Ep 132: YouTube Secrets Tips and Strategies with Sean Cannell

When you create YouTube content, you are only one viral video away from changing your whole life. Today we speak with best-selling author and video expert Sean Cannell about how you can grow your brand on YouTube.

We open our conversation by exploring the YouTube landscape and how, unlike other platforms, it acts as a content library and not as a feed. Sean shares why now is the best time to start a YouTube channel before explaining how you can overcome your early challenges like slow growth and having little viewer feedback.

Next, Sean opens up his playbook, diving into the best practices that lead to YouTube success. You’ll hear practical advice on creating punchier videos and insights into how best to approach your content.

We also discuss the top ways to get high YouTube rankings, why you should focus on quality over quantity, and why you should never upload a video that your subscribers didn’t ask for. YouTube has become a dominant way for people to build their brands.

Tune in for an inside scoop on winning at YouTube from a creator whose videos have earned over 100 million views.

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LISTEN TO THE EPISODE BELOW

KEY POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE

  • Introducing YouTube superstar Sean Cannell.
  • Why YouTube is, “the most important place to build your personal brand.”
  • The value of seeing YouTube as a content library, not a content feed.
  • Sean explains why it’s not too late to get into YouTube. 
  • Hear Sean’s top tips on marketing your channel.
  • How consistency and systematized content creation lead to YouTube success.
  • Sean shares his game plan for what you can do to win at YouTube in 2021.
  • Insights into how YouTube ranks video content.
  • The importance of creating quality over quantity.
  • Making your content half as short and twice as strong.
  • Whether your content should address different topics than you are known for.
  • Sean’s advice for making it on YouTube; level up as you go, take the stairs, and create the right systems.

TWEETABLE MOMENTS

“YouTube is the most important place to build your personal brand.” — @seancannell [0:03:20]

“With YouTube, you’re only one video away from changing your whole life.” — @seancannell [0:10:40]

“When making YouTube videos, you need to focus on making your content half as short and twice as strong. You need to grab attention and create tension.” — @seancannell [0:22:03]

ABOUT SEAN CANNELL

Sean Cannell is a best selling author, YouTuber, international speaker, and business coach who built a seven-figure media company helping entrepreneurs and creatives build their influence and income with online video. 

Sean’s YouTube channels have over one million subscribers, his videos have been viewed over 100 million times and he has been featured as one of the “20 Must Watch YouTube Channels That Will Change Your Business” by Forbes.  

Sean and his team are on a mission to help 10,000 people quit their day jobs to do what they love. He is passionate about giving tactical, practical advice to use video to spread your message.  

Sean is from Arlington Washington and currently lives in Las Vegas NV with his wife Sonja and their two dogs, Rosie and Sophie. 

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Sean Cannell — https://www.seancannell.com/

Find Sean Cannell on YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWWFavn3ym0w3myTD5OX59g

Sean Cannell on Twitter — https://twitter.com/seancannell

Brendon Burchard — https://brendon.com/

Gary Vaynerchuk — https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/

Grant Cardone — https://grantcardone.com/

Billy Gene — https://billygeneismarketing.com/

Marie Forleo — https://www.marieforleo.com/

Lewis Howes  — https://lewishowes.com/

Jay Shetty — https://jayshetty.me/

Forbes — https://www.forbes.com/

Joe Rogan Clips — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnxGkOGNMqQEUMvroOWps6Q

Hook Point on Amazon — https://amzn.to/38gW5YP

Coffee with Cannell — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZPTK6uQq-g&list=PLWReDWw62yEhu8oQjGPKNXSL19NUH4KvL

Think Marketing — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKegeYEy0lJxpkjWRthaRMw

