- If you're like most creators,
you've got some traction on your channel,
you're growing and you start thinking,
"How can I make money on this?
How can I grow a business around my YouTube audience?"
And so you jump very quickly,
unfortunately, things like Patreon and channel memberships
and trying to sell merch,
and you quickly find out
that no one really buys those things
and they don't really perform nearly as well
as you have expected.
Today, I wanna give you some of the very first steps
you need to take to actually create a product
that people will buy
and start growing a business around your channel
so you can make money
and make this whole project of yours sustainable long term.
(whooshing)
Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer,
welcome to Video Creators,
We're all about helping you grow your YouTube audience
and the business that surrounds it.
So you can not only reach and change other people's lives,
but that it can change your own life as well.
And the very first step to doing that
is creating a product that you can sell
that people actually want to buy.
I remember back in 2005, when I was first starting to learn,
"How do I make money online?
How do I create an audience
around something I'm passionate about?"
And I wrote a book, launched it to my audience,
and I thought, "You know what, this is gonna be awesome.
This is gonna reach lots of people,
it's gonna change lots of lives
It's gonna make me enough money
that I can start doing this full time."
And I sold a couple of copies,
but for the most part, that book didn't really go anywhere.
I was thinking why not?
Like other people are having tremendous success with books
or in your case, maybe with Patreon and with merch
and with channel memberships and Super Chats.
And why is it that was working for other people and not me?
Well, usually, what I found out the hard way,
I may save you from experiencing yourself,
too often people jump straight to the product
and be like, "Oh, I have an audience.
Now I should sell something,"
and then find out it doesn't work.
There's a few steps in there
that people are usually skipping,
that I skipped as well.
And I wanna help you not experience those same results.
And it starts at the very first thing,
which is understanding who your audience is
and what they want.
The assumption I mistakenly made is
that, "I know my audience, I'm actually one of them.
I talk to them all the time.
I'm a leading authority in this space.
I know this audience better than they know themselves."
And obviously that wasn't true
because if I knew them as well as I thought I did,
then the book that I was trying to sell
would have actually sold.
And the fact that it wasn't selling was proving to me
that there's a miss somewhere,
that they either don't want what I'm selling,
or I don't understand what they need or something.
So we really need to go back to the very basics,
which is who is your target audience and what do they want?
There's several different ways
you can discover this information.
But perhaps my favorite way is to actually just run a survey
and just flat out ask.
Usually it starts with me making a video like this,
and just simply asking for the information.
We will send this survey out to our audience,
by making a YouTube video about it,
we will email it to our email list,
we'll post it on our Community tab,
we will share it on Facebook and Instagram,
we just want as many people in our audience
to see it as possible.
And then we'll leave it over for about a week.
Now, let me walk you through the questions
we're actually asking here,
that will give you the best data possible
for making decisions about the products that you create
and how you sell those things going forward.
The first question is,
how many subscribers do you currently have in your channel?
Basically, what we're asking here is,
where are you at on your creative journey?
What's one question you can ask that very clearly says like,
Okay, if these are people
that have 10,000 subscribers and less,
here are the responses of people
at 10,000 subscribers or more,
'cause we've noticed that those two audiences
are asking very different questions,
trying to accomplish different things.
So it's important for us
that if we're going
after the 10,000 subscriber plus audience,
that we can separate their information
out from the people
who are maybe just getting started on YouTube.
And the same will be true for you,
you might wanna segment the responses you're about to get
based on where they're at on their journey.
After that, the next question is,
what's your biggest challenge
when it comes to growing your YouTube channel.
And we ask people,
please go beyond saying the very basic stuff,
like, "I want more subscribers," or "I want more views."
We ask people, please give us details,
the more detailed you are
the better we'll be able to serve you.
And so here, what we're getting at is like,
what's the biggest obstacle they're trying to overcome?
Is there common things,
common struggles that these people have,
because then that would make sense
for us to develop a product
maybe around helping that person do that.
It's an open-ended question
all these are open-ended questions on purpose
so that we can actually start hearing the language
that the audience is using to describe their problems
and the challenges that they're facing.
Because the more we can understand the actual language
that our audience is using,
the better we can communicate this,
that we have the solution to your problem.
And this is gonna make a big difference on your sales page.
Number three is, well, what does a win look like?
And this is getting a little bit deeper
besides the thing like,
"These are the obstacles I'm trying to face,"
we're actually going into like,
so what's the thing that you really want.
Often people will say like, "Yeah so I want views,"
or "Do you wanna make money?"
