In this digital world, being on one platform is not enough. That is why a number of podcasters not only upload episodes for podcasting only. Some livestream on Facebook and convert it as an episode, while others finish an episode and upload it on YouTube. Giving us more insight when it comes to optimizing our videos is Deepak Shukla, SEO expert and founder and CEO of Pearl Lemon. He talks about YouTube SEO and shares different strategies on how to use them. Covering the importance of keywords, creating playlists, having content, and more, Deepak shows the interesting side of utilizing YouTube to carry people to your own website.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

The Fundamentals Of YouTube SEO with Deepak Shukla

I had an amazing interview that I’m going to share with you with Deepak Shukla. He is an SEO expert. He has an agency called Pearl Lemon out of London. It was such a fun conversation. I want to share with you who he is and a little bit of what to expect. He’s a CEO, meaning he owns this award-winning SEO agency. He bootstrapped it. You’ll hear him say he started shortly after he moved back in with his mom at 30 years old. In less than six months, he grew an SEO agency from nothing to significant five-figure revenues per month and doing an incredible job of it. He’s been doing it for about a couple of years. You might think, “That’s a young company. He’s a young guy,” and that’s all true. However in reality, the internet, YouTube, Google, SEO, everything’s changing fast. I personally am not at all put off by a relatively new agency and a young individual. In fact, they would be even better suited and energetic to figure things out and be a great consultant than people who have been established for many years.

I was interested to speak with Deepak, learn a lot of new things that can certainly help me in what I’m doing for marketing and growing my business using my podcast and SEO. In particular, one of the areas that Deepak is an expert in is SEO with regard to YouTube and different strategies for how to use YouTube and videos. Most of us reading this blog are podcasters or using podcasting to market and grow your brand. A lot of us are also using YouTube. Some of us are recording our episodes as live stream videos on Facebook or at least recording as video and putting them out on YouTube as well. I don’t do that with every episode but certainly, if you’re a longtime reader to this blog and connect with us at Feed Your Brand on Facebook, you see we do put out live stream videos from time to time. Some of those become podcast episodes or we certainly do put those videos out on YouTube. That’s been important and an important part of our strategy, but there are some new things that I learned that Deepak’s doing and I’m excited to share that with you.

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Deepak, thank you so much for joining me on Feed Your Brand. It’s good to have you on the show.

Tom, I’m excited to be here. Thank you for having me on.

I would love it if you could start by giving a little bit of background and why and how you started your agency and how you found some opportunities in your niche in YouTube SEO.

In one way or another, everybody has to pivot in their career. Click To Tweet

I started my agency in October 2016. It’s been a whirlwind in that I started because I love marketing. I love some of the more technical components of marketing because out of university my first job was a tax consultant at Deloitte. It’s night and day as compared to SEO, but there is a technical component the tax. The space within marketing, which is my primary passion to a degree marries up. If you’re looking for something technical, you get into SEO. There was that component to it. Why now or why October 2016? I moved back into my mom’s at age 30 in August 2016 and I was like, “I need to move out,” because I’d moved back. Funds had run out. I’d been on this journey abroad and nomading and it was the case of, “I’ve got to do something that I could potentially make some money from, some cash to get out of my folk’s place.” My agency started full service but it never was the intention to stay full service. The reason I started full service because I was scrapping to do anything that would put money in my pocket.

That’s a fair and real motivation not only getting out of your parents’ house, which I can totally respect. I remember after I graduated from college interviewing for many jobs, waiting for that first opportunity, I ended up going back home living in my parents’ house. I was doing trade jobs like painting houses and things as other things are happening. That was a long couple of months until I could get out of there. I understand. Good real motivations and it’s interesting. You’re technically inclined it seems. You must enjoy numbers and data if you started in the tax world, but then found another way you can pursue where some of your talents lie but in an area that’s more fun like marketing.

Before I was at Deloitte, I was a literature major. I was studying Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Shokan and this stuff. I went to tax at Deloitte simply because I didn’t know what to do out of school. My friends who went to engineering or science and economic bachelors were all going to work corporate jobs. I fell in line. I did the same thing. I discovered that this is not me, the space. I enjoy hard things but this perhaps wasn’t the right hard thing for me to do.