Brand Builders Group Consultation Call — freecall.brandbuildersgroup.com

Take The Stairs https://amzn.to/2ZAJNUS

Hey, Brand Builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show. So recently, one of my best keynote clients asked me the question. They said, who do you know, that does YouTube and video? And I said, easy question, easy answer, Sean. Is that so you’re, and that’s who you’re about to meet. Sean Cannell is one of his, he’s a best-selling author as well, but man, he is YouTube. He is all things video. He is an international speaker. He’s built seven figure business. His videos have been viewed over a hundred million times, which I think is incredible. His YouTube channels have over 1 million subscribers, Forbes listed him as one of the 20 must watched YouTube channels that will change your business. And him and his team. I mean, they produce some of the best content ever, and they’re just on this mission to help 10,000 people, you know, do what they love. And so he gives amazing advice and just had a baby with his wife, Sonia, which is exciting. And brother, thanks for carving out some time for us. Yeah. Rory, I’m pumped to be here. Thanks for that introduction. Yeah, I guess the other thing was you and I shared the stage also at Shaleen Johnson’s event. That was the first time that I was introduced to you. And then again at social media marketing world, just shortly thereafter. And now, and now, you know, this other client that we won’t be there at the same time, but I hope hopefully they’ll book you. And I have to say, man, the more that we’ve done, these interviews, I have just become so convicted on YouTube and there I have missed the boat, my entire career. I don’t know how, but I have somehow just completely missed what it is and, you know, so can you just kind of talk about like, obviously everyone listened to his personal brands, how do you view YouTube in the landscape of everything going on with a personal brand? Like all the other social, you know, social media outlets, website blog, like podcasting, how do you think of YouTube? Yeah. you know, I think of course from my perspective, but I’ll back it up. I mean, I think YouTube is, is the most important place to build your personal brand. It’s the number one video site in the world by far, far and away, you know, Amazon bought Amazontube.com and the URL and people thought, okay, what are they going to do? And even if they do something, they don’t have the content library. Of course there’s Twitch and that’s kind of gaming and live streaming there’s other things. But even if a competitor was to start, it’s going to be so difficult for them to build the backlog of YouTube, let alone the technological infrastructure of distribution to mobile around the world, over 2 billion, monthly active users, the best feature set and it’s free. So I think it’s irresponsible for any serious personal brand, serious online entrepreneur, business owner, anybody that wants to share their thoughts, their wisdom, their message with the world to not be on YouTube. I am empathetic because I understand that what with YouTube, it’s kind of like maybe the hurdle of content creation podcast, you know, audio it’s its own challenge for sure. But it’s, it’s a little bit simpler. I think some of the other social media platforms also give you more of kind of that quicker dopamine hit you. They’re able to like post on Instagram today, or even write an article on LinkedIn or a medium post. And you get it done and you didn’t have to like pull out your suit jacket, take a shower, do your hair that day, set your mic up, plan the content, figure out how you’re going to edit it. I think there’s a level of that complexity, but that keeps a lot of people if you will, out of the game that are missing out on the opportunity that if you can create a simple system to create what we would encourage one significant upload per week on YouTube it can have massive dividends. And I think the other thing about YouTube is it doesn’t give you as much immediate gratification like, like a Tik TOK does right now, or even some of the other platforms. You get a comment, you get a, like you upload a YouTube video, you got zero views. You know, a week later you got 10 views, but you’re like, well, that’s how many my IETV got, but that was a lot easier to create. And the YouTube video took more energy. But the thing with YouTube is it’s like a fine wine. It gets better with age. It’s a content library. It’s not a content feed. You build up your thought leadership there, a body of work there. And over time you can create so much passive momentum, passive traffic. And I think the last example of that I think is important to note is there’s a reason why some of the most influential online entrepreneurs and personal brands really invest a lot in YouTube, whether it’s a Brendon Burchard, a grant Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk Billy Jean whether it’s just you know, a Marie Forleo whether it’s of course, a lot of the YouTube in foot, Jay Shetty, you think about these different