Triple Your Traffic with YouTube Organically with Liz Germain

0:28Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. organic growth strategies that have produced multi-millions in sales online. Her agency, VidFluence, has generated 850 million YouTube views for clients across industries, and she's sharing her secrets today. So we'll talk about how realistic it is to make passive income from YouTube. Talk about the best way to start your channel this year, 2025. And also, is there too much noise for a beginner to stand out and owe so much more? And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Liz and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies.

1:04Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Liz, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? What's up, Fire Nation? Thanks for having me, John. I would say that I got a lot of advice in my early years of being an entrepreneur that you have to hustle harder. And I personally, I did that for a little while, but then I discovered YouTube and the power of evergreen marketing.

1:46And I'm of the complete opposite belief now, because if you do the right things the right way, at least a handful of times on an evergreen platform, you actually don't need to hustle harder because your content can do that for you. So I'm excited to talk about that today. And thank you so much for having me. Oh, well, we will be talking about it today. And I've realized the same thing. And good part as well, Fire Nation to Liz's help. She was kind enough to give me an amazing 60 minute consultation on my new YouTube show that I launched back in November called MSTR Today, which I do not recommend checking out unless for whatever reason, you're obsessed with Bitcoin and the company MicroStrategy, now known as Strategy.

2:27But I've applied a lot of the things that she recommended to a great success. And we'll be talking about some of those things today. But I want to start because we're talking about tripling our traffic with YouTube organically. And of course, if we triple our traffic, hopefully we're generating some revenue. So how realistic, Liz, is it to make passive income from YouTube? That's a great question. It's a question everybody who wants to start a YouTube channel wants to know the answer to. And I would say it's more possible now than it's ever been before, especially with the advent of AI tools coming out, making the barriers to content creation so much lower.

3:01So really, as long as you understand who the audience is and what they want to watch on YouTube, and you have a good idea of how you're going to monetize that audience once they do start pouring in through good content, it's very, very realistic, more realistic now than it's ever been before. Now, what do those numbers look like? Like what could they look like on a number scale from, you know, a couple of dollars per video to a couple of hundred dollars per video? Yeah. So this basically varies widely depending on who the audience is that you're targeting and also the type of content that you're making.

3:31So for example, if I was doing DIY craft projects, my CPMs on that are probably going to be quite a bit lower than if I'm doing, you know, real estate or legal advice or business growth strategies and things like that because the interest points of those viewers are going to be very different meaning the advertisers running ads on the content are going to be paying different amounts based on kind of the the level of products that they're selling and the cost of those overall that they make back through the ads so the thing for anyone who wanting to start a youtube channel to really understand though is that ad sense revenue is just one of the monetization pathways that you can make money through YouTube on.

4:10There's actually three other main ways to monetize a channel, which includes selling your own programs, products, or offers on the backend. There's also brand deals and sponsorships from other companies sponsoring your content. And then the kind of fourth main way to monetize a channel would be through, you've got AdSense, brand deals, affiliate marketing is the last one. So with affiliate marketing, you know, let's say I was a DIY craft channel. I could also incorporate some of the products that I'm using in the videos and make sales on that content by basically promoting where I bought those particular products that are featured in the videos.

4:45So depending on who the audience is, what the content's about, you have to also look at, okay, how are we going to eventually monetize this audience? Are we going to primarily focus on using YouTube as a lead generation source for our own offers? Or are we going to look to expand the audience out a little bit broader and maybe bring in some more of those brand deals and sponsorships, higher AdSense revenue, et cetera. But all industries on YouTube are going to have a difference in the amount of CPMs and RPMs, which is basically how much the advertisers are paying to display ads on that content.

