The Power of Pillar Content and Discovery Ads for YouTube Virality

0:00I had ignored YouTube, didn't want to do it because of a lot of frankly, it's nice. I let you go first. I'm like, am I willing to do that now, you know, let Roland get the arrow stuck in his back. But what I didn't like about YouTube is that once you got on that hamster wheel, you could really never get off or everything just stopped working. And I was like, that sounds like a job. Like, I don't, you know, I don't want that. And so, and it was the same with the other social profiles. It's like, well, if you really want to make it work organically, you know, you need to post two or three times a day.

0:28I didn't want to do that. And so it's why, you know, you and I have relied on from personal branding. We've relied on this podcast, which is fine. Like us getting together and talking and riffing, you know, a couple times a week, no big deal. We're doing it anyway. Turn on a camera. Like that one's easy. That one's fun.

0:48Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch with your hosts, Ryan Dice and me, Roland Frazier. Ryan, what is happening? Man, I'm excited. We've got our Founders Board meeting coming up next week. So getting prepped for that. Probably by the time people hear this, we'll be on the other side of it. But it's always fun just to get in the same room with our clients, with other entrepreneurs, to get to share ideas. It's kind of, it's one of these times when we're sort of forced to say, what's all the cool stuff that we've done? Because that's kind of what our clients and members like expect us to bring.

1:19And so it's fun looking back over the last 90 days and just finding, you know, plucking out the cool wins and so that we can go and share. So it also kind of forces you to document the things like, oh, that was good, you know, before it just slips off into the thing that we did that we never do again. You know? Yeah. It's what people underestimate about, you know, the value of, you know, teaching and consulting and why we do it is it does make us better. It does make us sharper. When you have to explain what you're doing to somebody else and you have to really think out, okay, what did we do to do that?

1:50It's you just get so much better. Right. How is it replicable and pass belongable to somebody elseable? Yeah. And I think also the reason that we're good at what we do, not to pull a muscle patting ourselves on the back, but because we operate in a portfolio model and we have a lot of different companies, if we have something that works at one of the businesses, another, you know, one of our portfolio companies would be like, how did that work? And we're like, yeah, crap. We do want to figure out how to replicate this across these different organizations. Whereas if you just stay in your own little bubble and you stay in your own little world, it's good.

2:24You can optimize around it, but you don't necessarily duplicate it across other organizations or other departments. So that's fun. Look at this segue. This is really good. Watch this. Speaking of replicable things that are working that we're showing other people how to do, don't you have some great success that you've just had taking your YouTube channel from a couple thousand to 20-ish thousand folks? Yeah, this has been fun and didn't actually intend for that setup, but you're right, that worked out really well. I don't know about you. I mean, you have consistently taken a different approach to social than I have, and we've talked about this on other episodes, so we don't necessarily need to rehash it.

3:07But it's not that I'm anti any type of social, you know, or anti getting out there, anti being a personal brand. You and I share the similar philosophy in that we don't want our businesses to be built around us. We don't want to build to be the business. But we also acknowledge that there is value to being the face of a brand, to being the spokesperson for your brand. And because of that, there's value to having a personal brand because you can point it at a number of different entities. You're your own media. So we're on the same page there. The difference historically has been you were more willing to do it than I was because I just freaking hate it.

3:43And you also, I know it's not your favoritest thing in the world, but you were just more willing to do it. And so I know, you know, a couple years ago. Like evolutions of it. So, you know, from trying, let me release content every day, which worked great, got me a million followers on Facebook, to I'm going to just go all in and hire a full expensive team to create a schedule. and we're going to shoot every Monday and it's going to be this many things that we're going to do and it's going to get released to almost no effect. I mean, like looking at, um, I think we got up to, I don't know, maybe it was like a million and a half, uh, minutes a month, you know, watched, which was, which felt good.