people Lewis’ house. Why are they investing also in YouTube, even if they’re doing a podcast as well or other things, because YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. There are so many people, there it is. It’s the town square of online video. And we are allowed to have our own shows all land the plane with this final analogy. What, what would it have been worth to buy? I looked it up a piece of land in Manhattan in New York. You can get a little lot, that’s an empty lot, so you could build on it. I looked it up just the other day. You know, real estate prices are going up. Maybe they’re going down, depends on the pandemic. But it was only 17 million, $900,000 to get that piece of real estate. And actually you can, we can connect later cause I got my license. So I’m happy to flip that to you if you want. I wish. And, and so what, but what would that piece of real estate have costed 10 years ago? 20 years ago, especially 50 years ago. Nobody knows a future, but YouTube is such a dominant platform of where online video happens, where so much education and entertainment is consumed, where so many people are planting their flag. I think a lot of people are going to regret, not investing in YouTube even now and here. And we’re actually putting, we put an offer on a house today. Then the Vegas is a boom and bust market. We just need someplace to live. We didn’t really want to buy, but gotta live somewhere. And like, we don’t really want it. So we’re timing some things. Here’s the deal. It’s just continued to go up and up and up and up. And I looked at I’m like, it’s going to probably drop no, it keeps going up. And so I would rather get in today. It’s not too late to get into YouTube. I’d rather get in today because even if it dips a little, like if you play it out, it is where you want to really establish your voice as a personal brand in mind. So the, the concept of getting in today. So just to talk about that, cause it’s, I think it’s a little bit overwhelming when you see exactly what you said, where it’s like, you don’t get the immediate gratification. I’m rebuilding my YouTube channel. You know, it’s taken a year to get to like 400 subscribers. I mean, it’s just like, or six, six months, it’s been like six months we’ve been doing it. And it’s just like, Oh my gosh, I’m just getting killed. Like w you know, putting energy into it. How do you get over that? How do you get over that mental block of like, I’m too late to the game? You know, it’s, it’s not worth it. I should be spending my time somewhere else. Cause I can get more traffic, you know, quicker, anything around how you think about that? Is it just what you’re saying? It’s just that long. No, I think it’s two things. I think it’s mindset and systems and we’ll go systems first. I think the system is to just create a simple system to be consistent on YouTube. Even if you start really simple, let ask you will this episode go on YouTube? Yeah, it will. Yeah. Yeah. So you’ve already you’re this is what this is not, I mean, I’m not, I don’t want to belittle the process, but this is not that challenging. Like we’re on zoom right now. You know what I mean? Like we’re recording this interview. So, so I only have 400 subscribers. Yeah. But like also the show format, you’re doing a video podcast and that’s 400 subscribers. It’s like, it’s, if you can get this systematized and especially for those that are scaling out with a team, a virtual assistant, you just get a simple workflow going, by the way, I recommend everybody listening. Here’s the model, a weekly video podcast. And if you are podcasting, especially during the pandemic, mostly just like this over zoom or something like stream yard or something else, like just flip the webcam on and have your guests flip the webcam on as well. That’s like the minimum viable product I think to get started with YouTube. Then you’re able to promise a weekly show. You’re able to leverage YouTube for the SEO properties. And if Amazon, if Apple podcast and Spotify and Google play is giving you more love, that’s just bonus on YouTube. And that becomes a foundational thing to get the algorithm seasoned. And then here’s your opportunity. Two things can happen if you were to layer the next strategy on top of that, the next strategy would be, well, this is 30 minutes. This is 45 minutes is you do a Joe Rogan. Does you cut out the three minutes or the five minutes? That has more of a chance when we really touch on that, that hot button topic, that poll cause that’s the kind of stuff that gets clicked on. That’s why JRE clips, the Joe Rogan clips channel all the video podcasters that are smart, do this. They cut out the clips to go viral, to get awareness, to get more love. Because a lot of people that don’t know you yet, aren’t going to click on longer form content like this. And so that’s one way to evolve. And then the next one is not even necessarily weekly, but when you have the bandwidth, when you invest the time you study some of my work and you then actually create native YouTube videos, shorter that are meant