5:16And RPMs is how much you earn from that. So if you have a very, you know, high value offer set that advertisers are running on, and you're relying on that AdSense revenue, it could be anywhere from, you know, 15 to$20 CPMs, which if you stack that up and compound it over tens of thousands of views, or, you know, if you have really good content, hundreds of thousands of views, it starts to add up really quickly. So Fire Nation, to kind of go back over some of the things that she just shared, I mean, you have AdSense, you also can do affiliate links, you can have brand deals, sponsorships, and that can add up pretty quickly.

5:46And again, I'm speaking from firsthand experience, a show that I launched in November. Now, mind you, this is a daily show. So I'm producing a show every single day. So keep that in mind. But you know, I just got paid actually today a little over$3 ,000 for last month from AdSense. I have two sponsors that pay me$4 ,000 each right now and they sponsor every single show. And those numbers, by the way, are going to go up as my numbers go up, if my numbers go up, which of course I'm hoping to do. And I haven't even started with the affiliate link things, which can be very lucrative as well when you use it the right way.

6:18So my show is already earning over 10K a month that I launched back in November. And I'll read off my last like number of views, which aren't through the roof. I mean, they're good numbers, but they're not, you know, they're not these insane numbers that people sometimes see. I mean, my show yesterday has now 13 ,000 views. The one in the days before was 7 ,500, 8 ,400, 8 ,700, 6 ,900, 6 ,400. So I'm getting consistent views on a daily basis, but not these insane views. But because it's number one, high quantity, I'm able to really generate some significant revenue over 10K a month in this in a show that's pretty young, but it's 2025, Liz.

6:58What's the best way to start our channel today if it were up to you? I think it's really important to take a step back, no matter what channel you're trying to start and ask yourself first and foremost, who's the viewer that I'm making this content for? A lot of people will just jump into YouTube thinking, here's what I want to create. And that's an important part of the creation process. But if you don't also match what you want to create to what the viewer actually wants to watch and has a record through their viewing behaviors of watching that type of content, then you'll end up creating this content that you really struggle to get impressions on.

7:31You struggle to get new people into the channel. So you have to find that crossover between what do I want to say and what am I passionate about? And what is the audience actually interested in? So there's a variety of different things that we do to research, you know, really the audience interests and things like that. We look for top performing creators and that in a similar space who've already built those audiences. And then we kind of reverse engineer and do some pattern isolation to look at, okay, what topics, what formats, what packaging styles with the titles and thumbnails are really working for that audience already.

8:03And if it can be done on YouTube, it has already been done on YouTube. So it's easier and much more effective to just, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel and fit the audience into your interests, just go where the audience has actually already expressed those interest and find those, those points of crossover. And that's really how we create relevancy with the content. Start with the viewer. Now, you know what Wayne Gretzky says, Fire Nation, which is go to where the puck is going to be, not where it is. Such a better tactic. Now, with all this being said, though, there's a lot of noise out there.

8:36I mean, there's a lot of people doing YouTube videos. I mean, especially with iPhones. I mean, everybody's got a great camera right in their hand as we speak right now. So is there too much noise for a beginner to actually stand out from all those experts that are out there? I think this is an interesting question because yes, there is a lot of noise and there are new YouTube channels that are being started every day. Some of them absolutely blow up and some of them stay dormant for years and struggle for years. The main difference that I've seen between the profitable YouTube creators that absolutely blow up, especially relatively quickly versus the ones that spin their wheels forever, is that they really truly understand their audience and they also have a general understanding of how YouTube's algorithm works.

9:16So you hear YouTube algorithm all the time. You may have heard, oh, YouTube search is the way to go. Go do all this keyword research. And that is one path. That's one strategy. But you have to get really clear on based on the type of viewer that I'm looking to attract and based on the content styles that they like to already watch most on YouTube. From there, how do we kind of reverse engineer that and figure out what our content should be? So I think ultimately anybody can start. People are starting all the time. But the difference between those who succeed and those who don't really also comes down to outside of just a general understanding of the audience and algorithm is do they have the right mindset?

