Dude, who wouldn't want a video with 5 million views and yet, there's a science
to it. My friends today I'm going to introduce you to a friend of mine Nate
Woodbury. This guy is marketing genius and when it comes to putting out YouTube
videos and launching channels, he knows his stuff. I asked him to come on today
and actually share his formula for how he gets a video to 5 million and he's
about to give it to you about as concise as can be.
Dude what's up Nate man! Good to have you here man. Yeah. So listen Nate, you hit me
up years ago and said let's do this channel thing and I have to tell you I'm
so grateful that we did. Guys, I probably wouldn't have this YouTube channel today
if it wasn't actually for Nate Woodbury. So thank you. Thanks Chris,C it's really
been a fun journey. I've learned a lot. We've had a real good experience. We've
had some great successes and there's a lot of things that led up to getting
5 million views. I mean we've had 22 million views on the channel. 5 million
views on this specific episode. So we're going to talk about a lot of things in
this video here. We're going to talk about the keyword research that we did and and
how that led up to it. We'll talk about the call to actions and how we use call
to actions to get people to take action. We're going to talk about click-through
rate and we're going to talk about a secret formula that we use that will get spikes
on our channel. Get YouTube to promote... So in this short video, you're going to give it
all. You're going to actually say, "Here's all the components." In our kind of tiny niche
in the real estate world, we're top 5 in the world now on the conversation of
real estate. So if there's a niche that you want to dominate it starts with how
do I get a video that could really take off. So Nate, I'm excited today. You're
going to actually break it down and give us the formula. Yeah, well the first thing,
you mentioned that we're now in the top 5 in real estate. Well, in the beginning,
we were nobody on YouTube, right? So we had to start with keyword research and
we found really long, really specific phrases or questions that people are
asking around real estate that we knew we could dominate YouTube for. And this
is interesting because when I started making videos I'm like, "Oh, make videos on
my expertise. I'll make a video that I think people want." And what I loved about
the keyword research is very quickly. it was wait a second. Don't make videos you
want to make. Make a video that people need or want and their systems for
knowing how many people every month or are organically searching for those
keywords. Because there's definitely people all around the world that we're
searching for you and your expertise for those of you wanting to make a YouTube
channel. You have expertise people are searching for you, they just don't know
you exist. And so you find these questions that people are asking.
So some of the questions we found are - "How to invest in real estate with no money? -
Yeah - or "How to invest in real estate with bad credit" or one of my favorites
was like, "How do invest in real estate in your 20's?"
I'm like, "That's really specific. I guess 20 year-olds want to know that. Yeah. So
Nate, with the shorter this video is going to be, let's actually dive in and be
hyper specific. So how do you actually kick off a videos or any kind of
part of the formula there? Well, the simple thing is is you tell people what
the video is about. So in this video, we started out - "Hey in this video, we're
going to show you how to get 5 million views on a video." The second thing you do
right in the beginning is give a hook and say, "You know we've done it. We've
cracked the code and I've got Nate Woodbury here that was the
mastermind behind this video. He's going share with you all his secrets. So you
say what the video is about, you give them a hook. Awesome! So that's your
intros and then right after what do you do next then? So now they know why
they're here but you've got to convince them to watch the whole 10 or 12 minute
episode and so if you give them benchmarks along the way. "First, we're
going to talk about this then we're going to talk about this and then at the end
we're going to talk about this." So basically in this video, I mean we're kind of doing
the exact same thing. We're basically saying, "Hey, we're going to give you all
of the components to understand how to launch a video with 5 million views.
Right and now you're breaking it down and actually doing it. So that's the hook
that you mean. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so Nate, one of the things that's
interesting is there are more and more people coming on YouTube today that
actually have existing businesses. And one of the things you need to understand
is that the world wants you to answer their questions and give them content
and give them free value and you're thinking yes and I'd like to also find
an appropriate way to promote my business. Is there a right way of doing
that? Absolutely and and you're definitely right, you want to give away
your secrets for free. And so that's kind of hard for businesses to swallow. It's
like okay, well.. It was for me at first but I'm like, "Dude, give it all away right?
