As the second largest search engine behind Google, YouTube is undeniably the platform you should take advantage of. But different platforms have different sets of rules you need to know to win the game. If you want to increase your podcast’s visibility on YouTube, then this episode is for you. Fran Asaro, the President of Thrive Anyway and the Founder of The Senior Tuber Community, joins Tracy Hazzard to share tips and best practices to help you optimize and monetize your YouTube channel. As a YouTube Partner, Fran brings top-level information straight from the platform that will get your show seen and played. From banners to content to marketing strategies and everything in between, Fran gives you key insights to crack the YouTube algorithm, reach a larger audience, and build a loyal following. Tune in to not miss out from the YouTube guru herself!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Tips For Increasing The Visibility Of Your Podcast On YouTube With Fran Asaro

I am excited because we have a coaching crasher. I love a coaching crasher because it means I’m off the hook of having to be the expert, but it also means that I have somebody whom I could ask all my burning questions about the things that I want to know about. In this episode, we’re focused on YouTube. Our guest is going to tell you that one of the hardest things is being consistent and constant with everything that you do. One of the primary rules of everything SEO, YouTube, and podcasting is to show up consistently and constantly. This is one way we do this here at Podetize and we show you how to do this. Normally, if you’ve ever read this blog, you know that I’m normally with my partner, Tom Hazzard, but because we have the coaching crasher in this episode, Fran Asaro is going to join me. Let’s get started.

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Our coaching crasher is Fran Asaro from Thrive Anyway and Senior Tuber. I adore Fran. She is my YouTube guru, the everything expert on YouTube, the person I go to when I have questions, and the person who helped me optimize my channel. We’re going to talk about some of those things. I’m excited to have Fran with me. Fran is The President of Thrive Anyway and the Founder of the Senior Tuber Community where she mentors people to become YouTube creators.

While her focus is on mature individuals, Senior Tuber, she happily works with people of all ages and promises not to check your ID. The lifetime entrepreneur, she started her first business at 21 and as a partner in an auto repair shop, she also has experience as a top-producing realtor for 25 years. She has a life and business coaching company where she virtually partners with others seeking support, guidance, and resources in building their business.

Fran has experience in all kinds of industries, and that is key here. I wanted to highlight that in her bio because it makes a difference when you’re trying to support people who are coaching authors, speakers, and people who are building their businesses. It’s a different model than being a straight influencer on YouTube. That’s where Fran is key and why she’s matched to what we do here at Podetize that I have been eager to get her into our community.

Fran and I are working together. Her love of entrepreneurship and content makes a difference in what she does. I love her community. We’re going to talk some more about her community, but mostly what I want you to understand is that Fran is a YouTube partner. That means she has top-level information straight from YouTube, and she specializes in teaching us how to optimize and monetize our YouTube channels, allowing us to reach a larger audience and build a loyal following, which is what we want for our podcast as well.

The other alignment, and the part that I’m going to start with here as I bring Fran on, is that one of the things we are giant proponents of here is making sure that we optimize our listings and all the technical things that go on behind the scenes because if we want to be seen, heard, found, and rewarded, the only way to do that is to make sure we’re playing the game the way it’s set up. YouTube has a whole bunch of rules, best practices, and things that are going on. That optimization is the key. That’s where I’m going to start. Fran, thank you for joining us. We’re excited to have you. I want to know how you got interested in YouTube.

First of all, thank you for being here. I adore you. It’s a good match that I’m here because it’s like Christmas for me to come here and be on your show. My first YouTube channel started in 2009. That one’s sitting dormant, and then my next one, which is live started in 2011. I was a content creator and always loved it.

I have done some research on it. I was not successful at it, but I was having a blast. I was posting and loving what I was posting, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. For many years, I failed and I thought it was not going to be for me. I was going to have to keep doing what I was doing, my coaching, but my dream was to be a content creator where I was earning an income and building a business from it.

I’m happy to say that I’m in a position where this new content-creating YouTube and Senior Tuber is the foundation of my business, which I absolutely love. I love helping other people have a foundation with YouTube. It becomes the soul of your business. Everything you do from there gets fed from there. Now I’m extremely passionate because I’m sharing my love and I get to watch other people flourish. It’s been great.

Let’s start with the optimization side because this is the part that people don’t think about. They think their channel is like, “I signed up. I have a YouTube channel,” but there’s so much more to that. You showed me the layers of YouTube. There’s channel optimization and video optimization. Let’s start with this channel one that most people ignore.

