I am Failing! I stink at YouTube and so should you! + TV Shows I'm watching! Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 370

0:01Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. Each episode is packed with quick tips. They're super short, and at the end, we have some fun. Let's jump into it, and thanks for being here. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast, presented by Marigold. And I want to talk about something that's not going well for me, that I'm failing at, and I'm totally cool with that. And that is my YouTube strategy. Now, who cares? I don't care about YouTube. So first off, I'm definitely going to break down why you should care about YouTube and why I care about YouTube. But more important than that, this idea of being comfortable failing, sharing your failure, and making sure that as you go through your failure, you're taking certain steps to get the most out of it.

0:47It is so important. And so many people out there are full of it. You know, they'll be like, oh, Jay, you can't talk about the fact that your YouTube channel stinks, that you don't have a lot of people checking it out because you have a podcast that you put out there. You're trying to grow this personal brand nonsense. You have a LinkedIn following, all this stuff. If you do that, people are going to think less of you. Wrong. Who cares? We're all people. We're trying to connect with each other. We're trying to share the wins, the losses. And in this world of garbage AI, you don't get ahead by just pretending everything you're doing is going great.

1:25You don't get ahead by never sharing what's really going on because you can't connect with another human being anymore. if all you're doing is everything is awesome. It's like the Lego movie. Everything is not always awesome, okay? It just isn't. So what am I up to and why does YouTube even matter and what are the important steps while you're failing? So first off, YouTube. Obviously, YouTube is a big deal. That's a ridiculous comment for me to even make, but what I don't think everybody realizes is where it is headed. So about three years from now, YouTube is going to be dominating content. It is.

2:05The short form video that we are all consuming, do you realize that 90 % of internet traffic right now is short form and longer form video, 90 % of internet traffic, but where it's all headed, this idea of YouTube shorts specifically, those are videos that are under like 90 seconds, under 60 seconds. This is going to be the content that matters on planet Earth in the next three years. Because Google, okay, which owns YouTube, is prioritizing YouTube shorts everywhere in its AI summaries, in its search summaries, in obviously YouTube itself. And so the days of, hey, we made a new checklist that we want people to download.

2:51We made a downloadable guide. We made a downloadable 101 sheet. All this downloadable stuff that we put out there, that is not going to be the thing that fills up your sales funnel. It is not. It's going to be people consuming YouTube shorts. And the problem is it's hard. It's really hard to stand this up. So I'm a believer that this is where the world is headed. That's what all the data is showing. So I said, uh-oh, I got to figure out YouTube because when I say I didn't know anything about YouTube like a zero burger, like nothing. So I said, okay. So a few months ago, about three months ago, I said, Jay, you got to figure this out.

3:31And I have a team. I've got a hundred or so people in my company. And I easily could have just told my team, Hey, figure out YouTube. But the problem is when you go on YouTube now, you'll go on a page of some brand, okay, some decent brand, and they'll have, you know, 30 ,000 followers. And then you go and look at their videos and they'll have like seven views on a video, 42 views on a video. Okay, why? Because what everybody's doing with YouTube now, they're not trying to figure it out. They're creating video content elsewhere, podcast video content, webinar video content, they cut it up, maybe they make it a little bit shorter, and they dump it onto YouTube.

4:10They're not actually trying to play the game, which is so funny to me because when you go and you post something on LinkedIn on your company page or your personal page or on Instagram, you make a reel or on TikTok, what you are doing normally is you're saying, oh, Instagram likes this, TikTok likes this, LinkedIn likes this, and you're making the content fit the platform. But for YouTube, what everybody does is they just dump their garbage there and they hope for the best. And that's a recipe for failure. So here I go. I said, okay, I'm going to start doing this. And what I quickly learned is first off, getting subscribers, legit subscribers is hard.

4:45It doesn't just happen. Okay. And I was like, Oh no, I'm so embarrassed. Like right now, after about two or so months doing this, I have about 600 subscribers. And somebody said, dude, that's embarrassing for you. You're supposed to be a relevant human being. You can't have 600 subscribers. What are you doing? You should take it down. That's going to be like a negative signal out there. What? No, this is called being a human building in public, not trying to be full of it, that you know everything. Okay, I'm okay with that. I'm going to grow this thing. I'm going to figure it out. And by the way, so I started saying, wow, how bad is 600 subscribers?

5:19Do I really think of this? And this is what I learned. And this is why you can find success on YouTube. Do you know only 9 % of YouTube channels have over 600 subscribers? Whoa, that's wild. But here's the bonkers thing. So I started figuring out shorts, the videos that are under basically 60 seconds. That's the secret sauce. And I started messing around with them and messing around with them. And I realized that if you do shorts in a certain way, you make them really compelling. You have some cool headlines on it. You have some cool thumbnails. My shorts are averaging over a thousand views a short.