to like pull or push all of YouTube buttons to blow up your awareness. So then cause you’re always one video away from changing your whole life in business with YouTube, you put out the right video at the right time with the right title, with the right thumbnail, with the right. And again, maybe you don’t keep following up with that, but then they go, Oh, at least Roy has got a weekly show. So all of a sudden you go from four to 400 to 4,000 because of consistency. And because of having some smart systems because of potentially planning team and energy around when it is, you’re going to evolve into that. But in the meantime, Hey, in a year it’s 800 in another year at 1600 and YouTube does grow like a snowball, even if it is slow and steady, potentially with minimal effort, just with the videos you’re uploading here. So that’s systems, the mindset is simply that is really looking at it for the long haul, recognizing that you gotta level up with kind of the copywriting, the headline really good recommended book, Brendan Kane hook point. How do you write hooks? How do you grab people’s attention in a three-second world? Those skill sets matter so much on YouTube, but you don’t want to get overwhelmed again. Even if you put out Sean Cannell was, you know, you’re already amazing at that, but if you just guessed, like it’s not the best title in the world, but you show up every week and keep leveling up. Then a year and a half from now, everything changes. And you’ve got a backlog and consistency for people that are like, man, now I want to go deep with this guy. Cause there was a short form star smart content that eventually kind of went viral. And in your case, my case as well, virals 10 K views, you know, it’s 25 K it’s a hundred K when you’re normally only getting 50 to a hundred and that’s so much more common when you just stick with it. And you know, I just got to pull this one on you. Then the mindset side is he got to take the stairs stairs on YouTube because there’s that moment when, when putting in the work pays off. And so that’s what I’d recommend. Yeah. Well, I mean, I love the, I love the idea of, of your one video away from changing your life. I mean, my Ted talk is an example of that, right? It’s like, even though it’s not on my channel, I wish it was, but it’s like 4 million views later. I don’t do any, I don’t have to do any other marketing for speaking. It’s like people just email it. Hey, will you come do your Ted talk? People hire me to do a 25 minute version of the 18 minute Ted talk that’s available for free. But it’s, I mean, so I love that. And the, the other thing that this is part of why I’ve bought into YouTube finally, is what you were talking about, about how it gets better, like a fine wine, all the other social platforms. It’s like the, the longer it’s been around, the less valuable the content is YouTube is the opposite. Just like Google, because they’re the same. So, you know, you mentioned the SEO part of the video, the, are there some basic things like you’re saying, okay, yeah. Just throw up some video content. That’s basically what we’ve been doing. We’re just now starting to you know, so we put these on brand builders channel and then I do a weekly video blog on Rory vaden.com, which is the, you know, we’re just starting to like put more into that or there’s some basic things because of the relationship between Google and YouTube and how SEO works that we need to know in terms of like, don’t, don’t miss this, right? Like if you’re not gonna take an hour to optimize every video, but if there’s two things you’re going to do when you post a video, my gosh, like don’t forget to do this on YouTube specifically. That makes it, you know, more find-able absolutely. So there’s going to be two priorities, especially going into this next year that are critical for winning on YouTube. I’m going to share the lesser priority first, but it should be a given. It’s kind of like you, you like shouldn’t even have to mention the fundamentals because we should all assume you need to do the fundamentals, but it’s not the, the needle mover, but let’s address those first YouTube like Google needs to be optimized, like a great blog post. Your title should be attention grabbing and keyword rich still. And a keyword is what search term are you going after? You know what pain point or you’re solving? We teach ASQ answer specific questions. Just answer a specific question. And when I say answer specific questions, sometimes people think like a question, like what is personal branding? Well, that one’s probably been been touched on. Here’s one of my favorite strategies. It’d be like how to upload a LinkedIn profile. That was a deep strategy, by the way, because when you answer like something super specific like that, if someone’s on LinkedIn, they want to build a personal brand. Maybe that question is not even answered. Well, the app was just updated. All of a sudden, those are the types of videos that have a quarter million views that are really practical and utility. And then you like it. And you’re like, and