 

 

I don’t know who out there runs their own website, but it’s like putting SEO on your website and you think, “That’s too complicated. I’m just going to have a website and hope that somebody comes to see it. Maybe a couple of people do.” YouTube runs the same way, except it’s not as complicated as far as I’m concerned. It’s like a new language at first, but when you learn it, it becomes second nature. That’s with the video. When you’re doing the channel optimization, it’s almost like a set-and-forget.

If you spend a little bit of time setting your channel optimization, people will find you. They’ll know where you are. If you’re looking up an artist in your area, you’ll show up if you have it optimized correctly. It does half the work for you by doing that. Having your channel itself optimized is probably the foundational thing then learning how to optimize your videos comes next.

We do the same thing in podcasting. Most of the optimization runs around a failure to use things like teaser videos and do them properly. What other things are some of the prime optimization things that most people overlook? This is what I also found. It may not have been available when you set your channel up way back when and is now available and different.

That’s a big point because YouTube is changing. They change because of the audience and the times. What you learned many years ago probably isn’t the same. Are you asking me, which is, the primary thing for channel or video optimization?

Let’s talk channel first. What are some of the prime things that people miss, people don’t do, and don’t set up properly?

Put in your intro video so when somebody comes to your channel for the first time, you are there with a video that is less than 5 minutes long, preferably less than 3, welcoming them and telling them why they’re there. You don’t need to tell them your name or anything about you. Write it first. You want to speak to them. If you are a mature person looking to start or grow a YouTube channel and you don’t know how to do it and you need some help, then you’re in the right place.

It would be an introduction, “Subscribe and listen to our podcast.” They know what they’re doing. They either like you or they don’t and they click or they don’t subscribe. The next thing would be there’s a secondary video. When they do subscribe and come back, you welcome them back. What do you want them to know now that they’re regular and you want to welcome them there?

Also, tagging your channel is vital. If you are a channel for podcasters, let’s say, then you want to make sure your tag says podcast for podcasters. This way, podcasters will find you and they’ll know. There are 500 characters that you could put in tags. Once you learn the art of tagging, then you’ll find out what people are searching for. There are many ways. You could just go to Google and see what people are searching for about your business, but there are a lot of tools out there. That’s pretty much where I would start with those, but there are others as well.

The description, thinking the About Me and how it looks at the top of your banner, too often, we overbrand it for us. That’s what I discovered. There was much repetitiveness between your profile photo, banner, and other things, looking at it as a holistic thing rather than each in isolation.

 

 

Consider every place that you can enter data to be real estate. Do you need to have the same thing, image, name, or links? You want everything to be a story. If they’re looking at your banner, then you want to bring them down to the title or the About You page, and you want it to easily flow so that people learn more about you.

Do you see why now I brought Fran in? There’s so much that you don’t know that you don’t know about YouTube. Another area is optimization for videos. There are some things that you do that are set and forget as well. You could set a tagging system and some of those tags are set and forget, and you optimize and do a few new ones for each new video. There’s a lot that’s different for each one and they each need to be optimized.

There is a feature through YouTube called an upload default, which is like setting a template. If you’re using the same topic all the time, then every time you upload a video, everything gets auto-populated and you don’t have to add the tags or the description, but like you said, you can add to it based on the different video. The most important thing you want to do is be found. No matter how good your content is, if they’re not finding you, that’s a problem. Tagging is very important, but if you have provided your tag well and they’re scrolling through podcasts for podcasters, and you want them to find you, then you want to make sure when they see you that they’re seeing a fantastic thumbnail.

That is the first and foremost leg into what they are going to see. It’s got to be contrasting colors, like a person in your thumbnail that’s either making an expression or being animated and very bold, clear, short, 3 to 4 words maximum, that’s going to entice them to look at the title, which is the second most important thing to getting people to click. Once your thumbnails give them some teaser, then they’ll go over to the title, then they’ll click. That’s what we’re trying to do because many people say, “Nobody is going over.” If nobody’s going over to your video, they don’t even know about your content. You’re not doing anything wrong except for that first foot that you want to put in.

So much of this is something that we don’t like to talk about because it’s too techy. It makes a lot of people’s eyes roll. That’s algorithms. YouTube algorithm is somewhat of a mystery to some people and quite hackable for others. What are some things that we should know about the YouTube algorithm?

Even though I’ve learned about SEO and algorithms over the years, it was always like, “I don’t even have the bandwidth to understand it.” Here’s what I want to say simplified. It does change with YouTube. Their algorithms change year after year, but now, what YouTube is trying to do is see who is looking at your videos so that they know they can keep people on their channel and that their advertisers are going to be happy.