Everybody has to pivot in their career. It’s an exciting time. The timing was interesting. In October 2016, there has been an increase in the use of video for creating content and marketing and social media exposure. These last couple of years here is when Facebook, for instance, has put such an effort on live stream video. Now YouTube is the world’s number two search engine. Your timing is quite good. Digital marketing changes fast. If you’re not paying attention for a month or two, you could be left behind. Starting an agency at times can be a daunting thing for some people or others might think it’s inherently risky.

In this world of technology and digital marketing, the new guy is not necessarily inexperienced, is not necessarily at a disadvantage over established companies because it’s all new all the time. I’m dying to hear what your thoughts are on the state of YouTube in terms of using it as a marketing tool. You’re definitely more of an expert in it than I am. I’d love to hear about what’s new? What’s exciting? What the opportunities are? What people don’t realize? Let’s start with why did you start to gravitate towards YouTube? What brought you there? What can you share with us about some of the unique aspects that people may not know?

YouTube SEO: Digital marketing changes fast. If you’re not paying attention for a month or two, you could be left behind.

 

I agree with you that it’s an interesting time to be in the world of video. We’re beginning to get to the stage where people are recognizing it as a tool that can drive conversions. Therefore it’s perhaps worth attaching advertising dollars to the actual process for ranking videos as opposed to singularly producing them. That’s been the interesting shift. It’s largely still amongst early adopters outside of perhaps anybody that runs YouTube AdSense. The space is exciting. My interests in video, we take it back to university again. I did best when I was in seminars much better than I ever did with my essays. Essays weren’t terrible, but it certainly wasn’t good. I enjoyed the verbal aspect of being able to communicate my interpretations of the poetry and the plays and the literature that we were reading.

I have never been great at producing long-form content because I don’t and I didn’t have the patience to sit down and do it. What I did enjoy myself personally was creating videos. I was my own test tube. I made many mistakes with all of the videos that I’ve produced. I’ve gotten vertical videos on YouTube when perhaps they should be horizontal. I’ve got videos that are fit for Instagram are on YouTube. I’ve got videos where the audio and the video are out of sync. I’ve got video with the content that’s not correctly in place in a lot of them in terms of the YouTube description. Without realizing it at the time, I became my own test ground for actual videos. It came into fruition out of my own feeling that I’m doing these videos and I’m a better producer of videos than I am ever going to be written.

I want to see if I can get better ROI for my own videos because I began to use it as part of my internal sales processes. Meaning when I got into calls, I’d say, “YouTube me or Google me.” If people do Google my brand name, it’s not a hard thing to rank your own brand name but people would begin to always see my videos or gravitate towards the videos in Google search. “This dude, Deepak, he said google him. His videos came up,” and that was the backstory as to where my interest in October 2016. Even predating that if people look towards my actual history on YouTube, my first videos came up probably in 2010 when I was creating video of various types and kinds.

The real commercial component to it came when I recorded a while back a review for software. I can’t remember but there’s been a couple that I’ve done. We’ll use the one example, it was Mailshake. It’s cold email software. We’ll go through some of the tactics and strategies underneath it, but we’ll talk about what struck a chord or a light bulb moment. It was when Mailshake personally reached out to me and said, “We’d like to thank you for your video because some users have signed up as a consequence of watching your review.” I YouTube Mailshake review and there’s my video, top three Mailshake reviews. I was like, “There is money in this.”

That’s a great moment in your history where you realized there is one type of video, creating a video that’s a review on something. In this case, it was software which there may happen to be a lot of money in software as opposed to reviewing a book or something else. Reviewing something, you said, “There’s an opportunity here. This provides value for people. It’s why they’re going to watch it,” and there’s a way you can monetize that.

Something is better than nothing, so do something. Click To Tweet

I had that moment and as you can appreciate by this stage, you produce your own content. You read a blog post here and there. You implement maybe 10% of any blog post that you’ve read because you’re like, “That seems cool, but what can I do in a minute? That I can probably have the brain space to do.” Maybe the rest I’ll bookmark and then you go on this journey and you may come back to it. You probably don’t if you’re a busy business owner. That moment was the moment where I was like, “I’ve got the common-sense stuff that I know from SEO about perhaps link building and building descriptions.” That was where then also I thought, “Let me invest in time and see if I can get at some of the content that YouTube marketers discuss on forums with other YouTube marketers as opposed to anything that’s singularly mass market.” The stuff that we read, for example, about the ten best things to do with social you might read in Social Media Examiner or the Huffington Post. It’s for a mass market audience broadly. Therefore, it won’t always contain the most cutting-edge stuff. That’s one of the things that I recognize when I began this journey of video. That was the moment. That was when I began to deconstruct what was it that I did well within that video, how I rank that video and what was there that I could replicate and perhaps potentially improve.

