Hey guys my name is Tim Schmoyer,
and you know what's awesome?
It's when you guys can talk about stuff with way
more expertise than I can.
Today we have such an example of that
of one you guys from the Video Creators community
here with us to share your YouTube ideas
and suggestions and advice.
-Hey guys, I'm Derek Schommer from Common Man Cocktails,
and Tim asked everybody this week
to submit some sort of tips, and today I
wanted to talk about how to promote
your channels with merchandise without being sleazy.
So with my channel I focus mainly
on cocktail recipes in an entertainment show format, not
just a simple how-to.
I also do a lot of spirit reviews,
giving people additional added value
what spirits should taste like.
All my cocktails are done by tasting notes, aroma,
and how to make the cocktail.
What I want to talk about today is very focused
around e-commerce.
So what I want to do is share some tips
that I came up with to get where I am today.
And we're still growing, we're not done,
so I wanted to help you guys get to that same point.
Some of the topics I want to cover are what type of things
you can sell, the top five ways to build a secondary income
stream so that you're not relying
just ad rolls and YouTube ad revenue,
and some of the platforms that you can roll out
some of the strategies on.
So what can you sell?
You can sell t-shirts, you can sell branded stuff.
I've sold six t-shirts overall.
This is one of them.
And out of all of that, since 2008 I've sold six t-shirts
and I think maybe 20 branded glasses.
The reason is there needs to be what's in it for me
type value for your fans and your loyal customers,
and everything around show your channel and your brand.
And the value to having a t-shirt is pretty low.
It's just bragging about "Hey, I'm a fan of this show."
Look at Hulk Hogan.
Hulk Hogan made a lot of his money off of all this brand
garish t-shirts, his rubber dolls, figurines,
action figures, and whatever.
But that didn't happen the day he became Hulk Hogan.
That came over time.
As the loyal fans grew and grew and grew,
he saw a lot more out of that.
So if you have 200, 500, 1 million subscribers, sure,
your t-shirts are probably flying off the shelf.
But for everybody else probably not the case,
so what you really need to do is bring value.
Custom art work, music downloads if you're a musician
or you do different music type things on YouTube.
If it doesn't really bring value,
then it's probably going to sell a little bit slower.
Another good area to look at are homegrown projects.
If you're doing some sort of art splash art or something,
you're teaching people splash art,
maybe you sell some splash art.
You could think of training videos, ebooks.
I know Tim's got an ebook.
I'm working on an ebook.
Those it's really time is money, so the more time you
spend into it, the chances you're going to make money
you're going to be higher.
The margins are going to be high,
but you're putting in the time.
People like to go offline sometimes.
They don't like pre-roll.
They want to be able to watch videos on their own time.
Maybe you sell some of your videos and a USB key and things
like that.
Think outside the box.
Here are the top five ways I think you can actually
start to make money using the e-commerce solution
for additional revenue.
Number one, fan loyalty.
Fans are your most important thing,
so to build fan loyalty of course you should be watching
Video Creator series to figure out
ways of branding and growing your fan loyalty,
but fans come first.
Fans that turn into customers become repeat customers.
If you don't have the loyalty, you're
never going to see the adoption and the people that
want to buy your stuff.
Number two, content is king.
If you have crappy content, nobody's going to watch stuff,
so as you build content, content is number one priority.
There's nothing that takes priority over that.
Viewers that watch your show are asking
themselves what's in it for me?
Why are they watching this?
Maybe you want to know about our e-commerce
and how to merchandise yourself without being sleazy.
Now you're watching this video.
I'm giving you some tools to work through
and then later on maybe I can convert you into a customer
and get you to buy some things.
But you need to be able to get some value out of the video
and build those loyalties before you're
going to be selling all kinds of stuff off the shelf.
Number three, sell items that relate to what you do.
If you're making videos about home heater repair,
sell tools you use.
Find tools that work.
Maybe you find some new tools, something cool,
and you start using it you find real value.
Your viewers are going to find value in that.
If you do cooking show, look at CHEF and Tuvalu,
some of the cooking brands that are out there.
Expand, look around to see what the tools are.
Go to the store, look at what you are using
and see if you can sell that.
Start your store selling a couple of the tools
you use, because your fans that watch your show
are going to want to use the stuff that you use,
because that's what makes them fans.
Also some other things, if you're
doing video games, retro t-shirts,
custom retro-type stuff.
Things that are more simple to do that
are unique or harder to find or bring back the nostalgia.
If you do cameras or media, sell some accessories--filters,
bags, things like that.
One or two things that you think there's value to the people
that you believe in, because if you don't believe in it
you're lying, and if you're lying, you're a bad salesman.
Number 3.5, your audience 3.5.
Your audience is international on YouTube,
so consider when you start thinking
about branching out and selling stuff
you're going to be shipping international, Australia,
Europe, Asia, Florida, Mexico.
Number four, affiliation.
If you currently are doing affiliation, what you probably
found is it doesn't necessarily bring a lot of money,
but you don't do a lot of work for it.
Use affiliation to figure out what type of things sell.
