PODCAST

How To Build A YouTube Presence With Nate Woodbury

Mitch Stephen|By September 15, 2020

Episode 411: How To Build A YouTube Presence With Nate Woodbury

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REIS 411 | YouTube Presence

You don’t have to go “viral” to build a solid YouTube presence that attracts leads to your business. If you can figure out how you can design your content around the keywords that your prospective audience is typing, you will have the capacity to ride along with the YouTube algorithm and get more people to view your content. YouTube producer, Nate Woodbury is the absolute expert in this. In this conversation with Mitch Stephen, he talks about the importance of keyword research in his line of work, how you can start creating content for YouTube, and how you can optimize your titles to take advantage of the YouTube algorithm to reach more people. He also touches on the applicability of these principles to podcasting, mainly on the feasibility of repurposing podcast content for YouTube. Everyone with an expertise has a place on YouTube, whether you specialize in real estate or nail polish. There is no better time to start than now!

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I’m here with Nate Woodbury. We’re going to be talking about YouTube marketing. This is a topic very near and dear to me because I always seem to get my ass kicked in the digital realm with all these people that are trying to promote me and push me into the top but I never have much luck with it. I’m not sure if I don’t understand it or if I don’t stay in the game long enough to see the rewards or have I hired a bunch of jerks. We’re going to get some pointers on YouTube marketing, social media marketing and how it might benefit you and how you might go about it. At least get you the basics on it because there’s no doubt we have digital calling cards or people are checking us out digitally.

There’s no way around it. If I tell everybody, and even in my own case, you may not have to have the most elaborate website in the world because you’re getting your traffic from there, but you better have one at least for credibility’s sake. The first thing everyone’s going to do is start creeping on you and trying to figure out who you are. Whether you’re a roofer or a sheet rocker or a house flipper or whatever, they’re looking to see if this guy is real and what reputation he has and all that stuff.

I’ve got to pay homage to my sponsor really quick. Please go to LiveComm.com. In a nutshell, it’s mass texting, but you buy phone numbers. They’re about $2 a month. You get one free with your account and every phone number comes with a text distribution list and it starts to collect phone numbers from every cell phone that ever calls your LiveComm.com phone number. You can label these numbers. You can build lists like crazy. I happened to have about fifteen houses on the market on any given day.

In the last 300 houses, I’m averaging nine days on the market and 12% down because I sell my houses with seller finance. That’s because I have 24,000 people that have called my owner finance signs and have refused to opt out even though I give them a chance. Whenever I have a new house, I hit 24,000 people for $0.02 apiece. This is a bullseye right between the eyes. They’ve called. They’re interested. They won’t opt out even though I send them text messages telling them, “If you’re not interested anymore, get off this list.” For $0.02, I can tell them I have a new house for sale and that’s how it works. There are so many other ways to use this product. Check out their website. Nate, how are you doing?

I’m doing very well. This is starting out to be a great day.

Maybe we can up the bar for everybody that comes after us. Where are you sitting physically? Where are you at?

I’m in the City of Lehi, Utah.

Is that close to Salt Lake?

Yes. It’s about 20, 30 minutes away.

I love Utah. It’s a beautiful place. They have Zion National Park. I got stuck there at one time. I got snowed in a van. I thought I was going to die. Luckily, my mama had packed a little survival kit for me with candles and food. They found me in about a day. I was whited out and I had to pull over and I was leaving my truck running until it was going to run out of gas and it never ran out of gas and someone found me.

With the weather like that, you probably didn’t get to see the sites, but the national parks in Utah are quite amazing.

I also want to go to Lake Powell. It’s on my bucket list. I want to have a boathouse for 2 or 3 days. Give us a little bit of your background. Catch us up. Who are you and how’d you get in this business of social media marketing?

You don’t have to be perfect to get started in YouTube. Just take your camera, hit record and show your expertise. Click To Tweet

I produce over a dozen different YouTube channels and these are daily YouTube channels. I call daily five or more episodes per week. That’s a lot of content. Fortunately, I have a great team behind me. Some videographers, a whole team of editors in the Philippines. We produce YouTube channels for business owners, mostly influencers, experts, people who have the expertise to share, and we make lots of how-to content. I’ve got a great track record of success since I get asked to speak a lot and share my secrets, pull back the curtains and share how I’ve done it. To put some numbers to it, I’ve got several channels that I produce that make multiple six figures monthly. In fact, one channel makes seven figures monthly just because of YouTube traffic. YouTube pays us money, but that’s not where the big numbers come from.

