YouTube as Your Stage: Share Your Message With Millions Worldwide

Are you aware of how YouTube is totally changing the game for speakers and content creators? It's incredible! Now, from the comfort of your own home, you can tap into a world of opportunities. Imagine reaching people across different countries, all while making a VERY good income. 

YouTube is now longer just a platform to store your videos on; it's your stage to connect, engage, and grow exponitially. In this episode, I'm going to dive into how YouTube is reshaping the speaking world, making it more accessible, profitable, and globally connected than ever before. So, are you ready to explore this exciting journey with YouTube?

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Profitable Speaking Podcast where we help you build a profitable six figure business from the stage. Here's your host, Mr. Web Marketing Brad Hauck. Welcome to today's episode of the Profitable Speaking Podcast. In this episode, we're going to look at how YouTube is changing the game for speakers to build a profitable business. Are you aware how YouTube is totally changing the game for speakers and content creators alike? It's incredible. Now, from the comfort of your own home, you can tap into a world of opportunities. Imagine reaching out to people across different countries, all while making a very good income. YouTube is no longer just a platform to store your videos on. It's your stage to connect, engage and grow exponentially. In this episode, I'm going to dive into how YouTube is reshaping the speaking world, making it more accessible, profitable and globally connected than ever before. So, are you ready to explore this exciting journey? Journey with YouTube. Let's get started. YouTube has evolved significantly as a platform for content creators. Initially it was a space for sharing videos, but it's growing into a really robust ecosystem where creators can learn income through various channels. This includes ad revenue, sponsored content, merchandise sales and fan donations. The YouTube Partner Program has become a key part of this. It allows you to monetize your content more effectively. This growth has opened up new avenues for content and creative expression and business opportunities, making YouTube a major player in the digital content and entertainment industry. Note that the entertainment industry. So let's look at some facts. YouTube is beyond big. 400 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. 1 billion hours of content are watched every day and it's in the top five most popular websites on the Internet. More than 500 million learning related videos alone are viewed on YouTube daily. In fact, back in 2022, digital video time among US adults nearly caught up to TV time. US adults spend an average of 3 hours and 2 minutes per day watching digital videos and 3 hours and 7 minutes watching normal TV. Nearly half 45% of all YouTube video viewership takes place on TVs now, up from 30% way back in 2020. So not only are we watching it on our devices, we're actually watching it on our TV screens. This is a big deal. I know a lot of people still find navigating YouTube on their TV difficult, but I know with my TV now I can just speak to YouTube and it will bring up a range of videos and I can navigate from there. What does this mean for you? You need to think different, that's for sure. Things have changed drastically over the last few years. You need to move forward in your business into a new era of entertainment, or edutainment as it's well known. Now, free is profitable, very profitable, and I'll talk about that much later in this podcast. You're now in control through YouTube of what you put out there, what you watch, all those sorts of things. Big media is no longer in control of what you watch. You can dig down into the search engines and pick what you want. Obviously the algorithm suggests things, but you are in control of what you're pushing out and what you're pulling in. And that makes it really essential time giving us the start of a year to re strategize. Personally, I'm doubling down on my YouTube channel, Mr. Web Marketing and building a game from scratch. I've started with some videos on how to use canva.com, which I really love, as everyone knows. But I'll be adding new streams about business, growing your speaking business. And even this podcast is there for you to watch or to listen to as an audio podcast. Because YouTube now has an audio podcast stream there where you can upload your podcast. What do you have that you could reuse, re, upload or reshoot and get it up onto YouTube into the latest format. Remember, we're talking about 4K up to 8K these days. So if you can upscale it, for example, which you can do within things like Premiere Pro, you can actually upscale video now. And there is other tools available. But what have you got that you can bring up to date or reshoot and get up there and start making money? So let's have a little bit of a look further into understanding the YouTube's monetization landscape. There's a range of different programs available through the YouTube Partner Program. First of all is advertising Resonue got tongue tied advertising revenue. As a YouTube partner, you'll be able to earn revenue from overlay, display and video ads that run on your channel. And they're the ones we see all the time. Obviously you can go to YouTube Premium and turn a lot of that off, but most people watch YouTube for free. So every time ads play, even if they don't click on them, you, you get paid. If your channel's been monetized, you have YouTube