4:32Um, but subscriber wise, I, it, like all of that had almost no effect. And that was when they were telling us really focus on shorts and that's cause YouTube was really promoting shorts, but in terms of shorts leading to subscribers, and then also why do we do this? It's not for the ego trip of watching the subscriber count or the views or the minutes it's for money, you know, money. And it just wasn't, you know, and so, and it, and it wasn't growing. And, you know, I think the most expensive, we were spending 15 grand a month with outside people, plus maybe three or four grand a month in ad budget plus let's say, let's be generous and say four or 5 ,000 a month of time, you know, for our people.

5:14So let's say it was 300 grand a year,$25 ,000 a month. And I'm still, I think, I think at 32 ,000 or something like that viewers, I mean, subscribers, which is nice, but the minute that we stopped spending all the money with all the people, it dropped to, you know, like I think Now it's maybe 700 ,000 minutes a month watched, which is my personal KPIs, how many minutes of the content are people consuming. But certainly in terms of reach to see, you know, you'd be able to jump from a couple thousand to 20 ,000, you know, is insane. So I definitely would love to share that with everybody else and also, you know, put that into place on our channel.

5:57Hey, Ryan Dice here, co-host of Business Lunch. and before we get to the show, I have an exciting invitation for you. My business partner and Business Lunch co-host, Roland Frazier, and I are hosting a live in-person event. And if you're a bootstrap business owner who wants to build a 10 million and even$100 million business in the next three years, you need to be there. This event is called Get Scalable Live. And over the last four years, it has transformed from a small gathering of entrepreneurs into the largest bootstrapped entrepreneurship conference in North America. Now, I know what you might be thinking.

6:29You're probably thinking, Ryan, really another business event? Is that really what we need? But trust me, this isn't just any other event. You see, unlike most conferences at Get Scalable Live, you'll have dedicated time to take action and actually work on your business instead of just in your business. Over three days, you'll work shoulder to shoulder with like-minded entrepreneurs to implement what you're learning and get valuable feedback that you're just not going to be able to get during the normal day today. You're going to be immersed in fresh ideas, strategic insights, and you're going to get the support and guidance that you need to actually reach your business goals.

7:05So this is your opportunity. This is your chance to step out of the day-to-day to eliminate the noise and finally work again on your business, not just in your business. And if you implement, I'm confident about this, if you implement just one or two key insights from any of our sessions into your business, you're bound to see a return on investment much higher than what we could ever charge for admission. And by the way, speaking of admission, right now, Business Lunch listeners can save an additional 10 % off of our already low early bird ticket pricing. So just head over to GetScaleableLive.com and use promo code LUNCH at checkout.

7:45Again, that's GetScaleableLive.com, promo code LUNCH. It is truly amazing what can happen when you step out of the day-to-day and spend just a little bit of time surrounded by other powerful business owners. And since this opportunity only comes around once a year, you don't want to miss it. Again, the link is getscalablelive.com and don't forget to use promo code LUNCH at checkout to save up to 67 % off the full ticket price. That's all I got. I'll see you in Austin. All right, back to your regularly scheduled programming. Yeah, so cool. Let's talk about it. Because we have, I had ignored YouTube, didn't want to do it because of a lot of, frankly, it's nice.

8:27I let you go first. I'm like, am I willing to do that? Nah, you know, let Roland get the arrow stuck in his back. But what I didn't like about YouTube is that once you got on that hamster wheel, you could really never get off or everything just stopped working. And I was like, that sounds like a job. Like, I don't, you know, I don't want that. and so and it was the same with with the other social profiles it's like well if you really want to make it work organically you know you need to post two or three times a day well i didn't want to do that and so it's why you know you and i have relied on from personal branding we've relied on this podcast which is fine like us getting together and talking and riffing you know a couple times a week no big deal we're doing it anyway turn on a camera like not like that one's easy that one's fun we have millions of downloads yeah right exactly and it's worked and so what i just came at it from the perspective of, okay, I'm not going to do it if I don't want to do it because I don't have to do it.