That’s it in a nutshell. Are you giving stuff that is interesting enough, people want to see, that they’re engaged with, and you get brownie points with YouTube based on your giving them what they want to keep people on their channel? Here’s the fun thing. We all have algorithms for our channel. What YouTube is doing to make money is exactly what you want to do to make money on your channel. You want to keep people on your channel.

You want some on their platform, but you want them to stay on your channel. There are these ways that if somebody comes and sees one of your videos and if you have your channel optimized enough, they’re going to stay there sometimes for hours. They’ll definitely be fans if they see certain things unfold. We can do that with playlists, end screens, and cards. There are plenty of ways to keep it.

Let’s talk a little bit about that. This is one of the things that most people don’t understand. You do need 1,000 subscribers to your channel to unlock some of these extra promo tools that are available. Some of them are available now, but many of them aren’t. To maximize your ability, you do need to get 1,000 subscribers. I want to start there before we talk about end screens, info cards, and some of these tools. What are some of your recommended ways to get to 1,000 subscribers quickly?

 

 

The very first thing I would recommend is shorts. YouTube Short is like a buy one get one free for your local supermarket. People want to get people to your channel and then they fall in love with you and subscribe.

YouTube wants that for us too. They want you to go from shorts into the long video. They want to encourage that.

There’s even another brand new feature that you can have a segue into your long or short videos from the short that you do put in. There will be a clickable link right in your short telling them where you want them to go from there.

This is the way to drive podcast traffic.

If you’ve got a podcast, chances are if somebody comes to you for the first time, they’re not going to invest one hour. They know nothing about you, but if they’ve seen five of your shorts and if they’re interested, they’re going to want to know more and they’re going to click. It’s not going to bring in a lot of money, pennies, or dollars a month depending on how many shorts you put up there, but it’s going to bring you viewers and subscribers. That’s what we’re trying to do. Shorts would be the quickest way. People are growing their channels fast. Shorts are new in this area, and it’s kicking butt out there. It’s doing great.

What are other ways that they could get 1,000 subscribers?

Being consistent. If you have a podcast out there, tell people what they can expect from you and do that and letting them know that you’re out there. Fine-tune your audience. You want your audience to see themselves in there. If you set up your channel and videos right and they know they belong there, then they’re either going to stay or share with somebody else. That’s a very important thing as well.

It was great that you said that because we see the same thing in podcasting. When you niche down tightly into an area, you grow your subscriber base faster. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it the other way. The all about me show or my business channel takes a lot longer for someone to trust you than it does if, “I’m interested in 3D printing. We found that quickly. I’m interested in binge-able content.” That’s why Binge Factor outgrew and grew faster to 1,000 than Podetize did.

If you have a lot of things you want to put out there, you can have up to 100 YouTube channels for every Google account. If you’re yearning to get everything that’s inside of you out, open up another channel, but don’t confuse your audience, which is why I failed. I put everything from meditation to my coaching and reviews. People would subscribe, but they weren’t my loyal followers because they subscribed to that piece, and then all of a sudden, I confused them when all of a sudden I put an audiobook on there. You want to make sure you keep it very consistent with your brand.

 

Once you get 1,000 subscribers, unlock some extra tools and things, some of which are end screens and book cards, can you demystify some of these promo tools? At the end of the day, they do what you said, which is to try to drive traffic to other things. YouTube does better than driving traffic outside of it.

You could have up to five cards in every video. You’ll start noticing some of the things I’m saying now that you’re reading about them, but you may not have noticed before. There’s a little exclamation point and black box in the upper right-hand corner of a video as you’re watching it. Those are people who have spent time putting things they want you to do next. They might even say, “If you want to go to my next video, click here,” then you could strategically place where you want people to go next.

You could have up to five of those, including links, playlists, and regular videos. You can have an array of things throughout your video, however you want to place it. End screens are the last twenty seconds of your video. At the end of your video, you want to make sure you’re not covering up anything like if you have any call to action, but you have videos that will show your next video what you want them to do next. If you don’t do it, YouTube’s going to show them what to do next.

It might be not in your channel or one of your videos so you might as well do it yourself.

If you learn how to do an end screen, you could have up to four. One should be your subscribe button. For the others, you could use the rest of the 3 for videos or just 1. It depends on what you want them to do next, then you have a choice. You’ll go into your playlist. You can have a box that says, “See this playlist.” It will show you your whole podcast if you want. They don’t have to worry about it being one. That’s cool. Playlists and podcast lists are very important if you learn how to use them correctly.