Your agency grew from nothing to a significant amount of revenue per month quickly. Are you helping your clients determine what type of video content they should create? Are you taking their video content and helping them get it more visibility? How is it that you assist your clients to create a video that’s going to have value for them?

Both in that, number one, the actual production of video represents a barrier for a lot of businesses. They’re like, “I need a camera,” and there’s that education process. I know that cut out half of my market in terms of my client base. There were some people that I knew I would create additional work for myself in trying to find someone and they wouldn’t want to pack. It was a whole bag of mess. There have been a couple of clients who have said, “Deepak, I’m down. Let’s do this,” and in those spaces, we have begun aligning some of the content that they’ve produced in terms of blog content and aligning it with their actual YouTube strategy. YouTube search does not reveal its actual keywords and volumes that people search internally. Any tool that you use will run off a Google search and then show you estimations of what appears on YouTube. Of all of that being said, you can assume a decent level of correlation. There is the keyword finder that comes up in Google as well as YouTube. When you search something, you can see some of the other listings that appear alongside it. This is the interesting bit, 94% of Google searches are long tail searches.

Keyword phrases, they’re not a single word or two words. It’s three to six words.

People want to rank for lead generation. People want to rank for Photoshop tool. If you think about semantic search and how people run searches, I would typically never look up, for example, best marketing software. I would maybe but for the large majority you’re thinking of particular marketing software. You’re thinking of a particular size of dress or style of dress. You wouldn’t just Google buy a red dress. You could Google buy a red dress but it would give you poor search results. With this in mind, there are a couple of things that you can do and that we did do with this blog owner that will speak to some of the audience that goes beyond. We’ll come back to some of the fundamentals of YouTube, which a large proportion of it you can find on a regular blog post. Make sure there’s some title correlation, there are a couple of YouTube plugins that you can use. Do tell me if we can run through them. The interesting thing was recognizing that a lot of searches long tail, determining the volume of video that you’re able to produce and/or the quality.

YouTube SEO: There are many interesting ways you could do with video when you think creatively.

 

Number three, looking at your content and looking at Google search console to see what keywords are ranking within your blog posts. For example, this company is a recruitment company and they recruit for technical software roles. They recruit for Python programmers, for JavaScript, for Ruby on Rails, UI, and UX whatever it may be. They’re about a few months in with us and they’ve been producing from their standing start four blog posts a month, so we’ve got sixteen blog posts. We’re working with a company that is like, “Deepak, we’ve been in business for a few years. We’ve started producing blog content. We’ve got sixteen blogs and these are the keywords that the blog ranks for. Python programming jobs are one of the keywords. It’s high volume. This company’s ranking at the bottom of page two. We want to get it to page one.” What we began doing is looking at keyword co-correlation within what was already ranking or what was close to ranking around Python programming within their Google search console. We correlated that with building YouTube content that would speak to some of the things that were already being searched for. That would be excellent at ranking in three places.

First of all, it would be excellent at ranking within the actual recruitment company’s site, in terms of that page becoming a bit more of a power page. It was capitalizing upon some content that page is already ranking for, but then you build more videos for it. The second place it starts to do well is Google search. Especially there are not just reviews, tutorials are a huge thing. If you’re a manufacturing company, if you’re a physical business that does anything with plants, then how-tos on taking care of plants. There are interesting ways when you think creatively with what you can do with video, even if inherently you think, “Deepak, I’m an insurance company.” You might look at, “What are the how-tos around insurance that makes sense for my business?” because how-to and tutorial are huge things as well as reviews. Using that strategy, we’re able to increase everything across the board with this new business by producing content around Python programming, focusing on that in terms of the video content. Making sure that correlates with Google search console. Building some links to the actual YouTube page itself from both the website as well as link building off of it.