Or is it that I wanna feel popular?
Or is it that my boss is telling me to do this
and I wanna keep my job or whatever.
We're trying to get to the deeper thing.
What's the motivation that's prompting you
to actually grow your channel.
In your case, let's say you have a cooking channel.
Maybe you would ask, "How many times a week
do you currently cook a meal for your family?"
Maybe you're gonna find out most people are saying,
"You know what, a win for us
is when everyone's sitting around the table
and we have a delightful conversation."
So now that's helpful for me to know
if I'm selling cooking stuff
that this sale shouldn't be like,
"I got another cookbook."
It should be like, I wanna help you sit around the table
and enjoy delightful conversations.
I have a cookbook that's gonna help you do that."
Number four, what tactics
are you most interested in learning
about how to grow your YouTube channel
or about how to get this thing that you want?
This gives us a lots of really valuable information
in terms of ideas
that we can use to create different videos
and podcast episodes and email campaigns that we send out.
It's giving you an insight, giving you a look
into how does your audience think
about solving this problem?
As an expert, we get so used at solving it this way
that we forget sometimes
that the audience is actually thinking this other way.
Number five, what are you missing out on
by not having a bigger channel?
What's at stake now, is what we're asking.
"I feel like I won't be able to pay for my rent."
What's the deeper thing that's motivating them
to want to consume your content
and solve this problem in the first place?
The better you can tap into that on an emotional level,
the better you're gonna sell,
but more importantly,
the better of a product you're going to create
that's gonna serve your audience
way better than anything else
that they could have gotten from anywhere else,
because you understand them.
Number six, what is the one thing
you think is holding you back
from having a more successful channel?
It's similar to what are the obstacles
or the challenges that you face,
but this is kind of forcing them to prioritize everything
and say, "This is the biggest thing."
Number seven, we wrap it up with like,
"Finally, if we could follow up with you,
personally learn about your situation,
we would love to chat with you for a few minutes."
About 87% of you, not only fill it out,
but you're like, "Please contact me.
I will love to talk about this.
Can you help me overcome
all the things I just told you about?
That would be awesome."
I think it's a good indicator,
like measurement to see,
where is your audience at with how much they trust you,
how much they really want to engage with you
and you need with them.
And then that's it.
After you published the survey, let it run for about a week
and then shut it down.
What you're gonna do
is export all that data into a spreadsheet,
beneath each question in that document,
you're gonna start summarizing what everyone's saying
about that same question,
all the responses for question two,
then all the responses for question three and so on.
Are you gonna start writing it
in their language as much as possible,
summarizing what are the top things,
the reoccurring themes that keep popping up here?
Do that for all the questions
and then by the end of that,
you should have a really good idea
of what your target audience's problem is,
what they're trying to solve,
what really is at stake for them
and how you can tap into this on an emotional,
not in a manipulative way,
but in a, "I understand you on a deeper level now,"
type of way.
Now, what happens if you promote the survey
and you don't really get any feedback.
In fact, I would say, that you would need a minimum,
absolute minimum of 50 responses
for this data to be valuable at all.
'Cause anything less than that,
you're not really getting a general consensus.
you're just getting a few people's opinions.
This process does assume that you already have
maybe around 10,000 subscribers already on your channel,
and you're growing an active, engaged audience.
You've been following all the other principles
we've been teaching here.
If you've through the process,
you're probably at one of two spots;
either you're like, "Oh, I have so many ideas
of all these different things I could do!
Where do I start?"
Or number two, you're at like,
"I have no idea how to so...
"I actually thought I was doing this
or solving this problem,
but I have no idea where to even start with this thing."
In either case, I got you covered.
I put together a free guide,
it's gonna walk you not only through this process
in more detail,
but it's also going to give you
a whole list of tons of different options
of all the different ideas you could do,
of how to communicate
and deliver your value to your audience
in a way that they will want to buy it.
I give you my actual sales script that I use for my videos
that we've used with clients
that's generated several million dollars for our company
as well, millions of dollars for other people's businesses
and a whole bunch of selling tips and tactics
and strategies that really work well.
Because you can have the right product
or the right service and try to sell it
but the offer is wrong, the pitch is wrong
then no one's going to buy it.
So it's completely free.
You can click right here,
the link down below to go download it.
It gets started working through that process
so that you can reach more people,
change their lives with the products
and services that you're making,
the business that you're growing,
in a way that also changes and impacts your own life.
So click it and I'll see you guys over in that guide.