Premium revenue. YouTube Premium, previously known as YouTube Red. And I just talked about paying for that is a way for paying members to watch videos ad free. You receive a cut of their membership fee when they watch your videos. So even if you're not getting paid for the actual ads in your videos, you're getting paid from the membership cost that they give. We have channel memberships. With channel memberships, you can offer exclusive perks, rewards and benefits to viewers who choose to pay for a subscription and become paid members of your channel. So a bit like Patreon and all of those different tools, having a membership site, you can do that within YouTube. When you reach a monetization level, you can set different membership levels and what special perks each level gets access to. This is great because the platform takes care of it and drives traffic directly to your membership. You have the merch shelf. You can now start selling branded merchandise to your viewers directly through YouTube using your very own merchandising shelf. It will show up on your video page. So you see your video and you see the merchandising shelf right below it. Obviously I move around from time to time, but it's there. So you can do T shirts and all sorts of stuff. You have YouTube Brand Connect. Through Brand Connect, YouTube connects creators to brands looking to run branded content strategies. So you might have a large specific audience that an organization, say, like Coca Cola or Pepsi wants to reach, and they might do some branded content with you. And you'll see people like Mr. Beast and those sort of people doing these collabs all the time. Essentially, this service is trying to make it easier for brands to find YouTubers that they can advertise through and for content creators to get sponsorship deals. So again, all these things become available to you as you build your channel. What do you need to get into YouTube partners? It's pretty specific and you will see it underneath. When you go into YouTube Studio online, you'll see there's an area that says monetize. You can go in there and it'll actually show you which things you've reached and what you need to do to get for your specific area. But the basics are you need to live in a country or region where the program is available and Australia is definitely one, so is usa, uk, et cetera. Have a clean slate with no community guidelines, strikes against your channel. Play within the rules. Have 4,000 public watch hours or more in the last 12 months. So you do need to build your traffic up. So you need to put good content on there for free to build that up. Have a thousand subscribers or more. This is quite achievable. You can need to link your Google AdSense accounts to your channel and of course you need to be reviewed by Google to make sure that you're suitable. So let's have a look at some of the things that I've learned over the last year in building a good YouTube channel. First of all, the most popular way to make money is actually to get money from ads. That's the first step. Once you start getting monetized. Getting money from having ads is the place to start. Obviously it grows from there. As you get more traffic, you get more opportunities. It's easy to do and it pays very well in certain fields. Some fields pay higher than others, or some key phrases, et cetera, pay higher than others. For example, Craft versus Finance has more paid ads. So you get paid a higher percentage of money for those sorts of ads. You need to focus in on creating at least 100 quality videos to build your traffic. 100 is like the basic number. It's a bit like writing articles for your website. 100 videos, you're starting to build quite a solid chunk of content around a topic. You can just keep creating videos that get views and YouTube takes care of the rest. So all you need to do is create content. YouTube will worry about the ads and all that sort of stuff. So it's really good in a way because you don't have to paste content or put code on your web page or whatever it happens to be. One thing I would say is don't stop, keep going and improve your videos every time you do one. Incremental change is better than perfection. Don't try and get it right at the start. Start shooting videos, see how they go. Improve on what you add into the videos each time and make a better video each time you do a video. You can leverage YouTube's other income streams. There is a range of things, so there's methods like you can do licensing, crowdfunding, and affiliate marketing. Licensing your videos out essentially means giving other media platforms or organizations the right to use your content for a fee. And they can contact you directly or it might come through a marketplace. Online affiliate marketing is where you have links that lead to products on Amazon and places like that. And you get a percentage of every sale. And you can put them, you can talk about them in your video and then you can link to them in the description. And I'm sure you've all seen that many times. And also you can link to programs that you sell or others sell or ones you support. So you can always look at. Even if you're not making income yet from advertising, as in, you haven't got to that level, you can still recommend products. That's okay. It's not going to affect your ability to meet these programs. So how do we maximize Revenue through viewer engagement. You need to build a loyal viewer base. This is essential. You want people who are going to keep coming back to watch your stuff. A bit like when we're on stage, you want people to come back