Using that within the blog content and following a strategy like that, it’s quite a powerful way to help boost your actual Google SEO as well as then looking at YouTube. That’s a singular example of Python programming. If you begin to produce a lot of content around the Python programming keywords, then what will initially begin to happen and it follows the same Google process in that you begin to get more visibility. What we’ll want to try and do is build links between videos and cells that you have using YouTube and notes. You’ve got YouTube cards, you’ve got the description. You can begin looking at playlists that already exist or popular videos that already exist on YouTube. You can begin composing your own playlists because playlists tend to rank well sometimes. In this case, people search for Python programming advice.

One of the keywords we’re trying to rank for is, “How to get a Python programming job or get Python program job or programming job advice Python,” and these types of keywords. You can build playlists around that and insert other people’s content. Doing combinations of those things will help everything across the board because then you begin to build power pages with sections. From the Google SEO perspective, I have as an SEO more opportunity to build links to a page if you’ve literally added a 200-word explanation of video. If you apply a strategy that meets some of the commercial goals of a website, then there’s a lot of value. Videos are a huge growth curve. It’s not something people would see immediate results from is it the other thing to consider when you’re starting out.

AI is not necessarily all that smart or at least not yet. Click To Tweet

Those are some important questions I’d like to ask. If you’re creating your own videos, how much content per week, per month or what is the measurement that people need to create? If you’re going to commit to a video strategy and create your own content, how much do people need to create for it to be meaningful?

There are two approaches you can take. You begin with what’s realistic. When I say what’s realistic, what I mean by that is how much content do you have the ability to reasonably create? Realistically, I’ll create as much content as you ask of me. I’ll definitely say to you more as long as there’s some value to the actual content you’re producing. Broadly speaking, I would say follow the same advice that is given online as to blogs. Meaning that regular content is better, quality of content is better, but something is better than nothing. An example of something that I’ve done that my team is annoyed at me about but I did it because I was like, “Something’s better than nothing and I want to get on that journey.” I have an info product around cold email that talks about the process of how I built my agency, for example, using cold email.

One of the things that are absent in terms of my funnel, the funnel was run by Adspend in the initial stages. It still is to a degree because I wanted to prove that it was profitable before I invested time and resources. I saw that it was. You could go to YouTube and you’ll see that I’ve got 97 videos in a playlist all around cold email. What’s horrendous about those videos is that they’re all one minute long. With all of that being said, I began to get organic sales from the course through people searching cold email agency, how to start a cold email agency. Specifically, quite long tail keywords that I appear on within Google as well as YouTube. That has happened because of one, the volume of videos I’ve created. Two, that I put them into a playlist. Three, the content choices I’ve made have all fundamentally been around specific questions that relate to cold email that I found off of Quora. The biggest problem with my videos is that they’re too short.

You’re saying you have a lot of videos, they’re short but they’re ranking. Does the length of the video have a significant impact on how it ranks or how many views it gets? Does YouTube not care how long the video is?

YouTube cares because of watch time. Watch time dictates the quality of the video. Some people come on and see, “What’s the video? That’s too short.” The other question associated and they all make sense in that they’re all true. I’ve got longer videos that do better. The reason that I did that anyway was that I was extremely busy and I thought, “Something is better than nothing, so I’ll do something.”

Some of my audience might think, “He’s just making a whole bunch of one-minute long videos. Maybe that’s all I need to do,” and I can shortcut this process of needing to spend a lot of time making videos. It sounds like what you probably would expect. Something’s better than nothing, but if you’re intentionally implementing a strategy here, incredibly short videos are probably not going to serve you as well as whatever a reasonable length of the video is. It’s like a podcast where we say it’s got to be at least twenty minutes if it’s just you talking in order to be valuable.

YouTube SEO: Before making a transaction, people will have questions.

 

What’s not explicit here is that the infrastructure that I do have is having a team who runs SEO. Every video to the extent it can be has been optimized. The tags are all in place. The descriptions are there. The thumbnails are excellent. All of that has been done well. The issue was my time and that was the resource that was in huge scarcity. I’d have Adina by project said, “Deepak, we used to make seven-minute videos.” I was like, “Adina, seven-minute videos are not going to happen. Here’s what I got. Work with it.”

That’s going to be different for everybody. You were talking about the playlist and video description. It sounds like you were talking about creating pages on client websites that were a resource, that were aggregating videos and providing content to people. It’s not necessarily just on YouTube where you’re expecting people to consume these videos. Is that right?