by the way, you know, I also help people with, with building their personal brands. And that’s why your other may be more personal development, softer topics actually get discovered because you get noticed cause you teach people how to install a WordPress plugin. So there’s something about answering specific questions and priority number two. Yes. The title, yes. The description should be filled out. Like with enough words, like a good blog, post keywords, the tags YouTube has let us know these things carry less weight, but that is what’s called metadata. And it’s important. You just don’t want to cut corners there, especially when you’re just starting your YouTube channel. Youtube really doesn’t know what your video is about. So you’re giving it metadata. And that means you’ve architected the content to be actually tackling something very specific. And then of course the thumbnail, because that’s, what’s going to be what people click on or not. And so it’s like title thumbnail, tags description. And then the topic itself, that’s really the needle mover because if you’re not talking about the right things at the right time, especially, let’s say you were to talk about news, like there’s, this is what we would call trend surfing. It’s a good strategy. And that would be like related to personal branding. You put, you extrapolate some principles out of pop culture and you commentate on somebody. They don’t know you, but they know something that’s happening in pop culture collection. We talked about how we didn’t do it, but with like we’d recognized, we totally could have personal branding mistakes from it and whatnot. And it brings awareness. So that’s actually a topic thing. That’s actually the content strategy, but all of that, I would cluster under important, but the lesser priority, the way to optimize your content going into this next year is the content itself. And what I mean is here’s how YouTube ranks videos now AVD and CTR, Oh, say those in reverse CTR click through rate. And then the second one’s average view duration. So almost all the other stuff is so much lesser important than does someone click on it. And what would determine if someone clicks on it? Well, a great title that kind of like opens up a loop and curiosity, a thumbnail that’s also great and gets attention, but the topics almost more important because you might see it. You’re like that’s the best thumbnail I’ve ever seen. Well, I’ve never seen such a what Mark Twain couldn’t have written. And as PO Shakespeare, couldn’t have written a title as good as this. What does it matter if they’re not actually interested in the content? So your choice of topic, knowing and understanding your audience’s problems and ambitions their mindset, what keeps them up at night? What would actually get them to stop scrolling? Because that’s what they want to learn about. That’s what they want to hear about what gets you to click. You actually have to get the click, but getting the click. It’s not enough. They call it click bait. Wow, you got the click, but you trick me. I don’t want to watch. So AVD average view duration, AKA watch time, right? Another way of putting it is just how long do people spend on the video? So then once you start the video, it’s actually the architecture of the content. So I would challenge you. I watched some of your stuff, this probably maybe a long time ago. Maybe you still need to do this in this next year. Quality over quantity matters. And it’s quick to be able to set your phone up and maybe just record real time for seven, five to seven minutes or 13 minutes on a topic. People who know you will endure that, but there’s so many people that are just putting more effort into at least editing out the breaks at any hour, ums, structuring their content, putting something powerful in the beginning. I’m not saying it needs fancy production value, but you’ve really optimize that content to hold viewer attention. You’re really thinking about creating open loops, if possible, to have people go. You’re even more. So if you teach and you can have visuals, even if you do like kind of a webinar style and you share some things, you bring people from point a, B, C, D in the video. If you can hit an average view duration of eight minutes and a click through rate of over 10%, which your YouTube analytics will show you, YouTube will keep showing your video to more and more and more and more and more audiences through suggested 10% or higher 10 20, 30. And it’s crazy over eight minutes because if YouTube sees, so if you a couple of metrics and these are all taken with a grain of salt, but some good targets, a good target length of a video is 15 minutes. A good chance of a great 15 minute video will have an average view duration of about half that around eight minutes. And if the topic has a wide enough reach that people click through it at 10%, meaning when YouTube shows and recommends it and impression someone clicks through and then stays on it at that percentage, then that’s what could potentially spread throughout the algorithm. And if you