We’ll make four or five figures monthly from YouTube, but the lead generation from these channels. When you build an audience, when you build a following on YouTube, they like you, they love you, they trust you and they want to buy from you either. They’re wondering, “I love all this training. I love all this information you’ve given me for free, how can I get your coaching? How can I buy a course from you? How can I get you to help me do X, Y, Z?” They basically come to you with a credit card in hand like a warm referral. It’s easy to help them out at that point.

A video or some information a day, that’s quite a commitment from your client too. You’re committed, but your clients got to be committed as well. You can’t pull content out of your rear end.

It is a huge commitment and that was an obstacle. I figured out this formula. If you follow this formula, then I know how you’ll get results on YouTube. You’ll get the attention of the algorithm so that YouTube will start to promote your content. All my clients are business owners with an extremely busy schedule. How in the world that I figured that out? I call myself a master of efficiency. I had clients that fly into Utah, come to our studio. We filmed twenty episodes in a single day. That means we only have to do that once every four weeks. Clients regularly once every four weeks. It’s a lot of work. It’s a marathon day, but that’s what I recommend is to film in batches like that.

When you’re working a marathon, days go fast. I don’t like marathon days when they seem like the day drags on forever. When you’re engaged, you’re getting things done. You have a schedule and you’ve got people around you helping you, 12, 14, 15 hours can fly by fast. It’s very rewarding if you get a lot done and it takes a task masker like you that knows where we’re going every second to get that done. I imagine there’s a lot of preparation before this. Your client’s probably saying, “You need to give me 25 one-minute segments,” or how long are these segments?

We make episodes average in length about 10 to 12 minutes. That’s only film. To prepare for that, one of the great areas of expertise I have is the way to do keyword research for YouTube. What we do is we find long, specific questions. In your space, it might be, how to invest in real estate with no money? That’s nine words long or how to invest in real estate with bad credit. These are specific questions that people are asking. We start there. We do that keyword research. I’ll give you some other examples and other niches, like how to design a living room with a corner fireplace or how to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics. We do the research to find questions that people are asking.

I don’t make those up, but we find questions that at least have a little trickle of consistent volume so that we know that when we make a video with that title, it will rank on day one on YouTube. Even though we’re getting a trickle of traffic, we’re going to rank instantly and the YouTube algorithm is going to start seeing that we’re getting good results because people watch our videos all the way to the end. Once we have those titles, this was their space, this is what they’re an expert in. They simply have to outline some talking points. If I want to answer this question, make my episode about ten minutes long, I’m going to introduce it this way. I’ve got three secrets I’m going to share. I’m going to share this story and I’ll wrap it up this way. That’ll be ten minutes.

Ten minutes is not long when you’re filming. I struggle to keep a commercial under 60 seconds. It’s amazing to me how fast it is. Sixty seconds when you’re trying to do a plank for exercise is a long time. When you’re trying to keep your content down and do a commercial with a hard stop in 60 seconds is damn near impossible for anybody with a lot to say. They seem so devoid of pertinent information. When you finally limit it down to 60 seconds, it’s like, “I don’t know if I told anybody anything. I started to and then I ran out of time.” Ten minutes goes pretty fast.

If it’s a commercial, we’ve been conditioned. We want to keep those as short as possible and Super Bowl ads to get 30 seconds or 1-minute ad that they’ve put so much money into it. How do we say it all in one minute? On YouTube, you don’t have that much pressure and we’re not selling things on YouTube. We’re teaching, we’re giving away value. In the end, we’ll give a call to action. We’ll say, “If you found value in this video, I want to give you my book for free,” or, “I’ve got a free resource where I’m putting on a master class, click the link below and you can find out more.” That’s how they turn into leads. It’s creating the content for ten minutes and keep keeping people’s attention for that ten minutes is pretty easy and very common on YouTube.