Absolutely. One of the places that can be a huge source of growth for your actual channel is from your website. An excellent place to produce video content and this is a place that any business owner can start is FAQ pages within the context of sites. It always does well. That tends to be a power page. Before making a transaction, people will have questions. Producing a video to answer a question is an excellent way to drive some traction. It’s something that we’re starting to do. It’s the time thing. I would say FAQs are an excellent place within your industry and everybody’s always got the ability to produce FAQ, whatever industry you’re in. A video to attach to that is excellent and it typically should mimic searches that people sometimes do make on YouTube and that have a specific question about whatever service or product it is that you’re offering.

The idea of a playlist of using some of your own videos but also other people’s videos, the fact that you are curating content and the authority saying, “These are good videos that are going to help answer your questions or are in your area of interest.” You don’t necessarily have to create all the videos.

There are a couple of elements to this and these are some of the hacks that you can employ. I could. I run an SEO agency. If I want to help get found on searches, I would look at playlists that already exist within my industry that relates to the space of SEO. That’s one of the things that I would do. I would run a SWOT analysis of those playlists to understand how does this reflect what people are searching for? How useful are these videos? Is this space underserved or low competition? Typically they are because a lot of people don’t think of YouTube playlist SEO because it’s relatively niche. What you can do, which is powerful is if you’ve got a couple of videos from Rand Fishkin at Moz or Brian Dean at Backlinko or Neil Patel. You can create an awesome playlist of content you’ve never seen before about marketing from Neil Patel and then tactically insert your own videos into that playlist.

The main aim of any YouTube video is to get people to your website. Click To Tweet

Do your best to build some SEO within that playlist by building a couple of links to it, but when people run searches it will naturally rank quite well anyway because you’ve combined videos that are already popular in a way that perhaps hasn’t yet been done. Irrespective of that, people will run specifically playlist searches as we do know. They’re generally low competition, especially in the space here. If we’re talking music, it’s a whole different game. When we’re talking spaces outside of music, then there’s a lot of opportunity in terms of low hanging fruit to produce 30% of an entire playlist. Use that to bump your views.

Is this a conventional playlist within YouTube you’re talking about? How you go into your video manager and you can create a playlist. It never occurred to me, but it should have. That playlist doesn’t have to be all your own content. Much like you can have an embed link to a video on your website that’s on YouTube, can you have an embed code to play a playlist on your website?

You can, the same way. You can also reach out to channels that produce playlists and suggest the video, assuming your content is relevant so you could then also reverse engineer and look at playlists that already exist. Think, “How can I add real value to this playlist?” and then it will often be a YouTube person who’s made a playlist for the sake of making a playlist and someone who’s not done it tactically. You could find ways of reaching out to them and say, “Could you add this video to your playlist?” Its blogger outreach, except this is YouTube playlist outreach. This is stuff that is interesting because this space is at the beginning of a huge growth curve as we all know. However you want to do it, get in the game of video and also start thinking about video search and what you can do with the playlist part and then also on the other side, are you taking channels that are from a standing start? We’ve also begun working with channels that are doing decently and have 50,000 plus subscribers, but within a space of 30 to 45 days because YouTube SEO is generally not competitive broadly speaking.

We’ve been able to increase their actual views by 5,000 minutes from YouTube search through a process of making sure that we’ve run maintenance. They’ve done their best effort in terms of this is what we think based upon TubeBuddy or vidIQ and we’ve done some bits and bogs. We’ve gone in and covered every hole that we can. I’ve seen a 5,000-minute bump in 45 days. For the bigger channels out there, what’s interesting is that you can almost get the thing that you ordinarily wouldn’t see with SEO. You can get a pretty quick return if you go in and hire someone for even a project like, “Deepak, I’ve got twenty videos or I’ve got 100 videos with 50,000 views or whatever it may be. Can you do something that I can’t?” That’s where also there’s a huge opportunity in terms of that gap because most of your competitors are running internal SEO in that they’re filling out the tags, they’re adding the descriptions. You can also go beyond that with how you link different videos and all kinds of interesting stuff.

Do you know from your experience when people search on YouTube for those long tail keyword phrases, is YouTube only mining the titles of videos, the tags, and the descriptions? This is the distinction. Does YouTube also know all of the things that were said in that video? Are they also searching based on those criteria? Do you have a sense of that?