don’t hit those numbers, but you raise those numbers, people dwell and watch your videos longer. And then people are clicking through on your videos. More those priority. Number two, title, topic, covering a trend. All of that is very important. It’s like just the fundamentals, but those are the levers, which how do you optimize those? The content itself it’s taken some time practically editing. Like I don’t care if you shoot your video on your phone, get it to an editor that can actually make it more interesting, more poppy and like, think about, about faster, because everyone’s rushed. You know, everyone wants it. It makes me think sometimes we’ll do something like this. That’s, you know, 30 minutes. But a lot of times we bond YouTube. If you took you 10 minutes to record the video on your phone, chances are a good editor could make that five and a half. And the difference between that 10 minute, just like free flowing train of thought versus just edited down is everything on YouTube. You know, this isn’t unlike English and there’s the English teacher story who had the class write a paper on a topic. And they had them write a six page paper. So he had to write a six page paper. And they were like, all right. So just choose a topic, six page paper, then they turn it in and then you send it all in. And then he handed it back to him and he said, look, I want you to cut this in half. And they were like, what? You want us to cut 50% Of this paper? Then he said, yeah, I want you to cut it in half because I want it to be stronger, more punchy, better. And they’re like, that’s insane. There’s no way. Okay, fine. So then they go to work and the class goes back to work, cuts their six page papers into three page papers. Then they turn them all in and then the teacher goes awesome. Great job. Hey, before actually we finished this out. I’m going to hand these back to you. I want you to cut these in half again. What a page and a half are you kidding? Like from six to eight, This is insane. He said, I want you to do it. And so then they cut it all the way down to a page and a half. Well, how strong was that content? By the time it got down to a page and a half, it’s what probably any great journalists would learn when they have to fit a complex thoughts into just an article in the New York times. So how can you make your content half short and twice strong? That’s sort of the idea of optimizing the content, grabbing attention, creating a story that has tension, a climax conflict resolution and holds attention. If you, I’m not saying that’s easy, but that’s like the key of YouTube right now. And to alleviate some pressure, just upload your weekly video podcast. And when you want to take a shot at maybe editing something down more or apply some of that editing to the clips channel, you go, man, during that conversation, we hit a point that’s strong that’s that’s title that one point, let’s settle that. And let’s make this three minute clip, five minute clip, seven minute clip that just really directly delivers that promise. Let’s do a good thumbnail. And for example, Joe Rogan does it all the time. Like of course celebrity meets topic, but like Elon Musk shares opinion on Corona virus. And you know, you’re like what? And you see it. And of course you just clicked through all they’re doing is sitting there and talking, but it’s delivering like one idea. One question, one, answer, one video on sort of that you got to click on it. You want to think about how you can do that for your own content. So if you’re saying a target length of 15 minutes and you’re trying to like cut it in half, does that mean you’re recording like a 25 minute and then trying to edit it down to 15? I mean, that’s interesting to hear you say 15 minutes and that’s low that’s long time. But you’re saying that that kind of, I mean, I don’t know if you would classify that as longer form content, but you know, like normally I am for five to seven and they end up being more like eight or 10, which then if we chopped it down, it would be like five or six. But you’re saying try that, that it’s good to have videos up there that are longer than 15 minutes because the, the AVD is higher. The videos should be as long as they need to be, but as short as possible. So if you’re your eight should be fours and your thirties should be fifteens. And so, so I only put that out there because the average iteration of a 15 minute video, if it’s great will probably be eight minutes and YouTube loves videos that cross that eight minute threshold, but there’s no reason to try to inflate your content. Three’s great fours. Great. If you look at think media right now, our main channel, we spend a lot of time around six minutes, seven, but sometimes the content goes to 12 or 13 and it’s usually for a reason, doesn’t mean it holds attention. But if we’re we’re teaching somebody how to use a particular camera and walking them through all the settings, well, it takes 13 minutes to do that. My thought is, if you take 26 minutes to do that, when it could have been 13 a competitor, let’s say