9:50Because the creators that ultimately succeed on YouTube have already decided I'm going to make this work, even if it takes me 10 years. Some of the biggest creators in the world, like the Mr. Beast of the world, you know, it took them six, seven years to get their first thousand subscribers. But they had already made that decision that no matter what it takes, I'm going to make this work and I'm going to figure it out. So if you don't have that level of conviction that you are going to become a YouTuber and it's going to be successful when the going gets tough, which it does for every creator, we call this the YouTube rite of passage.

10:20You get out there, you start making some content, maybe a couple of the videos do OK. Most of the rest of them don't do well at all. Those tough times are truly like it's a mindset thing. It's all about rite of passage and you have to be in it for what can I provide as far as value goes to the audience? not thinking about it as, you know, what am I going to get from YouTube for myself? And that's really the main mindset distinction that I see between creators that go on to be wildly successful versus the ones that stay stuck for years and eventually end up quitting because they're in it for themselves.

10:52You really, truly have to be in it for providing value to your audience. Fire Nation, Liz is just here dropping value bombs. I hope you're taking notes and thankfully in the podcasting world, you can just listen to this again and you might have to, especially if you're looking to make a dent in the YouTube game. And we have so much more coming up when we get back from thinking our sponsors. You've got AI helping you write emails and name your dog. Shouldn't you be using AI to help you invest too? Seriously, I know investing can seem a bit overwhelming. I've been studying it since a young age, and I still have questions 30 years later.

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12:01go to public.com slash fire to fund your account in five minutes or less. Paid for by public investing, full disclosures in podcast description. Okay, let's talk about a platform that's completely changing how entrepreneurs are running their business. And they are also our featured partner, High Level. If you're an entrepreneur, coach, agency, or course creator looking to grow faster and smarter, High Level is the all-in-one platform that replaces your entire tech stack. Seriously, think ClickFunnels, Calendly, MailChimp, Kajabi, and even your CRM all rolled up into one powerful white label solution.

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13:10Seriously, every question that pops up, they will have your answer waiting. And if you visit my special partnership link, you'll get a free trial. So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com, where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High level, join the revolution. Liz, we're back, and we got some things to talk about. I mean, if we do this, all this work, and we're rocking our show, how the heck do we know if we're on the right track? You need to understand what your YouTube analytics data is actually showing.

13:47So this is what we specialize in at my agency. We basically not only help people come up with better ideas that are more relevant to the audience they want to attract by using our research processes to kind of, you know, reverse engineer what content is going to work well with them. On the flip side, we also train people on how to read their analytics data. Most creators, myself included, I started as a YouTuber back in 2012 and was uploading weekly videos for like the first four or five years. I didn't open my analytics dashboard until year four, maybe beginning of year five. and that was the biggest mistake that I could have made because YouTube is giving you a whole host of information about how the audience is interacting with your content if you just open up the dashboard and look under the hood.

14:32Most creators, especially in the beginning, they never really even look at their analytics at all besides the surface level stats like how many views did a video get, how many subscribers does the channel have, but YouTube's analytics gives you more data than you could possibly imagine. And it's more comprehensive than every other social media platform out there. So you need to understand which KPIs or which metrics are actually worth tracking on a regular basis. It's things like traffic sources, impressions, click through rates, retention rates, total watch time generated, what were your top performers, which one which videos brought in the most new subscribers, which videos are maybe more relevant for your existing audience and which are better for bringing in new people to the channel, being able to read through your analytics data is a critical skill that when I first started learning, it was really overwhelming.

15:21Because if you do open up your analytics, you're going to see thousands of pieces of information. So you also need to know how to translate that data. And the people that really understand how to read that data are the ones that have a major competitive advantage. Because most creators, like I said, they just don't even ever look at it outside of surface level stats like views. But if you're just looking at the total views of a video, we don't know if those are even the right viewers, you know, are they in the right age bracket? Did we hit, you know, the right type of retention rate, because a view is going to be counted, whether or not somebody clicked on that video and started watching for 60 seconds, or if they started watching for 60 minutes.

