- It's funny, when you actually focus
and get serious about something,
how much faster it grows.
- [Robotic Voice] vidIQ.
- [Woman] vidIQ.
- [Man] vidIQ.com.
- Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to VidCon 2018
and today I'm joined with--
- Pat Flynn.
- [Interviewer] What's your channel?
How many subscribers do you have?
- So we just crossed 120,000 subscribers.
I had about half that less than a year ago
and there's a lot of people who have helped influence that,
but the channel's Smart Passive Income.
I teach people how to grow their business,
help them make more money, save more time,
and help more people, too.
- Passive income, what does that mean
and how does that associate with YouTube?
Because I know a lot of people do make businesses
out of passive income on YouTube.
- Yes, you know there's a lot of ways
to generate income on YouTube.
Obviously, through things like AdSense and brand deals,
and I actually don't do those things.
I make money through the recommendation of other products
and sending people to affiliate links.
So, I try to create the top-quality tutorials out there
that relate to different tools that my audience would use
to help them achieve their goals.
And anybody can do this
and it's not just Amazon Associate products, too.
It's software, it's coaching programs, online courses.
I do extensive reviews and kind of unboxing those things
and, although these are digital products,
you can still unbox them
in a sort of unbox theory kind of way.
- Yeah.
- And be the best one to review that thing.
And that's what I do
and that's how I generate a lot of my income.
I also generate income through building
really, really strong relationships with my audience.
Try to truly serve them first.
That's, for me, the number one way
to build any sort of business,
is to serve first.
And when you do that, your earnings become a byproduct
of how well you serve that audience.
And when you build that kind of relationship,
which YouTube allows for
because it's so personal and so connected,
you build trust and when people know they can trust you,
they will trust your recommendations for,
not just other people's products, but even your own.
So I create online courses and whatnot.
YouTube has played a big role in how
that has all kind of come together over the years.
I had a YouTube channel started in 2009,
I didn't start getting serious about it
until just eight months ago.
- Yeah.
- And it's funny, when you actually focus
and get serious about something,
how much faster it grows.
- Yeah.
- So those of you who are maybe playing around a little bit,
I promise you, if you focus a little bit more effort
and energy into that, you will see growth for sure.
- So, if you are giving a lot of advice
and promotion on different products,
one of the key things, I guess, for you
is making sure that you're
at the top of the search terms and rankings.
How do you do that on your channel?
- So, obviously using keywords and things
that people would type in.
There's a lot of tools, vidIQ obviously being one of them,
that allows for some discovery
of what keywords you can use
and what you can put in your description,
obviously tags and whatnot,
but I think the number one way to go about it,
and I got this information from my friend, Brian Dean,
is if you think of the top content
about a specific key term or a product out there
is like buildings, right?
There's different buildings at different sizes
and the tallest skyscraper
is the one that is ranking at the top.
Well, if you wanna just build a taller skyscraper,
then you're gonna win, right?
So, what's out there, what's it doing,
how can you make something just better, right?
Something that's going to engage people,
have them watching that video longer,
having them watch even more of your videos.
Just, again, trying to keep it simple.
There's a ton of tools out there that can help you,
but I think it really comes down
to just the quality of the content
and just making it easy.
What can I do?
I can make things better than things
that are on that platform and eventually YouTube
and the algorithms are going to kick in in your favor.
- Now, with your business past,
how do you connect those theories and experience to YouTube?
How do you treat YouTube as a business?
Where are the analytics similar
and how to you leverage them to your benefit?
- Yeah, I mean, YouTube to me is one of several,
sort of, content platforms that I use
and they kind of have choregraphy
amongst all of them together.
So for example, there is a product
that I am an advisor for called ConvertKit.
It is an email service provider.
I have blog posts about to use it,
I have blog posts about email marketing in general
where ConvertKit is inserted into that,
but YouTube plays a key role
because I have a demo video on ConvertKit,
and if you look up ConvertKit on YouTube,
I have the number one video.
But that video isn't just living on YouTube,
it's also living embedded on my blog,
it's embedded in my tutorials,
it's even embedded in my online courses
and it just continues to churn the views,
which helps the algorithm, but also, obviously,
delivering content in a way that introduces people
to this product, shows them how easy it is to use.
It doesn't go over, these aren't hour-long tutorials
that go over every single feature,
I just pick the top five and I just go for,
okay, this is why you need this,
and then, it kind of works on its own.
So this is the passive part of it.
You do all this work upfront
and then you can reap the benefits later,
kind of just continues to grow
and exponentially grow from there.
- How do you measure success?
- Ha, this might be interesting,
but I actually don't primarily look at the numbers.
I do look at the numbers, they're obviously very important.
I look at the trends, but to me, success is measured
through how well I'm serving my audience,
and the way that I measure that
are by the thank yous that I get.
I actually keep track and count the number of thank yous
that I get and I have, if you've ever seen my office tour
which is really popular, I have a home office
that was built from scratch
and there's a little wall behind us in my office
that is all the thank you notes and cards
that people have sent me, many of them handwritten.
That's how I know that I am doing something right.
And when I go to my mailbox, every single week,
I pick up dozens of new thank you letters.
Pat, you've changed my life.
Pat, you helped me quit my job.
Pat, you helped me make X amount of money.
Pat, you helped me spend more time with my family.
That's how I know that I'm succeeding.
The other numbers,
that we all pay attention to, - Yeah.
- will come if you get those kinds of things.
So my goal is to, whenever I create a program,
or even a video or anything,
how can I get it so well done that a person
would take the time to write me a thank you note
after watching it?
And if that happens, I know I'm doing the right thing.
- And this is a theme that we've been hearing
throughout VidCon.
It's not necessarily about the analytics,
it's about storytelling,
and you're receiving these little snippets of stories
every time somebody sends you these thank you notes.
- Yes, and I know that's just a fraction
of the number of people you're helping, right?
- Yeah, absolutely. - Because not everybody
is going to send you one.
- Thank you very much, Pat,
and we'll see you all again soon.
- Thank you. - Bye for now.
(gentle upbeat music)