AP 0513: Should I Keep My YouTube Channel Active?

AskPat 513 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 513 of Ask Pat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you answer your online business questions five days a week.

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

Bryan: Hey Pat, how's it going. This is Brian and I run a blog. Anyway, I've been, I have an affiliate deal with a pretty unknown supplement. It is gaining popularity though. And sales have been going good since I started marketing it about six to eight months ago. I even created a separate YouTube channel to help awareness and drive traffic and sales. The YouTube channel though hasn't, done as well as I'd hoped. It hasn't even brought too many clicks over to the site, but I have noticed that my videos, I've obviously embedded the videos on my own so I have noticed that my site has made more sales just from that even though YouTube isn't converting as well.

I'm just wondering if I should stop YouTube at all and just focus all my efforts on higher conversions on the site or if I should keep up the YouTube. Just wanted to hear your advice on that. So yeah if you could help me out with that, that'd be great. Thank you so much Pat. Keep doing what you're doing, thanks.

Pat Flynn: Hey Brian, thank you so much for the question today. I wouldn't stop YouTube in terms of like shutting it down. You know I just want to make sure we define what stop YouTube means, because you could obviously stop YouTube entirely and delete your account, which I don't think you should do and I don't think that's what you intended to do.

What I think you mean is you want to stop with uploading new videos onto YouTube and that's totally okay because if the videos seem to be working out on your website right now, then you can keep those websites there. You keep your account of course and those videos will continue to roll. People are gonna be watching them on your website. And then you could always come back to them.

That's what I did over time. I actually walked away from YouTube for a little too long because then my subscriber count which was quite big at the time, it was 30 thousand when I left, I left it for two years and when I came back to it a lot of those subscribers left because I just was not consistent. So you know depending on how many subscribers you have, you may want to continue to add videos if you want to keep them updated and keep a consistency going. It doesn't have to be quite as often as you were doing it if you feel like you're not getting conversions. Because obviously you want to put time where the money is. And you want to make sure that you are getting an ROI, you know getting a return on wherever it is that you're investing time, and of course time is money.

Now on YouTube specifically, I want to make sure that you are doing your best to convert from YouTube because you might not know, if people are maybe watching on YouTube and then they're coming over to your website and that's where it's converting. And while you feel like YouTube isn't converting. Now I don't know if you're running ads or what the CTAs—call to actions—are like at the end of the videos for example. Is there somewhere where they can get more information or where you can have people subscribe to get, you know, a lead magnet of some kind, so you get their email address, I'm not sure.

But my inclination is to consider just pausing the addition of new videos on YouTube for now, and focusing on where I think, a lot of people need to focus on. And that is not just getting more exposure and getting more traffic, but figuring out what happens when that traffic comes to your site. This is one of the most important things. Because you could have, like a billion people coming to your website but if the website does a terrible job of serving information, of providing value, but most importantly converting people into your sales funnel, well then that billion people would just be all for nothing. You want to make sure that the funnels, the way that people land on your website and where they go, and how they end up getting whatever it is that you're trying to offer, you want to make sure that process is down pat.

So what I would do is instead of, you know, increasing the percentage of traffic coming to your site, increase your conversion rates. I mean if your conversion rate is one percent for example, and hopefully you know what that conversion rate is when people land on your site, versus how many people end up buying or clicking on that partnership that you have. I mean, doubling your conversion rates are often much easier than doubling the amount of traffic. If you're at one percent all you have to do is go to two percent.

And that might mean, I mean you have to, here's what you do. Sorry Brian, I'm sort of just spit balling here I guess you could say. But this is what I would do. I would literally draw out on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard, the moment that people land on your website, where they go. What other options, you know almost draw a flowchart if you will, on what it is they can click on and then how long it takes them to get to whatever it is that offer is. And then in each of those spots from one place to another, wherever you draw that arrow from one box to another, that next action that they can take, you want to write down those conversion rates.

And you're gonna find out really quickly, where the drop off points are, where the conversions are the highest, where the conversions are the lowest, and you can determine. And the sometimes just that one conversion, maybe it's a conversion from traffic to email list, if you double that, boom. Everything else is going to increase too. Then you can also increase your conversion rates exponentially, by increasing the conversions all over the place. So not just that one place. But when you do write these flowcharts out and you do write down these conversion, and this is something that we should all be doing. And you should all know what these numbers are. And if you don't then something's wrong.

And you know we're at the start of the year here. It's okay if you haven't done this yet but you need to do this at some point soon, so that you know exactly what's going on. That's one of the biggest sins that people have when they're building their businesses. They just don't know what's going on. They just aren't sure. And when you aren't sure, when things go wrong, you don't know how to fix them and that's a problem. So increase your conversion rates by knowing what the conversion rates are, not just conversion rates into your product, although that's obviously a very important part of it, but conversions from page to page, from page to email address, or subscription. All those sorts of things matter.

And then you can start to, you know, increase the conversions all over the place, but you start with one. Start with the low hanging fruit, the one that's gonna be the easiest for you to test and the easiest for you to increase. And that's where I would start.

So Brian hopefully that answers your question and gives you an idea on what to do, but also how to approach it, and what. you know, you could do to figure out what your top priorities are and where you should start. Because it really, you know a lot of this online stuff, I mean we all have a million things we could do, right? I mean I have tens of millions of things that I could potentially work on, but I know that next domino, that I have to push over that's going to make that domino effect like they talk about in The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, required reading for all entrepreneurs. Prioritization, understanding what that first step is is really important.

There's a billion things to do. There's a million dominoes you could line up but what's that first one that's gonna be the easiest for you to tap over but also going to have the biggest effect and create all that energy for you moving forward. So hopefully that makes sense. If not, read the book The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. It's amazing. AskPat.com/TheOneThing, no spaces. Go ahead and go there.

So Brian thank you so much for the question. We're gonna send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much and for all of you who are 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. Just hit the record button, and start talking. Ask your question. It's my job to sound good. Doesn't matter what kind of mike you have as long as I can hear you that's all that matters.

Thank you so much I appreciate you and here's a quote to finish off the day, by John Wooden. He said, “Things work out the best, for those who make the best of how things work out.” Those tongue twister ones are always a little confusing when you first hear it, which is why I'm gonna say it one more time. “Things work out the best, for those who make the best of how things work out.” In other words, stuff happens all the time, but the ones who succeed are the ones who react, and pivot, and adjust, and adapt. So take what you have and work with that. And make the best of that. And you will have a lot of great things happen to you.

Cheers take care, and I look forward to serving you in tomorrow's episode of AskPat. Thank you so much.