Do I hold anything back? But the the secret is you give away all of your
secrets people really gain value from that. They really build a relationship.
They get to understand you. They trust you and at the end of every one of your
videos you give them a call to action. And I say at the end, you can give them
in the middle as well. There's 3 different types of call to actions that
are all categories here. One is a call to action to get a free gift, right? To
join your list you might say, "Hey, I've got a book. If you want
access to this book for free just click that link below." Yeah.
That's one call to action. Another call to action is more indirect but it really
helps boost your channel and you can say, "You know what I
another video that I want to recommend. In fact, I'll do that right now. So I
talked about keyword research. Yeah I have a video where I go really in depth
on how I do the keyword research. How I found those questions, the tool that I
use. So I'll link to that video right up there. It's my leaf strategy video. Okay, awesome.
So that type of call to action will help boost your channel because YouTube will
like session watch time. So I'm not just how long people stay on your video but
how long they're going to be there for the entire session - right. So it really serves
your channel to recommend another video. Instead of when you get to the end of
the video saying, "Well hey, thanks for watching. We'll see you tomorrow because
people think, "Ah everything the contents done. I'm done. I'm going to leave. You can
give people the next step to take. The third call to action is - "Should we do a
poll? We could do a poll in this video. Alright, I've got a question. If you want
to make a video look more professional, what do you think is most important? The
camera, the lighting or the audio? Pick the one that's the most important. We'll
do that in a poll right up here. Okay, so I love this. By the way, that's a
relatively new or feature that's been provided. And so I love that you really
keep up to speed on what is YouTube doing, what are they launching, what are
they releasing and for today, those are 3 of the different call to actions.
Yeah. So once you've done that then I know that something that is really
important to get to that big number is click-through rate. What is that? What is
this whole thumb nail design conversation? Yeah, so thumbnails have
become more and more important over the years. Obviously, you want to design
something that's compelling. That you know we've heard the word clickbait
which you don't necessarily like because of the bait-and-switch. You want to
really deliver. But if you can design a thumbnail that performs better, it has a
better click-through rate, that means you're going to get more views. Now you can
do AV split testing. For those watching, they're like, "I'm confused. What's
happening right now?" When you actually put a thumbnail on there, people may
search for something but then they often filter through the thumbnails to decide,
"Well, does the title and thumbnail compel me?" Because they say a picture can be
worth a thousand words. If you have a bad thumbnail then you have a low
click-through rate and fortunately, YouTube says, "Hey, you can split test that
and swap them out to see if you can actually get more people watching your
video. Well yeah because YouTube serves up a whole menu of video options. So
you've got all these images, all these lines and you've
got... Yours has got to stand out. So at first, you take your best guess. You
design one that I think this is what's going to get a high click-through rate. But
then you can design a second version, an alternate version and you can test it
and YouTube analytics are great. It will say, "You know what? This one performed
better. This one had a higher click-through rate." So guys we're about
to get to like the exponential formula that's Nate's used to help my channel
and many other channels have explosive growth. But Nate before you share that,
will you just talk about the importance of sequel videos? Now the sequel video is
what our 5 million view video is. Yeah - so we do keyword research first and that
video we created is How to invest your money in your 20's? Yeah. We notice that
that video had started to do well and meaning we notice that because we were
looking in the analytics. We saw okay this video has gotten 50,000 views and a
lot of it has come because YouTube has promoted it. YouTube was suggesting it. So
we decided to create a sequel. We created another video at the exact same title -
How to invest your money in your 20's but we decided to make it longer and better.