Maybe only do them on Amazon and you see a couple sales go up.
Those are things you should be thinking about selling yourself
and be able to bring those in, package them and send them out.
Because you know what?
People are a fan of you, not your affiliate.
They don't care about Joe Six pack,
whoever, wherever he is in the world shipping products
that you tell people to go to.
They want to buy it from you.
They want you're packaging it, your family's involved.
They want you to be part of the process.
If you're just linking to somebody else, that's
great as a starter method, but you're
going to need to consider what can I
sell for my channel for myself?
And number five, don't be sleazy.
That's the topic of the day.
You don't need to be a used car salesman--buy my stuff,
buy my stuff.
Don't spam your Facebook fan page-- buy this, buy that,
buy the other thing.
Just once a week is cool.
People will understand you're selling stuff
and you're always going to get new fans,
so if you show something once a week that you sell,
new people are going to see it and people
are going to be annoyed by it.
So don't go Twitter-blasting everything out.
That's just not cool.
Don't promote every single thing you sell in a single video.
Your video content comes first.
Content is king, so you want to make
sure you have your content up front and center
and then talk about some of the other things.
You don't have to tell people to buy it, just use it.
If you use it on your show, and people see it,
you Don't have to say, "This is what this does.
You want to buy this," because they know.
They're watching you do it.
The product is selling itself.
So B, if I don't have an A, B, products
should sell themselves.
If you have a product people go "That's cool.
Where can I get that later on?"
Later on you could say, "Hey, by the way,
you can get this in my store.
So go here to do it."
You don't have to go through all the work.
Use it, they're going to see how it's used
and now you can execute and build
your sales with your most loyal customers.
A couple different things to look
at when you're looking through platform
options for online retail.
There's a Volusion.
It's $15 a month.
You sell up to 100 products.
It's pretty good for what you're at.
There's BigCommerce.
I looked at them for a while a little bit.
They're UI was a little bit older.
$35 a month plus a 2% transaction fee.
SquareSpace just launched where you can do one product.
If you just have your one product, you can get an $8
a month SquareSpace account and sell that one product
through them.
Or you can upgrade.
I think they have $16 a month is 20 and $24 a month
was unlimited amount of products.
Etsy, if you're selling some random stuff,
they take a transaction fee.
It's kind of like eBay without bidding.
I'm not really an Etsy guy.
I try and stay away from Etsy.
It scares me.
Shopify is what I personally use for my store.
You can check it out at awesomedrinks.com.
That's $29 a month, unlimited amount of products or SKUs.
The advanced features are going to cost you more.
I'm in the advanced section.
I sell 400 products, so it's different for everybody.
But those are some of the prices you could look at.
So if you're making that much on YouTube revenue,
rolling it into that instead of taking it
and putting it in your pocket like,
"Hey, I made $29 this month," think about how you can make
money off of the $29.
If you could take that $29 and make $40, you're doing good.
You've made that money back and then some.
So you're looking for different ways to reinvest that money,
but don't overextend.
Don't go and buy a crap ton of things out of the gate
and say, "This is all the stuff I sell."
Half of this stuff isn't going to sell.
If you can get one or two products
and see some product movement in one of those two categories,
you can expand out and by other things
as you start making money.
So a question of the day.
Here's what I want you guys to do.
I want you Google some of Tim's videos.
Go to the Video Creators and I want
to look at different people who have left comments.
Click on them, because if they are leaving comments,
they probably have a channel that they're growing.
Look at their channel.
Now come back to this video and suggest to that person
something that you think they should be able to sell.
Think outside the box, because they might not be,
and trying to figure out and help your community members.
Say, "You know what Joe fixing automobiles Audi guy,
I think you should be able to sell additional
I don't know headlight covers or something."
Give some people someplace to start working.
So leave comments below.
Right there.
Why would you subscribe to Video Creators?
This is a great one.
So if you're watching this and this
is the first time you're not a subscriber,
the reasons you should subscribe to Video Creators is this.
You want to look to build fan loyalty, grow your fan base,
grow your audience, grow your subscribers,
expose your show to more things.
That is kind of the goal, and if you can do that,
you can start executing on an e-commerce solution.
If you're going to try and sell something
and you have two subscribers, you're going to be sad.
But as you grow and you're watching this channel
and taking those tips, putting them into action,
now you can start thinking about how can I
get a secondary revenue stream out of an e-commerce solution?
So there you go.
That is how you can use this channel
to extend and grow your own channel
and grow those additional revenue streams outwards.
Lastly, I'd like to thank Tim for giving everybody
the opportunity to write e-tips video
and get some cool stuff done, share some content.
And again, if you like the content you saw here
and I didn't drive you crazy with my overboard crazy
personality and you want to see more, just tell Tim.
"Hey, that guy Derek.
We want to see more of that."
I'll send more videos.
I don't care.
So I hope Tim a speedy return.
Safe trips.
And for everybody else leave your comments below,
and of course if you check me Common Man Cocktails
at YouTube.com/everydaydrinkers.
Have a good one.