15:57So we really want to know the difference between the types of viewers that the content is bringing in, is it matching the type of viewer that we're actually trying to bring in? And also what topics, what formats, what packaging, you know, with the titles and thumbnails are actually performing better with them for the goals that we have, not just for audience engagement, but also for whatever our monetization pathway is. So that's the number one thing that's going to give you the best competitive advantage is understanding what the data is actually showing you so you can make data-driven decisions moving forward.

16:25And this is one of the biggest eye-openers during my 60 minutes that I had with Liz is how she was going into such detail and just uncovering all of these incredible things about my analytics that I didn't even know existed. And like, it was so fascinating to see exactly like where people were watching from and how long they were watching for and what were the most interesting parts of the video to them and where are they dropping off at and where are they coming back or where are they sharing? Like all these different things. It's such a powerful tool. And Liz, before the break, we did talk about money.

16:58We talked about the four main places it comes from. We're talking to AdSense, affiliate marketing, brand sponsorships. We didn't talk too much about lead generation of selling your own offers on the backend. So maybe we can touch upon that a little bit. But before we move on to the next topic, anything you want to add about where the money comes from? Yeah. So the first question we always ask new creators coming in for support is, would you rather prioritize sales from the channel to your offers or size of the audience? Because this is a spectrum. It's not that you have to be that these concepts are mutually exclusive.

17:29You can definitely go for sales to your offers and size of the audience. but we like to ask that first because it forces the creator to get clear on am I going to go with maybe a smaller more niche focused channel strategy where all of my content it might not get as wide of reach but it's hyper tailored to the type of ideal client that I have versus the other pathway which is let's just grow the audience as big as we possibly can and by doing that with those larger numbers larger audience seeing the content overall a higher percentage of people within that larger audience is also going to be interested in whatever our core offers are.

18:05So it's really a spectrum. And your programming strategy on the channel is going to vary widely based on whether we're going super niche, you know, more specialty content that's hyper focused to the ideal client type. And we're just focusing on generating leads and sales from the channel versus if we're trying to grow, you know, multi million person audience and try to attract new leads that way, regardless of wherever you land on the spectrum of what the true goal is. is for the channel, you have to understand that ultimately YouTube doesn't love when you send people away from YouTube. Okay. So YouTube as a business, their only goal is to keep people on the YouTube platform for as long as possible, which means you as the creator, regardless of where you end up on that spectrum, we use the 80, 20 rule and the max of it goes like 70, 30%, where 70 % of the content is sending the viewer to more videos or playlists on YouTube for related content.

19:01Okay, so when they come in, they're not just watching one video and leaving, they're watching one video that leads to another video and leads to another and another and another we're creating these groups of related videos to send people down these rabbit holes, where we can take them from click to binge. Okay, and if you do that effectively, that can help to expand the reach because that's what YouTube wants as a business. So when they see that somebody comes into your ecosystem, and they're watching, you know, four, five, six videos at a time, guess what YouTube's going to do? They're going to give that content way more impressions, because it goes directly in line with what their business goals are, which is to keep people on the platform for as long as possible and get them to come back regularly.

19:38That's how YouTube makes its money. Now on the flip side of that, you've got this, you know, 20 30 % of the content, especially if you have an offer on the back end, that we do want to hyper cater to take people from YouTube and turn that viewer into a buyer in your back end business. Okay, so with that, we're typically doing a lot of lead gen, we're not necessarily doing a lot of direct sales content on the channel. And the reason for that is because if we want to send a viewer direct to the offer, we can definitely do that. But it's much better to do that where we're retargeting. We're running retargeting ads from a second channel to basically say, hey, you've seen this content before.