You have a giveaway and one of those giveaways is the Keyword Research Mini-Course. I’m talking to the readers now directly. Nate’s very giving. He has the same philosophy I do. I’ll tell you everything I know. If you want to go do it yourself, go ahead. I’m smart enough to know and Nate is smart enough to know that there’s a whole bunch of people out there will say, “I don’t want to become an expert in this. I’m an expert in that. I’m going to stay over that. I don’t want to be over here. I’m going to hire Nate and his company,” or “I want him to coach me and get me through the learning curve on this.” He gives a lot of information away for free. I want you to go to 1000Houses.com/GoYoutube and check out the Keyword Research Mini-Course Program. You’re also developing right now a YouTube Masterclass.

Before the pandemic, I used to speak a lot on stages and in public. That’s what my masterclass is. It’s the same presentation that people have me come in and speak. That’s where I pull back the curtains and show all the steps of this formula and how to get results. In the master class, I don’t sell anything. I pull back the curtains and show you what you need to do. Literally, if you walk away and implement it, you’ll get results. Yes, I do have a lot of people that become my clients after hearing me present this because they come to me and say, “I want to do it. I see the strategy. I need somebody to do it for me. That’s why I do a profit in my business. I’m very successful, but again, on the masterclass side, I don’t sell.

Go to 1000Houses.com/GoYoutube and check out the Keyword Research Mini-Course and the YouTube Masterclass. There will be all kinds of other things over there. You’ll have information on how to get ahold of Nate directly or whatever we think is important, it’ll be over there and you don’t have to memorize any of this stuff or write it down. What are some of the common mistakes people make when they’re trying to rank with YouTube?

YouTube Presence: We need to find questions that at least have a little trickle of consistent volume so that we know that when we make a video with that title, it will rank on day one on YouTube.

A lot of people are intimidated by the technology or they want everything to be perfect before they get started. That’s something that holds a lot of people back. We all know we’ve got to start somewhere. If you find good YouTube channels that you like, I challenge you to go back and look at what they were like on video when they started. YouTube makes it easy to look back. Let’s say they started seven years ago. You compare what their videos are like now to seven years ago and it’s hilarious. If you want to dig and find some of my early videos, it’s quite embarrassing. I’ll tell you a quick example. I’m a pretty reserved guy, but you compare what I am now on audio or videos to like 7 or 10 years ago.

I remember I pulled out the camera and I was making about a three-minute long promo video. I said I’m going to be high energy. I’m going to pump myself up. I hit record and I recorded this video. Afterwards, I’m watching it. I’m sitting there perfectly still talking in a monotone. I was like, “High energy? What?” It’s funny. The real truth is in your pocket or in your purse right now, you’ve got an amazing camera and all you have to do is turn it in landscape mode and hit record and talk to the camera and show your expertise. That’s a great place to start. People like content like that where you’re being genuine, you’re being authentic. Your question is what holds people back. People think that that’s not going to cut it, but that will I get you off to a great start.

People, to a certain extent, like real life. When the phone rings in the background or the dog barks, it’s like, “Sorry, man, I’m living a real-life here. I’m trying to get this information to you despite the fact that I got a crying baby back here that I probably need to go take care of, but I’m doing the best I can.” I think people appreciate that. There’s a certain amount. You wouldn’t want it to happen every day or every minute, but when something comes up, it’s like, “Shit happens. Sorry, my set fell over.”

The reality is it makes people more relatable. As we’ve been into this age of social media for a short while now, a decade or whatever, we’ve gotten accustomed to understanding that this polished images that we see of everybody on social media aren’t reality. There’s a trend lately of women who post a picture of themselves without makeup and say, “Here’s the real me.” It’s like this rebellion against perfection. If there’s something funny that happens, it’s a way of re-engaging people’s attention in the video, and it’s great to leave that stuff in your episode.

I’m glad to hear you say your iPhone is good enough. You don’t have to have to hire a bunch of professional and go buy a bunch of professional equipment and try to figure out how to use all that. For me, the iPhone is complicated enough. I don’t need anything more complicated than that because I’m figuring out how to use all that. I was born in a generation where there wasn’t even a computer at my school unless it was at the home office. I’ve been chasing that technology bus since the day I graduated and I’ve always been ten feet behind it, which is why it’s so important for me to people meet people like you. There’s no real super need for me to learn it from the top to the bottom if I have access to people like you that are willing for a price to handle it for me. I make good money doing what I do. I don’t need to save a handful of bucks and try to add another expert asterisk next to my name with social media. When you’re going to analyze a business or someone comes to you as a prospect, how do you size up if you’re for them?