9:15I think a lot of entrepreneurs get in that, especially if you're a CEO first, you're a business owner first, you're not a creator, you're not a YouTuber, right? Your job is not to go and do that. Your job is to run a company. So I started from the thing of, if I'm going to do this, I want to do it on my terms. And so what I said is I want to be able to produce, not have to produce any more than about a video a week. And on the weeks when I don't want to do it, I'm just not going to do it. And so I don't want to be a show creator where people are expecting that there's going to be a new show every single week.

9:51And instead, I wanted to treat YouTube more like a binge factory. So when somebody comes across the content, they can jump in, they can begin consuming the content, but all of the content is designed to go to one particular place with the goal. And this is important of leads. How many leads do we regenerate from YouTube. That was like the only metric that I wanted to focus on and that I wanted to optimize and leads at an acceptable rate. And we are now generating not just 20 ,000 some odd subscribers, but we are now getting thousands and thousands of qualified leads a month at just a little more than three bucks per lead total spend all in on that.

10:30It's one of the lowest cost per lead channels that we have. And here's the best part, dude, the cost is actually going down. There is a paid element to the strategy that I'll get into, but the paid is there to prop up the organic. And as the organic starts to tick up, you do, you're kind of, the algorithm takes over and the cost per lead actually starts to go down. So that's kind of the after, that's what we did. I'll get into how we did it. The first thing that I wanted to have was one piece of pillar content, like one video to rule them all. If somebody was only going to watch one video, what would that one video be?

11:13And I believe that all businesses have this. If you're a CEO who does keynote presentations, right, you've already probably have created this. If you use webinars in your marketing, probably your best performing webinar is that if you've written a white paper or a manifesto, there's probably some type of pillar content out there that you know, in the back of your mind, okay, if somebody sees this, they're pretty much going to be ready to buy the thing that I want to buy. Like they're going to get excited. They're going to get the picture. Like this is that one thing that I most want to give to people.

11:52So I said, I want to start with that. Now, here's the thing. Everybody had told me that if you're going to do YouTube, it either needs to be a short or it needs to be 10 to 20 minutes. Because, you know, attention span, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was kind of like, screw it. I don't freaking care. It's going to be as long as it needs to be. So my pillar content video on my YouTube channel is 121 minutes long. 121 minutes long. Because, again, I really just don't, you know, I wasn't worried about that. It's not necessarily the first video that people are going to watch, but I wanted all of the other videos to point back to that one.

12:28So that's where it began. When I relaunched my channel, that was the first video that got plopped onto there. Anything you want me to, any questions about kind of like the pillar content piece? Maybe, did you think about, like, how did you decide what the content was going to be for the pillar content? The question that I asked is, what is the one piece of content that I wished every single person saw before they engaged with us from a sales perspective? And I literally asked the sales team, hey, what is that thing? When you ask, because our salespeople ask everybody, hey, how did you hear about us?

13:09I mean, it's one of the most common, like, you know, openers if you're talking to somebody from a sales perspective. And if you have, if you don't have a sales team talking to people and you're more a direct, you know, direct consumer model, more of an e-commerce, you can ask them after they buy and say, how did you hear about us? Right. Was there a piece of content? Was there something that you saw? And so I asked them that, what is the, what's the one thing that, that you, that when you hear people say your ears, you know, start twitching and cause you know, you're like, Ooh, yeah, this person, they're 90 % of the way there.

13:41I just need to not screw this up. And what they said was, yeah, Ryan, when somebody hears you deliver the Get Scalable keynote at a talk, like, so if I go and get a talk and they mentioned that they saw you in a talk, they, like, I know that's good. Or you were on this podcast and on this podcast, you essentially talked about all the same things that are in your keynote. Or when people come from, like when people sign up after watching this webinar that I was doing, then we knew. Well, there's a problem with all of that content. It was all gated. In other words, there was no easy way for somebody to go and watch that content.

14:21Either they had to have been at the event I was speaking at, which most of the people on our list and most people come in contact with Brent aren't. or they had to have happened to listen to this podcast that I was on where the podcast host happened to need to ask me just the right questions where I would essentially deliver my keynote and Q &A form, which doesn't happen all that often. Or they needed to register for this particular webinar that, wait for it, I was only doing about once a quarter. So I realized like the one piece of content, and I think this is true for a lot of businesses, that one piece of content that you wish that everybody saw is hidden behind a wall somewhere.

