ways to engage with your audience without needing to lip-sync, send cold DMS, run ads, or be available 24/7. Let’s get started.

Hey, guys, it’s Meg. We are here with something a little bit different. This week on the podcast, we’re actually taking the audio of a recent YouTube video that we publish and sharing it here. So you may hear some fun sound effects flying through here. That’s completely intentional. The reason that we’re doing this is because even though I typically create different content for YouTube than I do for the podcast, you know, my YouTube content is a bit more tutorial and explaining how to do SEO and focusing on that. There are some fun behind-the-scenes episodes of YouTube videos that I’ve been doing lately that fit the theme of this podcast pretty well. And so we’re sharing that in part because I think that it would be interesting to you. This is a whole episode that I posted on YouTube about being on YouTube. And since that’s one of the ways that I’ve decreased my dependence on social media for the business, I thought it would be interesting to you. Also, I do have a general rule, which is that if we can’t repurpose things and be able to share them at least 10 times, then they’re not worth making. So although I do want my YouTube videos to have their own feel, and they even have a different theme music and everything like that different from the podcast. Sometimes when things overlap, I do want to share them with you. So if you are listening and hearing the sound effects and want to go check out the full YouTube video and see all the graphics that are in it, we will include a link to that in the show notes. And without further ado, here is my YouTube episode all about what I learned from a year of posting every single week on YouTube. Enjoy. Hello, friends, it is January 2022. And that means that it has officially been a year since I launched my YouTube channel. God can you believe it’s been a year? And also can you believe it’s only been a year since January 2021. I swear time has just stopped moving. Today I’m going to share with you my takeaways from a year of being on YouTube, what I’ve learned how I would do things differently, what recommendations I would make if you’re thinking about starting on a YouTube channel and how you can strategically plan your youtube content and analyze whether or not it’s worth it for you. So stay tuned, and I’ll share that with you right after this. Hey there, it’s

Meg Casebolt, the founder of love at first search where we help online entrepreneurs to show up in search results and turn those new people into leads, subscribers and sales. Today I’m going to re recapping my 2021 Adventures of starting a YouTube channel and share with you what I’ve learned and what I would do differently. To start with. Let me give you some basic stats in 2021, we published 76 videos on YouTube. Now you may be like, Well, if you were publishing weekly, how did you get from 52 to 76? Well, because we published every single day in the month of October, I have a whole recap video about the how and the why and how that impacted my subscribers on my watch time and all that everything’s an experiment, right? So you can check out more information about se October or daily publishing. In that video, we ended the year with 870 subscribers, I had a goal of 1000 subscribers within a year didn’t quite get there. But I didn’t really know what to expect. I just felt like 1000 subscribers is what you see in all of the how to get to 1000 subscribers quickly YouTube videos that show up as soon as you look up anything related to YouTube strategy, but I’m still really pleased with 870 subscribers in a year, especially starting from zero sometimes it takes a while to get momentum. We also ended the year at just under 10,000 views of these YouTube videos. We were actually so close, we hit 9995 views in 2021. And it kind of hurts that I didn’t just like post something on Facebook on New Year’s Eve and be like, please, five people go watch one video, please. But you know, it’s a vanity metric. Who cares how many views you get in a given year. The important thing is people were actually watching and when it comes to what worked really well in terms of our content. Here are some of the top videos that we released last year. Our top video of 2021 was all about SEO for images. So it was going into details about how you can do your image descriptions and your alt texts and your compression in order to make sure that they help your pages show up and they also up independently in Google image search, the next most popular video was my review of rankmath, where I was talking about whether or not you should switch from Yoast to rank math as your WordPress SEO plugin. After that, it was my my video about how to write a really compelling blog post title. It was like my second video out of the gate. So I probably should have waited a little bit on that one. Because my ability to talk to myself on a screen wasn’t quite as solid as it is now that the sound quality of it isn’t what I’m used to down. But you know, you live and you learn. And then the other outstanding video that people loved last year was my review of the Keywords Everywhere tool as a really low-cost way to find out what keywords could potentially be for your business. If you’re considering starting a YouTube channel in the future, or you already have one, but it feels really time-consuming. I do have a couple tips that can help you with how to make sure that you’re producing these videos efficiently. The first recommendation that I have is to batch record, switching between tasks is hard enough. But the true benefit of batch recording is that you only have to do your hair and makeup every once in a while you don’t have to do it every day. And for those of us that work in our home offices, we