If I’m looking at a business and I’m saying, “Is YouTube a good fit for you and helping you generate leads for your business?” There are multiple strategies, but the one that I found that is powerful is for experts. I know a lot of everyone reading this has an expertise in something because we’ve all had experiences. We’ve all learned lessons and we all have advice to share. We all have answers to questions. That’s a criteria. I look for people who are experts. When I look at a business, there are three different areas. You can break a business simply into three different parts of your business. You’ve got the traffic where the customers come from, you’ve got the marketing or the sales. That’s where your leads get converted into customers and you’ve got fulfillment.

You’ve got to have a great fulfillment system to keep your customers happy to deliver and to provide them value. When experts come to me and they’ve got parts 2 and 3 in place, they know how to take a lead and convert that. They know how to make a sale and they know how to fulfill. They know how to deliver so they’ve got momentum in their business. What I can do is I can help them leverage YouTube to grow a following and to develop tons and tons of traffic and to start funneling leads into their funnel so that they can exponentially grow the revenue. We look at it, “What’s the end goal?” I look at all the pieces in place and make sure that it’s a good fit.

Does podcasting fit into this? I would imagine if someone already had a podcast or started a podcast because they wanted to increase their digital footprint and YouTube presence, you could get a lot of information. I like to call it double-dipping. I’m doing a podcast on a subject that I’m an expert at interviewing another expert. Certainly, you could chop that 35 minutes up into a whole bunch of useful content. You could use it without me maybe even having to fly to wherever you’re at. You could probably get a lot of segments. I’m coming up on number 400 podcast interviews. Would a guy like me necessarily have to even go anywhere if I had that much content?

There are two questions I heard in there. The first question that I heard was about podcasters in general. There are two main types. There are podcasters that share their own expertise. There are podcasts that interview other people with expertise or cool stories, especially if you are sharing your own expertise. In your case, you’ve been doing it for hundreds of episodes, you’ve obviously got the expertise so a strategy like that would be awesome on YouTube. What if you’ve got all this previously recorded content? Could you repurpose it and put it on YouTube? It’s hard. It’s hard for two reasons. From a podcast that’s recorded for audio-only, it is hard to repackage it and make it so that it’s appealing and so that it’s what the YouTube algorithm and what YouTube viewers are looking for. You and I are talking through Zoom where we can see each other’s eyes through the camera. You and I are talking to each other when, if we had a separate episode, where we’re talking to the lens and we’re talking specifically to a viewer, people sense that. Instead of me talking to you, I’d want to talk to the person who is watching the video-specific. That’s one key difference.

I do solocasts in my office where I’m going to go on and discuss a topic myself.

Doing it that way could work well. The other question you asked is could you take a longer piece of content, say it’s 40 minutes, and cut it into 4 10-minute episodes. That’s hard to do because you need to do the keyword research before you film to know what to title your video. Here’s a way that you could make it work. If you did the keyword research first and have four different questions like we talked about, those long phrases, how to invest in real estate with no money and how to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics. You make your podcast episode where you go through and you answer the first question for ten minutes, the second question for ten minutes. You could make one longer podcast episode and turn that into four YouTube episodes. That’s a strategy that could work.

You gave me an idea for my own podcast. I should be researching these people, researching the topic and then have someone do a massive keyword search for me. I should have the thing titled before I even start so I can start to use those words in my speech and in the labeling.

It’s going to take time to build a huge following on YouTube, but if you are consistent, you will eventually build that momentum. Click To Tweet

The advantage of YouTube is twofold. YouTube has an amazing search engine. People all around the world who’ve never heard of you before but are asking questions, they now find you. That sounds obvious. We do searches on YouTube all the time, but it works. The other advantage of YouTube is they have a partner program. They share ad revenue. The benefit of that is because you have a vested interest in each other, you and YouTube, YouTube will promote your content. YouTube wants your content to succeed because that’s how YouTube makes money. The strategy that I use, the biggest step that we’ve talked about doing the keyword research. When you start using this strategy, it’s slow going.

