AP 0673: Are Video Podcasts a Good Idea?

Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to episode 673 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today as always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question today from John, but before we get to John's question, I'd like to tell you a little bit about DesignCrowd.com. DesignCrowd.com helps entrepreneurs and small business owners outsource or crowd source custom graphics, logos, web designs, from designers all around the world. DesignCrowd is more than 500,000 designers from over 100 different countries ready to help you with any creative and design projects you might have. Here's what you need to do. Go to designcrowd.com/askpat, you get a special VIP offer, just for you, that's D-E-S-I-G-N-C-R-O-W-D.com, forward slash askpat.

All right, now here's today's question from John.

John: Hello, Pat. This is John from Bali, Indonesia. My question is, what do you think about video podcasts? Not a lot of entrepreneurs online are doing them. I'm thinking it might be great to add to anybody's existing podcast. What are your thoughts, Pat? Thanks so much. Love your stuff.

Pat Flynn: Hey, John. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. You know, I actually have a video podcast of my own, and I will tell you that it is very successful. You know, there are not a lot of other people doing video podcasts, and because of that, there's a lot less competition.

When I launched SPI TV on Apple as a video podcast, it became one of the top three video podcasts in all video podcasts. I actually think it became number one at some point, but I can't remember for sure; it was such a long time ago when I started SPI TV. We're at episode 50 something now, but back in episode one, I made this big launch effort for it. It was great, got a lot of subscribers. And what's really cool, here's the thing about video podcasting: Not a lot of people relative to the audio podcasts are doing video podcasts. Now, why is that the case? Well, because, audio, you know, you can take anywhere with you, you can listen while on the go or in the car or doing other things.

But with video podcasts, there's this thing—you have to watch it. So not as many people are watching video podcasts; people are still going to YouTube primarily to watch things. However, if you have something that's going up on YouTube already, you might as well repurpose it and put it onto iTunes as a video podcast. Where do you get your video podcast hosted? Well I would recommend podbean.com. That's P-O-D-B-E-A-N, and the reason for that is because they just have the best plan for videos. Eighteen dollars a month, unlimited uploads, unlimited downloads, unlimited bandwidth, anything $18 a month, and that's what I use for my video podcasts. So you can't just give iTunes your YouTube link because iTunes doesn't give you an RSS feed; you need the RSS feed, and that's what PodBean does for you. You upload the videos there, then you can grab the RSS feed similar to an audio podcast, then you submit that to iTunes as a video podcast and you take it from there.

Here's the interesting thing about the stats, though. Over time, I've had accumulated over a quarter million downloads of SPI TV since I've started. So that's quite a bit of people who have watched videos on iTunes through Apple and video podcasting, so that's not a small number. More people have watched through YouTube, but here's the thing: When I launch a new video through SPI TV, more people watch on SPI TV within the first week, and that's because more people are subscribed and there's less competition and it is still a search engine, iTunes is, and they'll find me there. And it's just a lot quicker, because there's less competition to find things in search engines relative to when they're published.

However, I will say that the long tail is much better on YouTube. I would actually publish on both, and that's what I do. I have SPI TV on YouTube and I have SPI TV as a video podcast, and that's what I would recommend. But you're going to see that you're going to get a lot more views earlier in your podcast, your video podcast, but you're going to get a lot more views later in YouTube, and that's because YouTube, you know, they're the biggest search engine in the world besides Google, and they're actually owned by Google. So you're going to see a lot of viewers coming from there, especially once your search engine optimization happens and you start to get ranked there too. Plus, you would embed your YouTube videos onto your website too if they're relevant, and I have the post go up on my website where the videos for SPI TV, which are coming from YouTube. You know, you don't embed your video podcast, but again, it's the same thing.

So that's why you'll get more shares with YouTube. It's the shareable one, the one that goes viral, the one that people will share on Twitter. You know, it's hard to do that with podcasts, so I would do both, but if you only had to pick one, if you only had the time to do one, and again, for me it doesn't take that much extra time. It does take extra time, but not that much extra time that I've done it. As long as you are conscious about how much time you're putting into it, after the first time, it's very easy to do and repurpose.

So, yeah, that's how I'd go about it and recommend it for sure, and wishing you all the best. Thank you so much for the question, John, I really appreciate it. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.

And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to askpat.com. You can ask right there on that page, and if you do want to check out my video podcast, just look up SPI TV on iTunes and you'll find me there, or Pat Flynn, and you'll find all the other podcasts there too.

So, thank you so much. I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day by Brian Tracy. He says, “Imagine your life is perfect in every respect. What would it look like?” It's really important to do because you need to know why you're doing what you're doing, and that's what you should shoot for. Life will never be perfect, but as long as you're trying, and you'll know what to do. It's like putting in that address in the navigation system: That's how you know what directions to take; that's how you know if you get lost.

So what is “life perfect”? What is a perfect life for you? Imagine that. Thanks, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.