YouTube SEO: Unless you speak extremely clearly, then the things that you say is going to lead to some misinterpretations from YouTube naturally.

 

No, the algorithm is getting smarter. That they will eventually. The way that things are going with AI, I think that they will. There’ll come a time where they can differentiate and distinguish between accents and even patois versus native English versus a Yank. All of these variations will grow in absence of that because that’s not now. That’s where all of those other things that you probably can predict come into play: the descriptions, the titles, the inscriptions. We’re already seeing some of that because of the closed captions that YouTube automatically generates. It’s yes and no. Yes, in that YouTube can detect it already. Would I, therefore, rely upon it now? No, because sometimes using YouTube’s closed captions can damage your content because of misunderstandings that YouTube makes. That then impacts the algorithms understanding of what the video’s about enforcing confusion versus people that prime their content. That’s the other thing that people don’t necessarily always recognize. We should, which is why I always say, “Unless you speak extremely clearly,” it’s safe to say that my cadence, my tempo, the things that I say is going to lead to some misinterpretations from YouTube naturally.

AI is not necessarily all that smart or at least not yet. That’s helpful because that’s something that is true of podcasts as well is that Google doesn’t pay attention to the words that are said within an MP3 file in terms of keyword ranking. It’s limited to the titles and the descriptions and tags if any. While that may change, nowadays that’s where we’re at. Is it also true that you have to have a certain number of subscribers on YouTube and/or views before you can monetize your videos?

Monetization of YouTube videos, it’s not blanket but that’s a leaning towards the media celebrity and entertainment space. We’re talking significant traction. You’re competing with the Fortnite gamer, League of Legends person, Pewdie Pie and these people. It’s not a strategy that I would advise or bank on, but it can be done and there are always people that will be the exception to the rules. With all of that being said, the main aim of any YouTube video is to get people to your website. Which is why people always say or the advice always is, “My name’s Deepak Shukla. To access, go to,” and inserting both vocals as well as descriptive calls to action.

You’re saying it’s much more realistic for people to use YouTube videos and YouTube itself as a tool to market and grow your brand, your business, and bring people to your website for lead generation or wherever it may be. The common individual or company or brand using YouTube is not trying to directly monetize the videos they put up there.

We’re getting into a space where Deepak Shukla or Tom Hazzard can operate on the same basis as Coca-Cola would do in that your primary goal of producing video and even audio content now. The best thing that it does for you is brand exposure, brand identity, and therefore brand trust, which leads to more sales at the backend of any funnel you built. People will be like, “Tom’s legit. I know Tom. I trust Tom because I’ve heard some of his stuff.” At least when I was going through Tom’s sales funnel or whatever it may be, I quickly did a Google lookup or checked him out on YouTube because the world’s so visual. I want to see the man behind the iron curtain. That’s the proponent people should consider that I do believe even if you don’t have videos that necessarily rank, you leave money on the table in that sense of not having video.

If you want to find out what's cutting edge, have a look at what's happening in the consumer market. Click To Tweet

B2B is always five to fifteen years behind B2C. We need to take all our learning. If you want to find out what’s cutting edge, have a look at what’s happening in the consumer market because that’s the speed at which people think about. The example of that in SEO is Google’s local ranking algorithm ultimately to rank anything. We will look at Trustpilot reviews, Glassdoor reviews, Yotpo, Feefo, Google My Business, and Facebook like. The whole review thing has been prevalent in the B2C space for many years. It was common. Even many years ago, I’d look up IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes before I’d ever go and see a movie. I’d always say if you want to do something that you consider to be cutting edge, have a look at what’s happening in the consumer space. Apply it to business and you can bet your bottom dollar you’ll put yourself in the 0.1%.

That’s some sound advice. That’s probably true. That’s something that people can implement. A lot of the things we’re talking about now are strategies people could implement themselves if they have the time. They could also reach out to your agency if they don’t have the time certainly.