14:54It's tucked away. You only break it out a couple of times a year. So I was like, I'm just going to take this. I'm going to record it in YouTube format. I didn't want to just put a recording. I think that would have been okay. I didn't want to just put a recording of the talk on YouTube. I didn't want to put a recording of the webinar. I, I, I actually turned it into a report form and I, you know, and I, I put that, you know, recorded version of that, that report on YouTube. But that was the question I asked. What's the one piece of content I wish everybody saw? I knew if they saw, they'd be 80, 90 % of the way down the pipeline.

15:29Make sense? Yeah. So once I had that, the other thing that I did is I wanted to have a very clear through line to the lead. So I was like, okay, I've got this big pillar content. What is the most logical gated version of this content? Like what is something that I can say right off the bat? Hey, you should go and download this. And so it could be some type of tool related to what I'm sharing. In this case, it just, hey, I'm going to be going through in this video. I'm going to be going through this report. If you want access to the report that I'm going through right now, click over here to get it.

16:00And they would just opt in to get the exact same case study report that I was quite literally reading in the video. Like if you go and watch the video, it's on my YouTube channel, Ryan Dice Official. You'll see I am literally just reading the report on a Loom video. There is nothing fancy, nothing sexy about it. we recently created a new version of it that has a little bit of editing. I don't think it changed it that much. I think it's just fine. It's tough though, because if you've already uploaded it and have all the views, are you replacing the one that you uploaded? Yeah, we lost those views.

16:30I mean, the original one still exists. And so that original video, I want to say had like 10 ,000 something views and had some good solid comments, but because it was so important and I see this being kind of the video that people are going to watch for like years, I was happy to do that. Like what I didn't want to do, which is what my temptation would be is I don't want to upload until it's perfect, right? Because I know my perfectionistic tendency. So I just wanted to get something out there to see if it would work. But then once it was clear that it was working, it was like, ah, I do want this to be better.

17:02So it's not ideal, but it was way better than making sure it was perfect because then it never would have happened. And it was, I think, better than leaving what I felt like was an imperfect version up there into perpetuity. So, so you're taking the other one down and putting the new one up. It's not, it's not taken down. It's just what it's hidden, I guess. So you can still find it. Like if you have the direct link, you can do it, but it's not, it's not the one that we're now, that we're now sending and linking to. Got it. So we've got the ungated pillar content video in YouTube, that video now in the description, in the pinned comment.

17:40So I went in there and pinned a comment. Hey, if you want the case study, go here and get it. And also, you know, in the video itself, I'm saying go here to get the report. So that's how we're turning views into leads. And, you know, clear through line. I don't know the percentage of people who watch the video who then opt in for the report, but I know we're getting many, many thousands of leads a month. So it's a good percentage. Once I had that, I was like, okay, now what I want to have is other sort of sub videos that address just very specific standalone concepts in the pillar video. So the pillar video I'm breaking down, here's our comprehensive$200 million operating system, right?

18:20One of those concepts of our operating system is the scorecard. And so I created a video on how we create CEO dashboards and company scorecards. Pretty simple video. That one was like 10 to 20 minutes. I forget exactly how long, but I say in there, Hey, this is just one part of our operating system. If you want to get the rest of it, go back and watch the main video. So all of the sub videos and my goal, I came up with a list of 10 sub videos that I was going to create. And I was going to just do one per week. So there you go. You got the main video. I got another two and a half months worth of videos that I know that I was just committed to doing.

18:56And if I only do those videos and it doesn't work, I was going to commit to that. The main video plus 10 and every single one of those videos was going to reference and link back in every way that I could back to the pillar content video. Then what we did, and this was the game changer, the videos that actually got some traction, like the videos that people were you know, watching for more, I forget the exact metrics. I can, you know, I get them to you and I'll tell you what the exact metrics were. Um, and I'll, and all of our founders were members, but basically you can tell some videos hit and some videos don't.