It takes momentum to build. You’ve got to be consistent with it. I tell every one of my clients, “The first four months are boring. We’re posting five episodes every single week and waiting four months and having it be boring. Let me tell you, my client Noelle Randall, she’s I in the real estate space too, but she does Airbnb real estate. We went for four months and it was pretty steady. Gradual, little incremental growth, but at that fourth-month mark, YouTube started to suggest her content to newer audiences. Week after week, it started to build. On the last day of July 2020, we got up to over 5,000 views in a single day and then we had a spike. We’ve been over 20,000 views in a single banner channel. Her channel has grown from 16,000 to now 39,000 subscribers. The moral of that story is you got to plan in advance and understand it’s going to take time, but the fruit that starts coming from it builds so much powerful momentum. It’s beneficial for your business.

I’m so glad you gave that case study because you are inspiring me. I want to have a consult with you myself. I think I’m ready. Can you give me some keywords so I know what to post the name of it? Can you tell me what to name this episode so we can like to have the right keywords in there?

We would do keyword research and the sad truth is about podcasts, even Google as a search engine doesn’t index podcast like YouTube indexes YouTube episodes. I would say the best recommendation right now for a podcast is to create like a magazine headline, something that’s catchy that creates curiosity. You’ll know how to generate thousands of leads from a simple YouTube strategy. Something like that would be a title we’ll think about.

Can you repurpose these Zoom audio podcasts into a YouTube link?

Some people succeed with it but sometimes you need to pause it a little bit more that the great thing about the podcast medium is people will listen for longer. We’ve talked about length. You don’t have to trim it as much. On YouTube, you’ve got people’s visual attention, the ums and the uhs, the pauses when we’re waiting to think of a response and stuff like that, on YouTube, we tend to tighten it up. When we watch a TV show or an episode on Netflix, there’ll be a camera change every 3 or 5 seconds. Our minds are used to that. Visually, there’s some editing that you want to do, even if it’s to change the crop. Every 15 or 30 seconds, it does zooms out.

There are some things, but here I am telling you to film it on your iPhone, but now I’m telling you to make it more complicated. The quick answer is, yes, you can do that. You can tweak and make improvements and say, “Is my time that I made on this improvement worth it? Am I getting better results from it?” Start where you are now and then you’ll find ways to improve it over time and see if it’s worth it.

Your client, Noelle Randall in the Airbnb space, she went from 5,000 to 20,000 views. Is she noticing a monetary increase?

She’s fired up. I don’t know the numbers, but she’s had a huge increase in the amount of leads and inquiries that she’s had for her training on real estate. I do know the numbers from her YouTube ad revenue and for privacy, I can’t share those numbers. I wish I could. I can say this one. In July 2020 and prior, it’s been in the hundreds of dollars per month and now it’s in the thousands.

That’s from YouTube paying you for four because you’ve got so many hits, now they put commercials on them before your episodes or in the middle of your episodes or both?

I can explain that in more detail if that would be helpful. That’s how YouTube makes money. They put ads before and after and around your videos. YouTube gives you 55% of that ad revenue. They give you most of it. You create the videos that they put their ads next to. For each single view, it’s a fraction of a cent. If you get thousands of views, hundreds of thousands of views and now millions of views, then that’s when the ad revenue can start to be significant. I’ll also paint a proper picture or lay the foundation of what’s realistic expectation-wise.

This was adding up ad revenue for multiple YouTube channels. It took me three years before that became a four or five-figure amount. It took 2.5 years before it became a four-figure amount and three years before it became a five-figure amount. Prior to that, it was a couple of hundred dollars here or there. It takes some time to get there. When it became significant, it was a very small percentage of revenue compared to the revenue that we were generating from these.

YouTube Presence: The benefit of YouTube is twofold: one, it has an amazing search engine; and two, it has a partner program where they promote your content in return for a share in ad revenue.

There is an upside, a little bonus. If you can get enough traffic to get their attention, you’ll get a check. When I started this show, I had no expectations. It’s hard to make money when you have 1, 2 or 3 archive podcasts as it started to get up there. I had a common sense about it. I ran hard at first doing 5 or 6 podcasts a week, which was hard, to try to hurry and get to at least 50 so I had some presence and people could binge on me if they wanted to. People binge on Netflix watching all the episodes in a row. I have people call me and tell me they’ve seen every episode I’ve ever done. I’m like, “Holy cow.”