know that some days, you just want to stay in your sweatpants, actually, I could still be in my sweat pants now. You know, I’m not, I’m not. But when I first started recording for YouTube, I would like change my hair, my jewelry and my shirt for every one of these. And I even tracked it in my content plan to say, you know, in this video, I wore green and this one I wear pink and this was gold. Generally, my hair was up, my hair was down. But then I realized something very important. Nobody cares. So now I usually just wear a black shirt and some fun jewelry. And I start rolling. I also planned my recording days around my good hair days. So I actually planned ahead, I straighten my hair yesterday. So that way I could get started and get rolling on things right away today. If I know I have a huge amount of production that I need to do, then I’ll actually make an appointment at my hairstyles. First thing in the morning, I’ll get her first appointment. And then I’ll come home and record a bunch of ones that looks really good. And if I just happen to stumble into a good hair day, I will clear the decks. My team is super accommodating. If I’m like I know I was supposed to meet with you, but like, have you seen this hair? They’re like, Nope, I get it. Go record. My second production tip for you is hire an amazing team to help you with this. I have friends who edit their own YouTube videos. And that’s totally cool if that’s what they like to do. But many of my friends who are recording their own YouTube videos, that’s their full-time job. They’re monetized. They’re getting sponsored posts, they are using YouTube as an income stream. And therefore it makes a bit more sense for them to have more ownership over that process, especially if it’s something that they do really well. For me, YouTube is not about monetization. It’s a lead generation strategy. And then I need to spend the bulk of my time actually working with my clients and my students. So I have two incredible team members, Sam and Jocelyn you guys have heard about Sam before, she takes my really random rants and turns them into clear coherent thoughts and makes them way more entertaining to watch. And then once she’s done with the video, she hands the baton to Jocelyn who uploads the video to YouTube and writes the description and gets a transcript and writes a blog post and creates the promo images and shares it on social. So she takes it over the finish line, I absolutely 100% I would not be able to create the volume of content that I do without having a team to take it from raw idea into a finished product. Before I had a team of people to help me my goal was much smaller. I was going live once a month in a Facebook group. And then I was writing turning that into a blog post once a month. And if that’s all you can do right now, that’s okay, if you don’t have a team, a monthly goal is awesome. If you decide that you want to do weekly, that could potentially lead to burnout. So make sure to set yourself goals that are reasonable and attainable based on the resources that you have. Now I know people sometimes get stuck with the idea of what would I even say in my content. And let’s talk about what your content strategy for YouTube could be two suggestions here. One is to ABC always be collecting. I constantly have an idea bank going with 30 or 40 different content ideas. And my ideas come from a lot of places I think about what I’m going to be promoting in the month ahead and want people to know about that offer that I’m going to be selling. I think about questions that people ask me in live trainings or emails, and I look at my existing keywords. I look at my Google Search Console and YouTube Analytics data and I see opportunities in there. So if you’re wondering how to use a tool like Google Search Console to find content ideas, you can watch this video another way to make sure that your content sort of fits together in a way that makes sense to your viewers is to come up with a theme. So about every month I will come up with a theme and then I’ll find ways to connect them through cards and make sure that people know what has already been produced and

what’s coming some examples of themes that I created.

For last year is website platforms whether you should be on WordPress or SquareSpace for SEO, talking about SEO plugins on WordPress keyword research tools, how to optimize a blog post, how to do SEO for podcasts, how to plan your content, I had a couple different videos for each of those topics, so that they could string together to create a coherent idea. Now, since I’ve been doing this for a year, I took a look at my metrics to try to figure out whether it’s worth it for me to continue and how to decide how much time to invest in this. My recommendation for you here, if you’re considering pursuing this or trying to continue it is to think about what metrics matter to you. As I said, my goal is a lead generation, not monetization. So comparing myself to other YouTubers who have those videos that are like how I got monetized in three minutes, it’s just not important to me. So I don’t want to fall down this comparison loop when my goals are not the same as theirs. So instead, here are some of the things that I’m looking at when I’m evaluating whether or not my YouTube is accomplishing what I want it to. I noticed intake forms. So people are reaching out to me and joining my programs or filling out my contact form to work with me, I’m noticing if they say, Yep, I’ve already watched your YouTube channel, or I found you on YouTube, I am noticing the click-through rate from YouTube to my website. So I look at my analytics, I look at the acquisition reports. And I say how much of my traffic was coming from YouTube to my website? And how do people behave once they got there, I’m looking at the time spent on the page of people coming from YouTube versus coming from other channels and the number of pages that they visited once they got there. I also look at when people from YouTube sign up for my email list. So I’ve set up a Google Analytics goal, which will tell me every time somebody sees the page that they are directed to after signing up for my email list, and Google Analytics will use that data to automatically calculate for me what percentage of people coming from YouTube sign up for my email list what percentage of people are coming from Pinterest or referral traffic or search. And that way I can compare apples to apples of when people come from different places, how many of them are acting on the behavior that I want them to like filling out my contact form to work with me joining my email list, buying my courses, etc. I’m also evaluating how well these videos are working for me by looking at the new search traffic that I’m receiving for them. So I turn almost every video that we create into a blog post. Well, technically, Jocelyn does.

But that’s part of our strategy. Every video is also turned into a blog post. So that way, we can show up in the Google search results, both for the blog posts and the YouTube video. And now a year later, some of those blog posts are ranking in the top 10. For specific brands, like Keywords Everywhere, and comparisons, like comparing rankmath versus ghost, I’m also getting some really good traffic for specific topics like SEO for podcast is getting a lot of inbound traffic to my website, both from the videos and from the corresponding blog posts. So I’ll definitely be talking about that even more in 2022, because it’s a space where I can generate more leads. And the other big takeaway that I have from a year of YouTubing is that you have no idea when you’re creating the content plan, what’s going to take off, and what’s going to tank. And so YouTube has been a really great place for me to test ideas to see what shows up and people are actually looking for and what I can rank for. And to spend more time on the things that are working like SEO for podcasts, and less time on the things that I kind of get lost in the shuffle like content planning techniques, there’s no way that you can know how people will react to things until you publish it and promote it and see what the reaction is. So this is a fun way where I can just test out ideas and see what people think about it. My overall takeaways for a year of publishing on YouTube is that this is a really long term strategy, a year of weekly videos is not enough to make a huge dent in YouTube, because it’s such a huge platform. So it is something that I’m going to continue into 2022 and beyond. I know that every video that I’m creating is not standing alone in a silo. But instead it’s contributing to a body of work that is letting people get to know the way that I teach and my approach to this topic and how that might be a little bit different from the way that they’ve learned it from other people. And it might resonate with some people and other people don’t really care for the way that I talk about things.

Thank you so much for listening to the social slowdown podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or come on over to social slowdown.com and sign up for our email list so you never miss an episode. We’d also love if you could write a review to help other small business owners find the show you can head over to social slowdown comm slash review or grab that link in our show notes for easy access. We’ll be back soon with more tips to help you market your business without being beholden to social media Talk to you then.

Please forgive any typos as this transcript was automatically generated by otter.ai.