5:53Now that may sound like garbage, but when you have like 600 subscribers and you're averaging a thousand views, the majority of my views are coming from non-followers. And I also found out that for people that have 600 followers, the average shorts only get 65 views. I'm like, wait a minute. This is cool. I'm doubling down on all this. I'm messing around and I'm trying to figure it out. What's the right time to post? What's the frequency I should be posting? All of this. Now, why am I telling you all this? I'm telling you all this. Number one, you got to get on the YouTube train. I'm just telling you, you have to get on the YouTube train.

6:26But the other piece of this, and it doesn't matter if it's a social media platform. Maybe you're onboarding a new email sending platform. Maybe you are updating your CRM to a different system. I don't care what it is. Okay. And I don't care how big your company is. I don't care if you're the senior vice president of blah, blah, blah, to 10 ,000 person company. I don't care if it's a one person company that you're at. I believe I've been doing this now for 27 years in my career. I believe that whether you own a business or you are a manager in a category, or you have a significant role, I don't care.

7:00You need to have your hands on the controls, okay? You need to be in there with the new platform that your company onboarded for a little while. That doesn't mean you have to do it all, right? But you have to be in there. You have to see, oh, this is where this goes. This is how this works. Oh, I haven't sat in on a sales call in three years. I'm gonna go sit on 10 sales calls. I'm gonna go sit with the operations group to see how they handle this, okay? I'm gonna sit with customer service, see how they handle that. And for me with YouTube, I'm gonna see how you upload the thing, How do you make a thumbnail?

7:29How do you, what is the data looking like? What's working? What's not working? If you're not in it, okay, and you're trying to just be like, hey, you over there, you do this, or you hire an agency to do this for you, and you never have your hands on the controls, it's never going to happen. Because there's no way for you to intelligently share your thoughts, your input, the changes, whatever, or have a meeting about, okay, how is it going? I want to review this, that, or whatever, because you are too removed from it. So you're not above it. You're not that important. I'm sorry. I have my hands in it right now.

8:02It's like, you know, before my newsletter got going, I'd have my hands in my newsletter, every piece of it. Before LinkedIn got going for me, I'd have my hands in it, every post, every everything. Until you figure it out, you got to be in it. So I suck at YouTube, but I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to grow this thing. It's going to happen. It's going to take me time. And by the way, if for whatever reason you want to follow me, that's amazing. Please subscribe to it. It's just at Schwetelson, my horribly long last name, at S-C-H-W-E-D-E-L-S-O-N. That's not why I'm making this episode though.

8:36I'm making this episode to encourage you to be okay with failure, sharing failure. It's not really failure. You're growing, you're learning. And by the way, you got to check out YouTube. All right, let me get into the ridiculous portion of this podcast. Oh, before I do that, we have a sponsor. Woo! Marigold is our sponsor. And they have an email sending platform called Emma. I use it. It's amazing. Only for listeners of this podcast. Okay. Can you get 50 % off for three months? It's bonkers. This is like the ultimate email sending platform. I love it. All you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com slash E-M-M-A to get 50 % off for three months.

9:17jschwedelson.com slash Emma. Check it out. All right. Let's get to the ridiculous portion of this podcast. So speaking about things I should be embarrassed about, like failing. I should be embarrassed about the TV that I'm currently watching. And I'm going to break down exactly the TV shows that I'm watching because I know how much you don't care, but that's okay. Number one, I am all in right now in the gilded age on HBO Max or whatever it's called now. Max, Max, HBO. I don't know what it's called. I was sleeping on the gilded age. Okay. It's in season three. I'm just finished season one. This is about New York and like, I don't know, the 1800s.

9:52This is a great show. I am telling you, if you've never tried this, go to season one, start the Gilded Age. It gives three thumbs up for me. Okay, cool. The other thing I like, which nobody's going to be watching, but I'm telling you, this is a must do on Hulu with Gordon Ramsay. It's his new show, Secret Service. I love all things Gordon Ramsay. I've seen every episode of Kitchen Nightmares. His new show, Secret Service is great. And what But basically, he goes undercover in these restaurants, and he fixes them. And it's awesome. And these restaurants are disgusting. They have rats, and the food's gross.

10:28And I can't watch this show enough. I'm very pro this show. I'm also watching Love Island on Peacock, which is super embarrassing. I do have a 17-year-old daughter who I watch it with, which is also a little awkward because everyone's hooking up. So my wife watches with us too. my son who's 18 wants nothing to do with this situation but because it's like blowing up on tiktok and my daughter watches it then it's like family bonding we're family bonding watching love island what the hell's wrong with me as a parent and then the last thing is um i can't wait bachelor in paradise comes out monday cannot wait this is going to be so great they are combining the cast not just from the bachelor and the bachelorette but also the golden bachelor and the golden Bachelorette.

11:12There's nothing better on TV. I don't care what you say. You're wrong. This is it. So Bachelor in Paradise, very excited. I appreciate you. Listen, it would matter to me. I lied. It would matter to me if you go ahead and check out the YouTube page at Schwetelson. I'm trying. It's not going perfectly, but I'm going to get there. And I really encourage you to go deep on YouTube. And thanks for checking this out. Later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers.

11:48And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. GuruVents.com. Check it out.