Hopefully, you’re doing this while you’re flying or driving or something because this would be a complete waste of time. How do you get anything done? I imagine it’s the same way with YouTube or any of this social media. You’ve got to start to rack up the miles. You got to start to put in the time and start to get some mass. Just a word out there to everybody, if you think you’re going to make a couple of YouTube things and see a bunch of great response, don’t hold your breath. You might be one of those sensations that gets lucky on the first day. Something happens that you certainly didn’t plan that everyone’s interested in watching over and over again. People are trying to create that go viral video all the time on purpose.

Here’s an interesting thing on that point. I’ve never had a video go viral and that might be like, “What am I listening to this guy for?” I’ve had plenty of videos that have individually got millions of views, but viral means that it was so sensational or so exciting or this kitten was so cute that it got shared by everybody. With educational how-to content, that doesn’t happen. The YouTube algorithm promotes you to the masses. When you create a good video that will make YouTube money. The title that I shared earlier, how to invest in real estate with no money, that nine-word phrase, that video I produced for a guy named Kris Krohn. We used to be partners on his channel until I asked him to buy me out in June of 2020.

I produced that channel for five years. That one video, it’s probably around 6 million views not because it went viral, but because YouTube loves to put ads in front of it and promoted it. Why would we want a competitor’s ad showing in front of Kris’s training? One, if we got paid for it. For that one video, my own personal revenue off of that video is about $150,000, but that’s collectively over two years. The revenue that went to Chris was with several million dollars because it generated leads for his business. This works.

If you want to get your Keyword Research Mini-Course or you want to check out the YouTube Masterclass, then go to 1000Houses.com/GoYoutube and check out what Nate Woodbury has to say. If you’re interested and you want more information from him, all that contact information will be over there. Is there anything you want to say to the people out there before maybe we wrap it up? Most of the people that read this are real estate investors new and seasoned and probably a lot of entrepreneurs. What would you say to them as we part?

If anything that we’ve talked about has intrigued your mind, I’d encourage you to continue to dig and find out more if YouTube is a good fit for you. Compared to any other social platform out there from Facebook to LinkedIn, to Twitter, to Instagram, we could put a lot of time and energy and spin our wheels, trying to get traction in one of these areas. For an expert, you can get great results from YouTube. I wish YouTube would pay me to promote them, but I guess they do. They pay me when I make the content. The only other thought that I had in relation to audio and recording on a podcast and repurposing that on YouTube. The one disadvantage that you have is on audio, you can’t show things. You can’t use a flip chart or show objects, or let’s say you went and you wanted to give a tour around a home, talk about how to appraise a home or something like that. You can only talk about it in audio form. The things that you can do in a video, people like to see those things.

It’s great to be able to show things. Going back to the part that you can repurpose and in your case where you’re filming both, people like to see the facial expression. You can lean into the camera to emphasize the point and stuff like that. There are so many cool things that you can’t do in video but you can’t be in your pajamas. They can record their podcast in their pajamas, no problem. If you’re going to go on video, you got to put on a nice shirt at least and clean up and have a nice background and whatnot.

I want to thank all of you for stopping by to get you some Nate Woodbury in to learn a little bit about YouTube and digital marketing. Go to 1000Houses.com/GoYoutube and get your Keyword Research Mini-Course and your YouTube Masterclass out there and get connected with Nate if you think you want to have a longer discussion. I’d like to thank my sponsor LiveComm.com. Go to the homepage and watch what you can use this texting mass texting resource for. You can archive all the conversations from any phone number you choose in their archives. If there’s a conversation going on that phone number, you can click a button. It has so many features. It’s unbelievable.

The next feature coming this coming your way is ringless voicemail drops. There’ll be a ringless voicemail drop to all your clients. I can show you how to use that. We’re going to be describing how you tie all this together, but it’s a very interesting concept. It’s probably one of the most affordable mass texting there is. I know for a fact because we did the research, one of the most affordable mass texting platforms out there. Thanks a lot, Nate. I’ll see you later.

Thank you, Mitch.