in the room to hear you speak, wherever you are, because you're saying something slightly different or they're learning something new from you. First thing you need to do is give them what they want, see what works, see what's getting the most traffic, see what, and then do more of that. Okay? Learn from the success. Now, you have to do a lot before you start to see the patterns, but get stuck into it and find out what's really appealing to your audience or find your audience. Focus on a niche audience rather than a keyword. Yes, you might do say, like, I'm focusing in on Canva a bit because I like using Canva and doing different stuff. But I'm looking at my audience as solopreneurs, speakers and people like that. So I'm focusing on how they would use Canva to produce posters, ebooks, things like that. Talk one to one. When you're doing your videos, remember, it's only one person watching. It's not going up on a TV in a lounge room, necessarily for 100 people. It's more likely to be one person watching a specific video. Make it interesting and give them what you promised. If your thumbnail says that you're going to talk about this topic, then that's the first thing you need to be talking about and go straight into your video and give them what they're looking for. If you say you're going to do one thing and then you talk about something else, they're gone, okay? That's just the way the audience is. Short attention spans. That's pretty simple, isn't it? We all get that these days. Branding matters. So pick a style and stick with it. Find what works for you and stick with it. Use the same fonts, use the same styles, colors, branding, and people. Learn to recognize that it's you. Especially if you're using your face on all the thumbnails. Try to improve every video a little. As I said before, just little changes. Like in my Canva videos, I started to put little titles at each section and bits like that. Every time I try to do something just a little bit better, a little bit clearer, and each time I'm growing and learning skills as well. I didn't try and put titles on everything when I first started. I learned how to do titles, then I added titles and so on. And so forth. Go and watch some videos and this is what I did when I first started building this again on how Mr. Beast has built the number one YouTube channel in the world. There's quite a few channels where they've taken bits of his interviews and things like that. Go and listen to him. This guy is the best. And if you want to learn, even though you don't do videos like him, you can learn from his thinking. He's very smart, he's very cluey, and it wouldn't matter what topic he launched a channel on. As he said, if I go broke, I could start again and within three years be where I am now because the knowledge is applicable across all the different forms. So what are some effective YouTube, SEO and content strategies that you can use to make your videos show up more, get clicked More, etc. Thumbnails are super important. The first thing you should do is actually do your thumbnail before you do the video. Do the thumbnail and then make sure that the video echoes what the thumbnail is talking about. Don't crowd the thumbnail. Keep it simple and easy to attract attention on the screen. Remember, it's not a big picture, it's actually a really tiny picture on the screen. So it has to appeal to people at that size, not at A4 size. Use keywords in your titles, descriptions and tags because YouTube is a search engine and you YouTube feeds Google. Fill in all the options. When uploading, go through all the options on the upload page, go right down to the bottom and expand it out fully and go right through that. And there's some good videos online on the best settings to use. You'll need to experiment with that, but please do all of the things that it says, even like uploading transcripts and that. I use CastMagic to create the transcripts from my YouTube videos because it's a feature of the AI product ad timestamps break your video down into sections and often you'll see it on Google. You'll see a video showing and it'll show that it's starting two thirds of the way through when you've searched for a how to do something that's using the timestamps to start the video at the right place. Do searches of other videos for topics. See how many views they're getting, so find which ones are actually popular. Don't just do videos for the fun of it. Do some research. Stick to a theme for a playlist. For example, I have a canva Beginner Tutorials playlist and all the canva Tutorials are in that playlist. Break them down into streams just a bit like SEO silos. I also do the thumbnails to match for the playlist. So all the videos in that playlist have a matching thumbnail. They're all individual, they're all unique, but they all follow the same layout and color scheme. That way people can see they look like a set. If you use Canva, you just duplicate and then change the next one and download it nice and simple, like your video and comment on it. Sounds weird, doesn't it? Okay, liking your own stuff, but it's actually important. Be the first person to like it and the first person to write a nice comment like, oh, this was interesting because of this and this or whatever. Again, don't pretend you're someone else. Actually pretend you're the creator commenting on the video and make sure you share it on your social media via a direct link because you want those links to be picked up by the search engines to also maybe help drive a little bit of traffic. I've covered quite a bit there. What I wanted to finish