19:34Like if you just go and look at my most recent videos, that one video on scorecards got like over a hundred thousand views. Like it jumped up to like 40, 50 ,000 views in the first like week with no bump in anything. It just went a little viral. I don't know why. I've done some other ones that didn't. They got a few thousand views, right? And so the ones that get some traction, obviously they're worthy of amplification. And so whatever that means for you, the videos that get a little bit of traction relative to your other ones, we buy discovery ads for those videos. So a discovery ad is where the video appears in somebody's feed.

20:17So it appears in their nav as like a recommended video. It's going to show up on their homepage. It's not the pre-roll ad. You know what I'm saying? Does that make sense? Yep. So it's not a pre-roll clip that appears before somebody else's video. You're actually just making it easier for people to find the video. In other words, what you're doing is you're trumping the algorithm because our goal algorithmically is to show up on somebody's start screen. Our goal algorithmically is to show up on the watch this next, you know, in the sidebar. What a discovery ad does is it just puts your video there.

20:53It just makes sure that people actually happen to see that, but we're only doing that for the videos that already did get some basic traction. And early on, I was, we were committed to doing it with like all those videos, but now what we have is it creates this like binge factory. So the people that find the one video they wind up getting directed back to the pillar content video. But because we're also doing discovery ads for multiple videos now on somebody's start screen, and they might have been three or four videos of me there to go and watch. And so they don't just watch one video. They're watching a video after a video after a video.

21:29And the beautiful thing is you only pay for that first click. If they go and then watch another video after that, you didn't pay for that. That's why I'm saying the lead cost actually goes down. This is what has allowed the subscriber growth to happen. And now it just becomes this sort of beautiful flywheel that occurs that now as I go and add a new video, we don't necessarily need to put as much spend behind it. But we're spending right now as a percentage of the total ad budget, it's, you know, for scalable. I want to say it's less than it's like 3%, 4 % is what's going towards you. it's thousands.

22:10So it's like, I think it's, I think we're only spending three or$4 ,000 right now a month. Yeah. And it, and it started out as hundreds just when we saw the leads coming through and what they were like, let's crank it up. And so now anytime we, you went from hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to just$3 ,000. We went from hundreds of dollars a month to 3 ,000. I will have all of these exact numbers for you when we get to the meeting. It's better this way because otherwise it was step one, spend$100 ,000 a month for three months. Now you know what doesn't work. Now you spend$3 ,000 a month.

22:47Yeah, so don't do that. Step one, spend hundreds a month. I want to say the budget of Discovery ad for each video was like$50 or$100. It was kind of all the way up and it might have been a couple hundred dollars for a bit. Like, let's just make sure that somebody sees this. The beautiful thing is these are some of the cheapest ads that you can buy right now because they don't take people off platform. So YouTube loves these because all you're doing is saying, hey, watch my video right here on YouTube. You're not there's not a call to action taking them off platform. You're simply just saying, go watch my video.

23:23So it's I mean, I want to say the cost per click is like it's under eight cents. It's like seven point something cents. it's nuts, man. It's, it is so incredibly cheap, but we only do it on the videos that got some traction. So we know they're pretty good. They're worthy of amplification, but now if it's, if it's good, we keep putting budget behind that video. If a new video comes, then that gets a little more budget. So the budget isn't growing by us putting more money into certain videos, the budget's growing because there's just more videos that are worthy of amplification. And so that's kind of this, again, this big flywheel that just sort of feeds itself.

23:59Love it. so the last couple of weeks, I haven't done a video because I was busy and I didn't. And you know what? Subscriber growth is still happening and leads are still coming in because we're not purely dependent upon the, we're not, we're not purely dependent upon like the algorithm to make sure. And if we, you know, ever pause, then it goes away. And this is all being managed in, you know, with our own in-house ad team. So there's no like$15 ,000, you know, consultants and contractors doing this. I'm just knocking out a quick video. My goal right now is I go in, I record, um, I want to get to where I'm recording three videos a week so that, cause it just doesn't take that long at this point I can record.