For instance, if you go to your podcast link in your YouTube channel and you click on that, pull up the podcast you want to share from, and click on the video you want to share, that has a different link than if you went to an individual version of that video. When you click on that, it will now show all your podcasts to the right column where if you didn’t do that link, you’ll see what YouTube wants your people to take and do next.

I’m going to clarify that for the readers. What Fran is saying is that instead of your YouTube Studio going to the video side and in the backend and sharing the video, go to the playlist, pick the video, and share that link. It is going to make a huge difference because it’s now sharing the playlist and the video at the same time. Lucky us podcasters, we have a registered tab with our podcast playlist that’s separate. When we do that, it’s now going to show all your episodes and videos that are related to that podcast playlist.

You’re talking about having $1,000 subscribers to become a YouTube partner, but you also need to have 4,000 watch hours in order to be a YouTube partner. That sounds a lot, but it equates to about 333 watch time hours per month. If somebody hits your podcast and then it keeps continually playing all your other podcasts because they’re binge-watching you because now that they know, you’re going to reach those amount of hours in no time, then becoming a YouTube partner doesn’t become so far away.

That’s how you tip over into monetization. Remember that we talked about this in another episode. It’s going to have an episode in which we teach you how to convert your playlist or podcast to a podcast playlist on YouTube. We did that. When you do that, you’re creating an ability for all of those things to be viewed and watched, and keeping people binging. It’s the number one way. They not only help you monetize your YouTube, but they will help you monetize your podcast eventually as well because they’re going to come from your podcast when they binge it on you and want to subscribe to your community and courses and buy your stuff. This is all a strategy. If we can keep them on YouTube but keep them within your stuff on YouTube, we’re better off. That’s what Fran has been great at pointing out here.

The most important thing you want to do is be found. No matter how good your content is, if they're not finding you, that's a problem. Click To Tweet

YouTube algorithms, then you have your own algorithms. That’s how you do it. You play the game.

What about comments, likes, community engagement, and those kinds of things? How much does that help you?

I wrote an article for my LinkedIn Newsletter and I’m following it up with a video on how to support your favorite YouTube creators because when you know how to do it, you’ll ask your own people to do it. A lot of people who are just viewers don’t know how to support you, but when people say subscribe, like, comment, share, or whatever you put there or, “Buy my products,” that’s how they support you for putting out free content for them.

They want to give back.

There’s also a thanks button. If you have 1,000 subscribers, people could thank you during your live events or each individual video. They can click on it and pay you for having a great video. They won’t know it exists if you don’t tell them. If they love you, they’re going to want to help you. A comment is going to show YouTube engagement. They’re saying that, “If they’re putting out enough content that people are commenting back or they’re liking it, sharing it, or watching it all the way through, that must be good.”

This is a big one. If somebody starts your video and doesn’t stay with it to the end, it’s showing YouTube that your content is losing people towards a certain point, which your analytics will show. You want to teach people to watch your video all the way through. You don’t have to strap them down and force them to watch if they don’t want to, but if they know, then that’s good. My friend watched a few minutes of it. He didn’t realize it. He leaves the room, “I don’t care what you do, leave it on.” It’s not like you don’t want to watch the whole thing. Teach people how to support you.

You have a community. You have a group of people that get together, talk, and share all this information. Tell us a little bit about your community and how you nurture that community.

First of all, thank you. I’m a new podcaster. That’s huge. Because of you, I became a podcaster. I am not a live podcaster yet, but I will. I’m in the works of starting a YouTube membership. Instead of taking it off the platform, I’m going to do it there. It is a lot more money that you have to pay, but it’s certainly worth it when people will have a join button right there instead of having to take them off the platform for people who feel that there’s value in that. They join. You have different platform levels and everything. I have two other communities. I have a Facebook Community, Senior Tuber Community, and I also have a weekly live called the Senior Tuber Creator Group for a few dollars a month.

It’s a paid group. We brainstormed like somebody put up their very first video and now we’re going to process it on our call. As a team, we’re going to help them optimize their channel because it’s their very first one and it’s a great video, but nobody’s seeing it. We have to help or get it out there. We go through what’s current for us. We work on each other’s issues and we celebrate each other. It’s great. I’d say those are the communities I’m working with now.

 

There are a couple of other things that you do that we’re offering to the Podetize client community, as well as all of our readers. Fran will do an optimization review for you. She did one for me. It was this incredible report. It’s amazing. It takes a lot of time and energy. She’s not charging enough. I’m going to be straight with you on that. You might as well take advantage of it and connect through to Fran. What is in this optimization report, Fran? Give us a top-level.