teaching on the same camera when you hold that viewer attention that YouTube is going to love you more. Now, if both are pretty good and that person’s personality is so great and they do it in 30 minutes, we do it in 15, but they end up with 18 minutes of watch time. And we end up with like 12 minutes of watching that YouTube wants time on platform. Of course, there’s nuances to the algorithm period. End of story. How can you hold viewers attention longer? And so maybe the other way to attack this challenge is just definitely trimmed. The fluff, definitely think about dead spots. You know, I recently let me give you one example of, of actually how we practically do this. I do a show called coffee with Cannell. I livestream it. So I try to be pretty good as a communicator, but there nobody can be as good as a video editor on top of a community. There’s no way you could pause it. Video editing is always going to make it stronger even to the point where a lot of people trim out ums and some breaths are long pauses because YouTube just likes people want that content. You know, there’s a reason we probably listened to audio books and podcasts sometimes on 1.2 or 1.5 or two X YouTube saying, Hey, just give it to me. And viewers are saying, just give it to me, you know, as fast as possible. So I don’t even have to turn it up to two X speed. And so I do, what’s called coffee with Cannell. I record the content. And then because we now have two channels, I almost have like a channel where I experiment it’s called think marketing. And then I’ll, I’ll put the hottest parts on think media that are like worthy of have taken off with. Great. I want to ask you about that, about the channels. Okay. Well, where do you use the delineation between this should be its own channel versus like a, you know, you can, I think they’re called categories, right? You can go, I can have, I can just have several categories, like you know, like the, like you you’ve used this example a couple of times, the long form content is over here, but then the short edited clips live on a different channel. Like, is it by length? Is it topic? Like, how do you determine, Oh, I should move this to its own channel because then you’re also kind of fragmenting the viewers, but they’re getting a more focused experience. Yeah. That’s a great question. I actually think it’s something you shouldn’t even worry about until your, you get to a hundred thousand subscribers. Yeah. So it’s kind of like, like if you’ve got your main channel, you could upload your video podcast there and also your clips there and also your one-off videos there. And also the seven week blog series when you’re touring on the road, because it’s all just building up momentum around the one channel for us, it was actually kind of creating two different brands. Think media was sort of my strategy as well as tech reviews and camera reviews combined. And this is a really powerful YouTube tip that the channel suffered for from is you never want to upload a video that subs the subscriber didn’t subscribe for. That’ll kill you on YouTube this year. You never want to upload a video that the subscribers didn’t subscribe for. That’s how the trend strategy could backfire. Because if people thought you were always going to be political, I mean, you should do it anyways, potentially cause you want the growth and the reach, but it doesn’t make sense. Like I’ve learned this. If somebody is like, okay, Sean does camera reviews. And then I’m talking about social media strategy. They don’t want to watch that. Now. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t do it. I’m suggesting that you should know the rules and then break them intentionally and understand that it’s like, well, that’s why because they clicked subscribe because they want more camera reviews. So they don’t click on your next video, which kills it in the algorithm. Like anybody that doesn’t engage with your most recent upload and scrolls past it on any platform signals to YouTube, Oh, we shouldn’t show this to any more people. So the dream is to have a clear value proposition of your channel and continually deliver on that value proposition. It’s almost like a target where you could on the bulls-eye is great. Those are your best performing videos, but you don’t want to like completely miss the dartboard. You don’t want to completely miss the dartboard. You’re like, it’s kind of like it’s tied in if I go to the far outskirts, but that’s about as far away from my core promise, my core value proposition that I want to go. So we just were really steering our channel. Think media, really towards tech how to use cameras, how to use your light. What is the best light black Friday tech specials for creator gear. And then we started to think marketing. When we launched a video podcast and our minimum effective dose was at least our weekly Tuesday video podcast show on think marketing. And then it also gave us though a chance to just experiment. So especially when the pandemic happened, we started a show called coffee with candle. Cause all my