off with was to have a look at a little bit of a YouTube short story and talk about the success that this person's experienced. Over the past year, I've watched my daughter grow her YouTube channel to over 30,000 followers, using the algorithm and Instagram to drive traffic to it. She started from nothing, but by working out what her audience likes. She just kept growing. Along the way, we talked through many issues and I fed back ideas, but she did all the work. At first she was going to sell her crochet animals on Etsy, but I pointed out that they'd be far more profitable and take less time to sell the patterns. She did that quite successfully and still sells her animal patterns daily through Etsy. We discussed that she needed to use more than one platform or one stream of income just in case things change, as I've talked about before. So she decided to continue to do videos showing how to make the animals and put them on YouTube and Instagram, and people love them and they bought the patterns via a link underneath in the description. Then one day she decided to do a free pattern video where she showed how to do the whole pattern. And in that case it was for my little bee, which I have there always looking at me on top of my camera. It went nuts, okay? People just loved it. Learning from this, she started doing free videos. And today when I record this, she just hit 100,000 Instagram followers and 30,000 YouTube followers and is almost making a Full time wage from the ads that YouTube put in the videos. So why am I telling you this story? Because you can do it too. The power of free is actually incredible and YouTube rewards us handsomely as creators. And speakers are the best creators I know for content that gets lots of buyers on it. Think about what you could teach people all over the world to do. Stop holding onto your knowledge because it could be worth a fortune to you on YouTube and you'd never leave home unless you offered to do a speaking gig. It's scary to give stuff away, but do you really only want a thousand people to ever see your life changing course? Because realistically, most people who sell a course don't sell more than a thousand copies. And even your top creators might get to 10,000 or more. There is the people who are outstanding, don't get me wrong, but you think about it, how many people actually have bought your course? Wouldn't you like to reach more people? YouTube's giving you an opportunity. You'll find my virtually famous course in my Mr. Web Marketing channel. You can now do that for free. Go up there, watch it all, learn how to be everything I've ever learned and my best system for digital marketing. So just go to Mr. Web Marketing on YouTube and look up the virtually famous course. It's under there, under digital marketing course and you can watch it all for free. Hours and hours of video. Okay, grab a copy of the book Free by Chris Ann Anderson. Okay, it's a couple of years old now, quite a few years old, but it's one of the best books I've ever read and it will change your life. It will make you think about free in an entirely different way. And if nothing else, it literally reflects what my daughter's gone through. I think that YouTube is going to change the world. It's already growing so fast. But we need to embrace the change. We really do. We need to be able to reach a bigger audience. And YouTube is giving us the opportunity. We just have to grasp it. We need to find our audience on there, give them what they want, and we could be making a lot more money than we make on stages because the audience is so vast on YouTube. Could you imagine if a million people a day saw your videos? Literally, I was talking to my daughter last night and her last reel got over 1.5 million views. And it's still growing. So it's amazing how big the audience is out there and we're still playing often a very tiny game saying, can I get on stage in front of 20 people? That's important, but we can be so much more using YouTube. I want to thank you for joining me in exploring the transformative power of YouTube for speakers. The platform isn't just about sharing videos. It's a gateway to unlimited opportunities for reaching a global audience and building a profitable speaking business. I hope the insights I've discussed today have inspired you and sparked ideas on how you can harness YouTube's potential in your speaking career. Remember, the digital world is constantly evolving and YouTube offers endless possibilities for growth and success. If you found value in today's episode, I would be deeply grateful if you would subscribe to the Profitable Speaking podcast and my YouTube channel. Your support means the world to me and it helps bring more valuable content like this to you. Also, for other speakers or anyone keen on maximizing digital platforms like YouTube, please share this episode with them. Together we can grow and learn in this exciting digital era. Your likes, shares and feedback are not just appreciated, but crucial in shaping the future of this podcast. So please reach out with your thoughts and your stories of success. Stay tuned for more episodes where I'll cover more secrets and impactful Profitable Speaking tips. Until next time, keep inspiring, keep speaking, and remember, your voice has the power to create ripples of change one video at a time. Thank you for listening and let's make a difference together. Thanks for listening to the Profitable Speaking Podcast. If you've enjoyed today's podcast, please help a friend and share it with them until next time. We hope you have a fun and profitable week.