So the first one I had you you were sitting on your pool table. The red felt
it was a good scene but your estatic the whole time. This time, I had to pull up in
your car. The wing door went up. You got out. I followed you into the house - right
yeah. It so happened your cleaning lady was there. Like, "Hey cleaning lady." We
walk into the kitchen. So you're telling the same story but it was more engaging
because we were walking through your house and it ended up being a lot longer
and we posted that video to YouTube. It did well the first couple weeks. It did
better than average and then YouTube started to suggest this video. Yes. Huge
way. It actually caused the channel to grow from 80,000 subscribers to 160,000
within 5 weeks. What we had done in all of those months before it got
doubled in just a handful of weeks. Yeah and it's interesting because you're
talking about split-testing thumbnails for click-through rate but I think the
sequel conversation is also like a split test. Like I'm looking at my videos that
perform well and if one is starting to really take off then guess what? We can
more or less your sequel videos to redo it and say, "More production value. Make it
more interesting." You know script it better. Make sure that you pack in some
extra information that you didn't in your first version as in just do it
better. I mean you can do a sequel technique on a video from somebody
else's channel and try and write their code tells.
It works a small percentage of the time but when you have a video on your own
channel that is doing well, the analytics just saying well YouTube's algorithm
really likes this video yeah then create a sequel yourself. Just make it better.
Make it a minute or a couple minutes longer at least and that video should do
really well for your channel. Like a spike exponential growth. Well listen,
you've been doing a great job listening and watching. What I want to do right now
is let's go ahead and shift gears and for the final thing, why don't you
actually share the exponential formula. Friends this formula now that we've
given you... You know some of the different basics on this. Nate's now going to really
dive into as the master genius of how this works - this formula. And this is
where you really want to take notes because this really is the answer to
that question - "How do you produce a video with 5 million hits?" This is the exact
formula we followed on this channel and it's going to sound aggressive but if you
want to get the type of results that we've gotten on this channel, this is
exactly what you need. So first, you need to start with the keyword
research. If you want more in-depth on that again the videos right up there.
Awesome! Second ingredient, your videos need to
average 10 to 12 minutes in length. Some videos can be shorter, some can be longer
but always shoot for that target. So that's the second ingredient. Third
ingredient is you need to have an average retention rate or view duration
of 45% or higher. That means roughly the people will stand for at least half of
the video. So if you're 10 to 12 minutes, you're thinking, "I really want to get
people to watch at least 5 minutes 6 minutes." You can make a whole series of
videos on how do you be more engaging, how do you keep people's attention
longer. The best advice I could give is to make sure you're just giving real
good value - yeah, obviously. If you put the hooks, you give the summary at the
beginning. People understand the value that you're going to be... No
bait-and-switch. Give them what they came for. If there's a title and they're
clicking on it because of that title then do everything in your power to give
them everything that you can to satisfy that. So they walk away and say, "Hey, you
didn't hold back. Thank you! That was really helpful." The last ingredient is
you've got a post 5 or more episodes per week. Ooh, this is the one that's like -
yeah - "Man that's that's like almost going daily. That's 5 a week, right?" That's a
whole lot. These are how to style videos so they're a lot more efficient than
like a vlog - right. When we filmed together, we typically film at least 20
episodes in a day - true. So but that lasts us if we're doing five a week that lasts
us 4 weeks - yeah. We're really only doing one day of filming every month -
right. If you follow that formula at the 4
month mark, you'll have a spike. Seriously, you have those 4 ingredients and then
you wait 4 months, you'll have a spike. When we went to 5 videos a week on
this channel, it was 4 months to the day and we had our first
spike where we were looking at our stats texting each other. But you duplicate
this with other people now. You have a number of other channels that are
succeeding and growing and spiking and having great success. So I produced 13
channels. Every time that we've had these 4 ingredients in there, you get
to that 74 month market spike without fail. Wow,
excellent! Dude Nate, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate
you. Just holding nothing back and really break it because but now that is exactly
how we've gotten here and how you've helped so many other people as well. If
you feel like it's time for you to take your next step and say, "Wow, I need to
learn more about that keyword research." That's really the first place to start.
There's a recommended video for you that's popping up on the screen right
now. Go ahead and click on that. Get that next bit of information because it'll
give you the detailed facts of how do you actually know what to make videos
about. Once you know that, I'm going to tell you, it changes everything.