traveling got canceled and I started answering people’s questions, had their tourists on our team, started to think marketing live show. And they started to be like one hour, 90 minutes, even two hours. We’d bring people on and talk to them side by side on stream yard and answer questions. Just try to do community and try to build momentum. But what we now do is we teach for 15 to 30 minutes at the beginning and sometimes that content can be really dialed in. Great. So to land a plane on the strategy the other day I did it, it was 30 minutes long, about 28. And my editor, one of my editors did it, did an edit of it. And I went back to him and I said, we got a half short twice, twice. You know, I was like, I maybe like to hear myself talk, but like this whole story, that’s not essential. Let’s take that thing out. And four minutes was gone. It was kind of like, it didn’t help the content. And I was like, this part right here, I took 10 seconds or 25 seconds to click around. Cause I was sharing my screen to show people. I’m like, you got to cut that down. And, and he’s typically on top of it, but I was sorta like, you know, it was maybe he’s like, he just did a quick intro, outro, whatever I’m like, bro, you need to like, this thing needs to be optimized because that’s, that’s the difference between it doing well. Let’s say with people who know you and trust you, right, as soon as you hit like a lull and you know this, cause you’re a master speaker and architect, you know, it’s like, you’ve tried different things. You’re like, okay, that story bombs. Like I lose the audience during that time. I lose attention during that time. So masters of YouTube, which let me encourage you and everyone to that, if you can learn these types of skills, which I would argue is not an option. You have to learn how to master getting attention in a 20, 21 and beyond world. It’s just the name of the game. Janell, Elena is a great example. She went from zero subscribers to 1.3 million in three weeks with three videos. Whoa. So you don’t actually necessarily, it’s not like, Oh, if I did it, if you put out the right video with the right title, with the right thumbnail, with the right tie you know, tags and the whole deal, that’s on the right topic. And it’s a good optimized video. Youtube. It can just blow you up overnight. And maybe the strategy becomes not being so stressed. Like hope is not a strategy. Just thinking that, like Sean said, I’m going to eventually hit it, but, but creating a system and having a mindset of taking the stairs, but leveling up those little tweaks little by little because you go okay. Once I feel that once I hit my moment and arguably, I like to encourage a lot of people use your season and obscurity to prepare you for popularity. Oftentimes people are not ready for a viral video. So if you’re building a backlog of a catalog in a backlog and you’re dialing in your YouTube strategy, you’ll be able to sustain it after you go viral and keep following up with, with a level, if you will. And again, viral could be a 33,000 viewed video that grows your channel 3000 subscribers. Now you have that core audience that really changes everything for your topic, your niche, how you not, how you help people. And so I had Kyle edit that video down. So we took a 28 minute video out of a really long live stream. Cause I went into Q and a and knocked about nine minutes off it. So it went till about 18. It’s still like a longer teaching. I wasn’t, I’m not worried about the time if you will. I was like, it has to be 15 or it has to be, it just has to all count. As far as what’s left in there, we got to trim the fat trim, the fluff that was I, my bro, I, I repeated myself and stumbled all over my words. That whole part was unnecessary. I agree. Yes it was. And so then dialing that in and that might start with you as your own editor. It might start with you with the mindset as you’re maybe coaching somebody else. Zero, very unlikely that you’re just going to find somebody who just gets this unless you like connect them to our movement. And we just we’ll train them for you. But like, you know, you probably just keep coaching, keep tweaking. And those small tweaks eventually lead to giant peaks on YouTube. I like it. Sean canal, kennel. I say it wrong every time Canales, how you actually say it, right? Sean Cannell rhymes with YouTube channel. Nice. That’s that’s it Sean Cannell. You guys check him out. I mean, we could go on and on. There is so much stuff. He’s one of my favorite people to follow that I actually follow. And I learned a ton from him and his team really, really, really great stuff. I love this. I think, you know, use your season of obscurity to prepare you for popularity. Isn’t that true in also a spiritual sense and a financial sense and the every other sense buddy, we just wish you the best. Thanks for pumping out such great content all the time and for sharing some of your secrets here and you know, keep it going brother. Appreciate you. Thanks for having me on

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