AP 0183: How Can I Use the Recording of a Live Show to Build My Audience?

AskPat 183 Episode Transcript

Pat: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 183 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hope you're doing well.

Awesome, now let's get to today question from Kelly.

Kelly: Hi Pat. This is Kelly Hyndman. I'm a patent attorney and also host of the Jurinspired program. It's a channel on YouTube that I've created based on a weekly live video broadcast that I produce. I've got 22 episodes under my belt. Each episode has four segments and ends up being about an hour in length. I'm wondering what you think about the idea of breaking up the program into its individual segments at the time I post it to YouTube. I'm concerned that the full hour program might be intimidating to the audience, but at the same time I can't imagine how each program segment would hold together on its own because we always tease the segment with a little introduction at the end of the prior segment and at the end of each segment, we lead forward into the next one. It would take some effort to break it up and I'm not sure whether it would be worth the investment and time. Please let me know what you think and I look forward to hearing from you, and I do want to say thanks so much for everything that you've done for me.

Pat: Kelly, thank you so much for your question. Just so I can get this straight and for everybody out there who's listening so they can understand what's going on. I think this is what's happening. You're doing these live shows and you're using either YouTube live events or Google Hangouts perhaps and they run for about an hour in length and as a result of that hour recording, it automatically gets posted onto YouTube. Which is great. It makes it easy for people to consume content that they may have missed. Their subscribers to the show comes out and people can see it as it comes out and it's awesome. That's a great way to go about it. The cool thing about doing that strategy is you are getting people on live. Which is really awesome but then when people watch later on even though they're not on live, it sort of feels like they're live. Especially if you're doing things like interacting with people in your audience and things you can do on Google Hangouts for example is you can run the Q & A app on that or maybe you have a chat room to go with your particular presentation or video show which would add another dimension to it as well. If not, might be something cool to check out. Anyway, for people watching that it's like, “Wow, this is really live and he's really interacting with the people in the audience, that's cool.”

Now, in your show, you break it up into four different segments and you're worried that the length of the full hour is a bit too long or intimidating for those who are not watching it live. I would agree with that statement. It is definitely a long time to dedicate an entire hour to a particular episode. But there are going to be people who will watch and listen for that whole time. You could even, for example, make it easier for people to consume and less intimidating by converting that audio into a podcast. An audio podcast. So ripping out the audio from that video and then turning that into a podcast that is something that I think people are more likely to listen to for a full hour.

When you think about it, people listen to podcasts, they're on the go, they're in their car, they're on a walk, they're at the gym. They have more time on their hands and they're able to listen to more things and do more things at the same time. If your show's on YouTube specifically and a lot of people have a hard time watching those on the go. Now this isn't going to be a good fit for everybody. For example, if you have a very visual type of show where you need to be showing people things, it's going to actually not work in audio because imagine listening to an audio where it says, “Hey, look at this, and then look at this. Well I can't see anything. I'm listening and at the gym right now and all I can see is the barbell that's about to crush me.” So yeah, that's not going to work. If that works, just adding another dimension and talking about how we might be able to help your audience in different ways and that's another way to potentially do that.

In terms of breaking up your show into chunks and posting those onto You Tube, I think that's a great strategy. The reason that I love that is because you are creating smaller little segments that are more digestible if people are more interested in just this segment (A vs. B, C, or D), they'll be able to just consume that and be good and be happy and not have to worry about everything else. Maybe they want what's in section C, the third segment, and they won't have to sit and watch the rest of it and they'll know exactly where it starts because it's a completely different video.

Another reason why I like it is you can get very topic specific with your titles and your description. What that does is it allows you to be found for those certain things. It allows you to be more likely to be found for those certain topics on YouTube. YouTube is of course a huge search engine. So you got to make sure that you are optimizing for SEO on YouTube using the right keywords and even doing keyword research for YouTube. There's a great tool out there that I just discovered called TubeTrackr that will help you give you some insight. Just like Google Keyword Planner does, but specially for YouTube, so check that out. I knew one of the founders and he's awesome and that's TubeTrackr.com.

Yes, it's a lot of work but it's definitely something worth experimenting with. I would even just for a month. I think you said you do these once a week. So maybe for four episodes you break them up. Imagine that, you have 16 different videos now, not just four, but you have 16 different videos all targeting different keywords and all giving you another opportunity for different people who may not find you otherwise to find you and then get deeper into your show. What I would recommend doing when you segment this is—and it's going to take a little bit of time and you want to systemize it and you might get to a point where you can write down the whole procedure list and create an SOP, a standard operating procedure, which is basically a list of okay, after a show's done, these are the steps that it takes. These are the steps, step by step. This is what we do to chunk these shows and it's going to be a little bit difficult at first because you don't know what those steps are and you're going to have to figure it out along the way.

I would also like to make sure to include annotations, for example. You could take that big chunk and chop it into four different pieces but you still can connect them together. So, for example, if people do stumble upon one of them, they would still be able to find the other three episodes or other three parts of that particular segment. So you could have them annotated, “Hey if you've arrived here and you can listen to the previous part.”

Or you can even get really fancy and at the end of a lot of YouTube videos you'll see that there is maybe a minute at the end where it just shows a preview of previous videos that that channel's created or the next video in the series. It's actually animated because it just shows a little clip of it or it's just a part people can click on. It essentially uses an annotation, a clickable annotation, to help keep people going through all your content. I feel like if people digest a 25-minute segment or 20-minute segment or 15-minute segment, they're going to be happier, they're going to be more likely to click through instead of being bogged down and intimidated by that hour. So, again, going back to that SOP, the standard operating procedure list. Having that in place will allow you to more easily do this in the future and potentially hand it off as well. I would experiment with it for sure. See what the reaction is like. You might find that you'll have more video views across all your different channels and also make sure to utilize the annotations to collect those different chunks. Or to connect those different chunks together, and also you'll be able to create playlists as well and make your whole channel and your whole experience through your show a little bit more interesting and customizable for people.

So, Kelly, I hope that answers your question and gives you some ideas to run with. Thank you so much, and an AskPat t-shirt is headed your way. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.

Awesome, thanks so much, and I'm going to end with a quote from one of my favorite people in the world, Seth Godin. He says, “Change is not a threat. It's an opportunity. Survival is not the goal. Transformative success is.” Cheers, thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.