Influence in marketing is the eminent example of what was already happening in the B2C with Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods, name your name celebrity. That’s just for sport and music. Now, what are we seeing? We’re seeing Neil Patel, we’re seeing Gary Vaynerchuk and we saw Grant Cardone. It stands to reason also that the other way to get ahead is you will make more money if you put yourself out there on video to present your brand. Gary Vaynerchuk is probably a good example of it. Gary Vaynerchuk has VaynerMedia. He probably has about fifteen different income streams. My buddy works for Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s one of his copywriters and he’s had the opportunity to see what happens day to day. He says, “The dude spends burn money, in excess of a couple of $100,000 a month running stuff at his personal content all for brand exposure.” People brand Gary Vee and then he puts them into one of his billing cycles at the backend of it. I also am a great believer in video is going to increase your earning potential because that’s the way that everybody processes information and the example of it that’s still at its early stages is the whole space of influencer marketing. It didn’t exist a few years ago.

We keep talking in our business about the host of a podcast being the center of influence for their market and their audience. That’s true about creating videos as well. Do you find a lot of your clients reluctant to get in front of the camera or when they come to you they already pretty much accepting, “I’m going to be in front of the camera. I got to deal with how I look, my background behind me, what I’m wearing,” or do you find they’re still apprehensive?

It’s not easy and I understand that it’s not easy. You asked me to write long-form blog content because you are someone who believes in the power of written content, what it can do to transform your brand. It’s going to take me an age for it to implement. The difficulty that all of us face and that’s what I’ve realized and I want everybody to do. Digital marketers, as people, we need to get sales training because we’re already preaching to the converted. Me talking to you about video will not help me sell to any of my clients ever because I’m selling to the mass market who are beginning to understand video. I’ll put in all of their actual marketing dollars in TV because they’re like, “Deepak, I’m going to spend $1 million a year, $1 million a month on TV ads because I still get them.”

YouTube SEO: The reality is you want to be the center of influence for your show. In order to do that, you’ve got to engage people.

 

Digital marketing is still in its infancy as an industry. A lot of people forget this like, “Deepak’s been around forever.” I’m like, “No, recruitment has been around a lot longer.” Banking, hospitality, people don’t think of markets in terms of the overall space. With all of that in mind, what we can learn from these other industries that have been around a lot longer, with digital still in the early stages of catching up. You’ve got sales funnels. You’ve got ClickFunnels. The power of learning, persuasion, and introduce you to someone, something new and all of the stuff that’s involved. That’s where we as an industry have so much to catch up upon that we can learn from total recruitment marketers. These guys are hammering the phones. They’re mastering the art of selling someone emotionally and investing in them. That’s something that as marketers, if we become more cognizant to, then it will only help us convert some of those who are teetering on the edge of it.

I don’t know if you’re aware of part of what we do as a company in Brandcasters is Podetize for our podcast clients but it relates very much to some things that you’re doing. You talk about the long tail blog post is important and we agree wholeheartedly. In fact, to the point where we convert every podcast and about 15% of our customers record their content as the video first and we still convert it into a podcast. We also convert it into a long tail blog post for their website. It’s based on what was said. It starts as a transcription, although it does get cleaned up and quality checked. Algorithms don’t get it all right. That becomes the text basis for a blog post. You can speak your way to a blog post. In fifteen or twenty minutes that’s 3,000, 4,000 words long that it would take you five, six hours to write. You’d agonize over it. We find it works incredibly well for SEO, for your website to create those blog posts based on that. Are you doing anything like that with your clients?

The short answer is no. Broadly, do I want to? I do because that’s a process that does make sense and I agree with it. In terms of my personal learning in line with SEO, the other thing that I’m focusing upon is understanding emotional sales, sales psychology. I want to make people emotionally understand and get what it is I’m trying to do and connect it to their ROI. We are starting to do that internally. My problem is that I don’t produce video long enough and they’re a pain.

You’d need it to be probably fifteen minutes long to produce a long enough blog post that’s going to be meaningful for you. I wanted to make sure you understood that and keep it in mind for you or your clients. We’ve got a big infrastructure around doing that and all that they do full time is create that content. We compose a blog post and put it on the client’s website for them so they don’t even have to do it. It works well. To us, that’s a part of podcast production. We don’t do the audio without doing that. It becomes a resource for the audience and it becomes for Google mostly.

I’m going to include that now for my own podcast.

You should. It’s powerful. That was enjoyable. I want to thank you so much for spending so much time with me and sharing your wisdom of YouTube strategies with my audience. I’m sure they’ll be fascinated with that.

Tom, thank you. I had a lot of fun. You also talk about things that I’m passionate about. As you can imagine, I’m always pleased about that.