20:16It's all free, etc. You're in our world. If you haven't seen this particular offer, cool, go check it out here. So that's typically how we would do direct to offer is we actually split that off onto a second channel and run ads to that retarget that organic audience that way. The other way that we would take those 20 to 30 % max of lead gen videos and kind of, you know, structure them into a sales machine for you is we're figuring out, okay, I'll give you an example. We had a client in the health and fitness space who one of her kind of tripwire moving into core offers is basically like a seven day workout plan.

20:55Okay. So what we did is we actually built that into a video that we created for you to in a way that would that was very likely to get super wide reach and engagement. And essentially, what we did is we put the actual download of the freebie to get them onto the email list into the thumbnail. Okay, so the title of the video was something like, you know, best strength training routine, seven day strength training routine for women. and then in parentheses, we put plus free workout plan. Okay. And then we're showing that free workout plan that we're showing the freebie in the actual thumbnail. So that video ended up becoming a top performer because that's a super strong point of interest for what her audience wants.

21:35And, um, ultimately within the first couple of weeks, it was already generating like five, 6 ,000 leads to the email list, which then on the backend, we're also selling through the email list. So again, we're not selling directly on the channel. And this is a big mistake that a lot to new creators make is they'll just start creating videos that are like promoting their programs. We're not doing it that way. We're leading with value first and we're asking them, we're inviting them to come into our ecosystem. And then we're selling on the backend, either through a secondary channel where we're running direct to offer retargeting ads, or, and in most cases we actually do both of these, or we're taking them, you know, with very strategic content that's based on the top problems, challenges, and questions that the ideal customer has.

22:16and we're making a feature video that also has a specific funnel attached to it. So, hey, if you like this video, you're really going to like this free guide I put together for you. It's free. It's simple. Click it. Click down below to go get it. Now that sends them to an email opt in where then they join the email list and there's a set sequence that's matched up to that to then try to send them into more expensive offers. So really, we're focusing primarily on lead capture through the channels. every once in a while we might do like a feature video about the offer or something like that especially if there's a big launch campaign or something like that going on but in general most of the time we're we're almost never selling directly on the youtube channel and i think that's really important for new creators to understand is you want to think about your youtube your organic content as truly top of funnel we're just there to spread your message widely provide value for the audience and then if you want to then sell offers on the backend, we can either set up retargeting ads on a second channel so that we're not infiltrating all that same data in the main organic strategy, which can muddy up the data and make it really hard for you to make decisions.

23:20Or we're creating strategic lead generation content to get people off of YouTube onto your email list. So we can then continue to deepen that relationship and then offer them additional products, services, et cetera, whatever you have to sell. But we're doing all of that on the backend of the email channel so that, or of the email list so that the YouTube channel actually stays truly top of funnel and primarily focused on, again, providing value to the viewer. Liz, that was an absolute masterclass. I mean, Fire Nation, if you're not rewinding like the three minutes that that just was and listen to it again, I mean, you're not getting serious about YouTube and that's okay because not everybody will or is, but those of you that want to, man, that was an absolute masterclass.

24:01And Liz, I just want to say this. You were so gracious with your time today. Thank you for that. And I just want you to give the one key takeaway from everything that we talked about here today that you would love our listeners to walk away with. Of all the value bombs you talked about, what's the one thing Fire Nation needs to know? You need to understand who is the audience, how does YouTube's AI work, and ultimately what is your data showing you? Because when you have those three things under your belt, you will become unstoppable on YouTube. And ultimately, at the end of the day, if you're not quite there, just understand it's a skill.

24:36It's a skill that anyone can learn. If I can learn it, you can learn it. Let me just put that out there. Anyone can learn these skills. And it's really, if you have a message that deserves to be shared with the world, keep going because you will eventually develop that skill and become good enough that it will happen. You just have to believe in it and believe in yourself first and foremost. Liz, you are unstoppable and if Fire Nation wants to learn more and connect with you, what is your call to action for our listeners today? Yeah. If you're interested in going deeper, you can head over to channelamplifier.com.