hosted by: AskPat 813 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody. Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 813 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 Otis, but before we get to his question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks, one of my favorite companies because they're helping me and millions of other small businesses manage our business finances. From our income to expenses, which you can actually track automatically, and also invoicing. What's really cool is within 30 seconds you can create a professional looking invoice, so if you do any billing of any kind it's a really simple. Plus, the follow up process with people who haven't yet paid you is perfect.
Check it out. They just revamped their entire user interface to make it even easier for you to do this. 30 days for free you can get access to that at FreshBooks.com/askpat, and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section. Again, that's FreshBooks.com/askpat.
All right. Now here's today's from Otis:
Otis: Hello Pat. My name is Otis. I have a website, lakecitytactical.com. [Editor's note: This site is no longer active.] I make a custom product by hand. I'm looking to expand my offerings to digital offerings on different topics related to my product, and I'm wondering if one were to start a YouTube channel, what is the most effective way to figure out what the most productive or the highest-rated channels are in the particular genre or realm that I am looking to work in, so that I could strategically place myself with my competition?
Does that make sense? Thank you for everything that you do. I appreciate your podcast. I listen to it all the time, and it occurred to me while listening to your podcast that this would be a good question to ask. Thanks. Bye bye.
Pat Flynn: Hey Otis. What's up? Thank you so much for the question. It's actually fairly easy to find YouTube channels and high rated videos in YouTube. You simply type in keywords related to your particular niche in YouTube, and because it's a search engine, you're going to get a results page. It's going to show you the top results. I would explore those first few videos that show up on that top part of the results page because YouTube puts them there on purpose. They want to serve just like Google, and remember YouTube is owned by Google, the best results for different keywords.
You can go in there and explore what those videos are about. Try to figure out why those ones are ranking really high. You can also look at this as a great sort of not really secret, but a tactic you can use to find even more videos, and how to get in front of some of these ones that are higher rankings for various keywords. You go and find the top search results like I just told you. Click through into those top videos, and then look at the other videos that are there on the side, like the related videos or the suggested videos that go along with it. That going to also give you some idea in terms of what YouTube feels is relevant to that specific initial seed, keyword that you put in there.
Create videos about all these kinds of things. I would actually start to write down all the different keywords, all the different topics. What keywords are they using in their title? What are their descriptions like? I would map these all out, and that way you're able to find a position, and find a space in there, and actually create videos like those, but hopefully better and higher quality too.
I think another important thing to realize just with videos in general, especially on YouTube, which is an extremely powerful tool, so I'm excited that you're going to be diving into that, is with your content making so that people will want to continue watching once they start. One sign for YouTube that a video isn't worth ranking high is if a person starts watching that video, and then immediately leaves. You don't want that to happen.
There are other thing you could do to increase the likelihood that your videos are going to be shown more, and that is to create more videos, and start linking them to each other. Also, embedding those videos within your blog posts, or on your website somewhere. Those kinds of things can really prove to YouTube that your stuff should be ranking quite high, but more than anything, discover through the keyword research that you're doing on YouTube specifically what kinds of topics are related to, and what kind of things people are talking about related to that specific seed keyword.
That's how you go about it, and so I would actually just recommend you go and start creating videos because videos are great, but again, also making sure that they are there to engage and get people to leave comments, and then have them start to influence what your next videos become. Once you start to build a community behind your YouTube videos then that's where the real power behind the viralness of YouTube comes into play, and you get even higher rankings, and more video views as well, and of course more subscribers.
Hopefully that helps. Otis, thank you so much. I appreciate your question today, and I look forward to seeing, and hearing more about your results. Thank you so much. I want 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 and you can ask right there on that page.
Also, be sure to check out tomorrow. For those of you who are listening to this on a Thursday or a day before that, if you're listening to this in the future, AskPat Live. It's happening every Friday on my Facebook page. For an hour I'll be answering as many questions as I can. No, you won't get a t-shirt after every question if your question is featured there, but it's a way for me to interact with you more and live. Join the community. Head on over to Facebook.com/smartpassiveincome. We're going live every Friday at 1:30 p.m. Pacific, and I look forward to seeing you there, and answering as many questions as I can. I also do some give aways at the end of that as well, but anyway. The link one more time. Facebook.com/smartpassiveincome. I'll see you there 1:30 p.m. Pacific every Friday.
All right. Thanks so much. I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish of the day by Dean Rusk. He said, “One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears, by listening to them.” Love that. All right guys. Take care. I'll see you in the next AskPat. Bye.