I hope to keep in touch with you and maybe do a follow-up later in the year and talk about how things have been going. As we said in the beginning, it changes fast, doesn’t it?

Incredibly said.

The Fundamentals Of YouTube SEO – Final Thoughts

I’ve got to tell you, I enjoyed it. What an energetic guy. He’s excited. He’s passionate about what he does. I certainly learned a lot from our discussion, especially with taking things off of YouTube, utilizing YouTube videos on your own website and utilizing other people’s YouTube videos. You don’t necessarily have to create all the content. I thought that was brilliant and I’m going to implement some of those strategies for my own business. I know that it’s been important to create content and put it on YouTube. Everybody knows that and I hear a lot of people saying, “How do you monetize YouTube videos?” The thing is he makes a great point that unless you’re a celebrity or you’re a part of a company that’s got viral videos or is a gaming company like Fortnite or something. It’s hard to make a lot of money based on advertisements on your videos, which is the conventional way you monetize on YouTube.

It was completely brilliant the idea that you can put your own content videos on YouTube, but create playlists using videos that others have created that are relevant to your subject. That helps you tell your narrative, your story will make your points on your website. A playlist that helps people that would be coming to your website helps your audience. Even though there are other people’s videos would be included in that, you’re the conduit to it. You’re the authority. You’re the one saying, “This is important and you should pay attention to it.” You don’t have to be the author of every video. Use it whether it’s in an FAQ or a one-on-one series on your subject helping to teach people. To me, I thought that was brilliant and something that I don’t think I do enough of in my business. That’s about to change.

The other thing that struck me as I’m talking with Deepak is that not only is it important to implement that strategy with videos. A strategy we’ve been doing with podcasts from the beginning of our company is to make sure we convert everyone into a long tail blog post. I was happy to hear that here’s somebody who’s approached digital marketing from a complete video perspective, although he does have his own podcast as well. His businesses are definitely about video and SEO using video on YouTube. He has the same approach that we have. He’s saying, “If everybody just experiences it on YouTube, then YouTube is getting all the benefit. We’re using YouTube as a tool, bringing people from YouTube to your website. On your website is where you’re going to be able to engage with them the most, provide them with the greatest value and mine them for your own lead generation or to funnel them whatever it is that you want to do with your audience at large.

I was happy to see that whole strategy, even though technology is changing and what works for SEO and what people are spending time on. What’s resonating with the audience out there may all change. The reality is you want to be the center of influence for your show. In order to do that, you’ve got to engage people. You’ve got to encourage them to come to your website. That’s where you need to engage them. He fully supported that. All of us need to be everywhere as much as we can. The website, blog post, podcast, video, YouTube, anywhere you can put your content out there. Anywhere you can transform your content into another medium that is going to be out there. Those of you that are podcasters that are still not doing any video, not doing any YouTube live streams, or any Facebook live streams or anything like that. You can still engage in a video on YouTube in a couple of ways.

One of them Deepak talked about is to curate a playlist of videos. Hopefully some will be yours, even if they’re not, if they’re others you can be the authority that is the conduit to those videos to your audience and that has value. You can convert your podcast audio into videos as well. You can create an audiogram type of a video that’s either a portion of the episode that is a tease and you then encourage people to go listen to the whole episode somewhere else or it could be the entire episode. You can put up a SlideShare that has your voice track to it. Whether that’s something directly relevant to a webinar you might give. You have a SlideShare, you have a PowerPoint presentation or if it’s a podcast episode that has relevant still images that are related, you can create a video and put that up on YouTube.

While it may not be visually the same as a natively-recorded video, it’s still a valuable piece of content. There are many ways you can do it. If you have some aversion to worrying about your hair was done perfectly or what clothes you’re wearing or your background behind you on a video, there are ways to do it even as a podcaster. There you go. Hope you enjoyed this episode. I look forward to talking with Deepak again in the future and see how things change over the course of 2019. If you have any additional questions or comments, you can reach out to us anywhere on social media, @FeedYourBrand. Thanks for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

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About Deepak Shukla

Deepak is the Founder and CEO of Pearl Lemon, an award-winning SEO agency that he bootstrapped from $0-20k per month in less than 6 months. When he’s not running his agency, you’ll find him running marathons completing Ironmen, getting inked or playing with his cat named Jenny.

 

 

 

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