Case Study: How We’re Starting To Hit ‘Record’ Numbers on Our YouTube

0:00We're going to talk about how we're starting to hit quote unquote record numbers on our YouTube channel. Just for some context, right now for marketing school, we have a very small channel, about 7 ,000 subs or so, but it started to grow. And Neil, you probably don't look at your YouTube studios much, but maybe four or five years ago, I was obsessed with looking at YouTube studio. And this was back when I had the office in downtown LA. We're recording all the time, and we had videos that would get 200 ,000, 300 ,000 views or so. So my YouTube was cranking, right? Right. And I remember there's a certain point in time when I, when I look at the metrics where the growth rate started to accelerate, whether it's the number of views accelerating and the number of subscribers accelerating.

0:40So you can say maybe it's growing 20 % month over month. Right. And I've seen it consistently accelerated at that rate a couple of years ago. Now I'm seeing it again. Right. And point is the law of compounding. If you're continuing to accelerate at 20 % month over month, the numbers are going to start to get big. And so I have, that's why I was talking to a YouTube consultant. And I was looking at both my channels leveling up, which has 75 ,000 subs and the marketing school one, I'm like, the marketing school one has way more potential. I think it's just going to outpace it by a lot. And so I think the point is a lot of times, one of the points here, I would say, and I'll turn it over to Neil is when you're starting out, the natural human inclination is to compare the number of subs or views that you have to someone that's maybe in their chapter 15 or year 15.

1:23And it starts to get really overwhelming to do that. But as long as you're competing against yourself and you're seeing the law of numbers, you're seeing the law of compounding happen, then you know, you're on the right track and the YouTube consultant. He was like, yeah, I agree with you. There's a lot more potential with marking school. So go ahead, Neil. Yeah. So what are the numbers that we're seeing? That's record numbers and what are we doing to achieve it? Yep. So we're growing the numbers that would be 20 % month over month on views and subscribers. Right. And then right now we're at about 7 ,000 subscribers and I'm looking at it right now.

1:53Let me see what else I can pull up. Watch time is compounding as well. That's about 20 % month over month as well. And I'm just looking at, I'm looking at some of these graphs. Yeah, just going kind of up and to the right. So what are we doing? Was your other question, correct? Yeah. So I know a few of the things that we're doing. Number one, we're making our videos longer. So by making our videos longer, it helps with retention. Number two, we're starting to talk less about regurgitated content. If you look at a lot of our topics in the past, it'll be like seven SEO trends for 2023 that you have to follow or seven SEO hacks to check out.

2:27And we're talking about stuff that's different, like marketers are using this shady LinkedIn hack to get crazy growth. And then we're breaking down what marketers are doing and what you can learn from it. And we don't recommend the tactic, but we're talking about videos like that. Or we'll talk about stuff that's trending, such as like why Elon Musk is funding legal bills to people and how that's really interesting for Twitter and can also help cause them to get more growth in the future. But in essence, we're talking about stuff that's fresh up and coming and hasn't been regurgitated a lot, as well as making sure that there's longer form videos.

3:02And Eric and I are trying to provide more nuggets and insights within each video to also keep people hooked longer versus, you know, just dragging it out for the sake of dragging it out. And then of course, people get bored and drop off. Yeah. And also Neil and I are moving closer together for the sake of you. That's a completely separate thing for the sake of you. No, for the sake of you, the listener. So I'm looking at the graph right now. So I'm looking at a 90 day comparison. So watch time is up 264%. And then the number of subscribers in the last 90 days or so, we are up about looks like 30 ish, 40 ish percent or so.

3:39And then I would just say, if you look at the number of subscribers on a yearly annual basis, we're up 1500 % or so. So point being, it's starting to compound. The other thing that we've done, and Eric is one who drives this most of the time, actually almost all the time, is we start sharing screens. So if you're creating content around an educational based topic that requires execution and implementation, sharing screens to break down stats or steps or trends or anything that can help people not just understand what information you're giving, but also better know how to execute based on what you just showed them, that's a big win.

4:19And I do believe that if you can end up doing that, you're going to be in a much better spot. And we've seen when we do that in our videos, it also helps us generate quite a bit more views as well. Yeah. So I'll share a couple of things that Neil, you're probably not even aware of this, but we actually have a quote unquote brand team that helps with the thumbnails. And so what happens inside of Slack is for each video. Now, what we will have three thumbnails and we'll pick the one to go with first. And we'll also pick title. So we're switching the thumbnails and we're switching the headlines if they're not working.

4:49I don't think we're switching quickly enough. I think it needs to happen within the first hour, but unfortunately, a lot of the brand team, they're based in the Philippines. And then also the other thing is with these videos now, Neil, you're actually looking at the spreadsheet right now. I added a column for thumbnail concept in column H. And so I will come up with a thumbnail idea here. So at least we'll have another idea because before we were just kind of handing it off. But now I'm trying to be a lot more intentional with the thumbnail and also the idea itself. And whenever we have an idea, it usually will perform, let's say 10 to 20 X better.

5:19And keep in mind, this is the law of numbers. We don't have a lot of views per video yet, but I would just say at the end of the day, your idea needs to be really good. Your thumbnail needs to be really good and you need to hook them. So before I used to say, welcome to marking school, blah, blah, blah. And then we have like a big thing in the beginning. Now we just go straight into it in the YouTube video, just so we have better retention. And our videos that have good retention could really be anywhere from 40 to 60%. We're not Mr. Beast. 40 to 60 % is actually pretty good for a YouTube video.

5:46Cool. Well, make sure you rate review this podcast. That's it for today. Please give us five star reviews and ratings. That helps us a lot. Thank you very much.