When you say there’s a lot in there, I want to apologize in advance. I put a lot of stuff in there because I want you to have the Bible. It’s not all that you need. You don’t have to memorize it, but in that same situation, I have outlined all the benefits of the best optimization practices. I go through your channel and I tell you what you have or haven’t done yet and how you can do it. You don’t get scored. Nobody’s going to beat you up. It is just suggestions on how to optimize both your channels in one video.

You could do what you want with it. You could take your time to implement it where you can get on a call. It includes one call with me. We could go through it together or you can take your time and optimize it on your own, but it does help when you learn it. I want to say that most people give me the deer-in-the-headlights look when they have this call or they get my optimization report. I’m getting used to it now and I’m not offended if you say, “This is too much, I’m going to explode,” because what normally happens is people call me and say, “I noticed that other channels don’t have any tags.”

They call and tell me about other people. Somebody called me one time. One of my clients had said, “I can only get my channel up to an SEO of 30.” I said, “Sit with me for five minutes. Let’s see what we could do in five minutes.” I’m giving her three different simple things like tags, title, and I forget what the other thing was. We ended up to 90 within a few minutes. She gets to see it in real-time. It was very exciting. I told Shannon about how to look up keywords. She said she had spent all night long looking up keywords. She got addicted to it.

It can be a little bit of a black hole. Shannon has a PR and publicity community that is amazing. We were both speakers at that, and that’s how we met. I was fascinated by our talk. When I take notes, that’s a sign that this is somebody that I need to bring into our community. I got after Fran and it took us quite a few months to make it and get together. I was overwhelmed by your report. I don’t get overwhelmed easily because I’m pretty techie.

I’m pretty strategic about everything and I’m pretty up on what’s going on, but there was much detail in there that I needed to absorb and think about strategically, “How am I going to do this for my business? How am I going to do this? What do I want to do?” Some of these things I decided not to implement now because I’m about to revamp my whole channel and brand. When I do it, I’m going to implement all those changes. I planned them already. Thanks to Fran. This is something you’re going to want to take advantage of.

I don’t offer any affiliations or promos from other people unless I believe they’re extremely valuable. If I haven’t gone through it, I’m not going to recommend it to you. Fran is one. She’s not only someone that I recommend you go and you do this because you will learn so much about your YouTube, videos, channel, brand, and how you’re presenting yourself out in the world. You’re going to learn so much that it’s going to have strategic value to every part of your business, company, and coaching programs. Everything is going to build off of this foundation of some things that she’s going to point out to you where you’re going to go, “This is what I was missing. This is what is needed.” That’s why I’ve brought Fran to you.

One of the reasons why I started the Senior Tuber is because I took an academy and everything came in like a fire hose. I realized because it’s my age, I chose that age group, but a lot of people want to be given things at a spoonful instead of a fire hose. Even though I give a lot of material that is a little bit overwhelming, you have me that will slow down with you, plus you have it. It’s in layman’s terms. There is not a lot in my optimization report that you can’t understand. It is just a lot. We take it a step at a time. It’s up to you if you want to learn it at your own pace. That’s what I try to encourage.

Thank you so much for being here on the show. We will have an update. I’m going to bring you back and we’re going to talk about YouTube membership because we’re both going to be experimenting with that side of things. Video defaults are definitely something we’re going to be discussing in a future episode, and we’ll be referring to some of your information as we talk about our best video defaults. What we found is we started to update those.

A lot of people want to be given things at a spoonful instead of a fire hose. Click To Tweet

Screens and info cards, we’ve been testing those out. These are all some of the things that are going to be coming. As I experiment and bring them in, I’m going to be showing you the effect of my optimization audit with Fran, my view of that, and my review of it. It has made some changes fundamental to the practice. I believe that my YouTube Shorts are still already off the chart. We’re going to have an update on that as well. Fran is going to be mentioned here and she’s going to be brought back again.

Eventually, we’ll get to all the ways you can monetize your channel. That’s the ultimate goal.

As soon as we get into our monetization tip-over and we expect that to happen before the end of 2023, we’ll definitely be working on it, “Now what do I need to do next?”

We needed to have an audience because we’ve been having these conversations for months. It’s nice to share it with the world.

That’s what we do in our podcasts, so we could share what we’re working on in our partnership. Everyone, thank you so much for joining us here. If you were a part of the Podetize community, you’d be able to ask Fran questions personally and maybe even show her YouTube channel because you’d be in our Zoom community asking questions live. Thank you you much for joining us. We will be back with another topic.

 

Important Links

• Thrive Anyway
• Senior Tuber
• Article – 6 Simple Steps To Support & Be Supported As A YouTube Creator