Welcome back.
I'm Nate Woodbury and I produce over 20 different YouTube channels.
And none of my videos go viral.
Yet there's some videos that I've had get millions of views.
One of them has made me $160,000 in revenue.
In this video, I'm going to really break it down and show you how I did that and how you
can do the same.
-Nate, $160,000 is a lot of money.
So...
-Especially from one video.
-Right.
So, was there something special about this episode?
-Yeah.
So, it was very strategic.
In fact, there was a video before it that...
Okay, so, let me tell the story.
-Sure.
-On the Kris Krohn channel, we launched a video "How to invest money in your 20s".
And that video took off over several months.
It started to get traction.
It started to get suggested traffic.
Suggested is what we look for when we're wanting a video to go "viral".
That actually in YouTube means YouTube is promoting it.
-Okay.
-You know, compare that to search traffic or something like that.
With laid a solid foundation of search on the channel but this video started to really
get a lot of suggested traffic.
And we had about 65,000 views.
So, I went to Kris and I said, "Let's make a video with this exact same title --How to
invest your money in your 20s.
But let's make it a little bit longer and let's make it more interesting.
You'll show the same story.
Just elaborate a little bit more."
The original video was around 5 and a half minutes or something like that.
And so, our goal was to make a 10 or 12-minute video.
You'll see on the screen here the sequel, the second one that we created was over 20
minutes.
We actually didn't plan on it being that long.
The difference that we made is I had Kris pull up on his car.
The window opened up on his car and he got out.
And that's when he started talking giving the intro.
And I followed him with the glide cam.
So, steady cam going into his house.
We walk into the front door.
We walked pass the cleaning lady that was vacuuming.
People thought that was staged but it wasn't.
He walked into the kitchen while he's talking and he get some ice water.
We wend down in the game room and he write some stuff on the white board.
We go back up to his office.
So, he really did share the same story but it was in motion and people felt like they
got to be invited into his home.
Because of the prediction I made in the analytics, I was quite confident that the video would
do well.
And when we launched it, it performed above average.
You know how YouTube shows you how your videos perform compared to your previous 9 or 10?
It was above average.
Over the next few weeks, it continued to grow above average.
But then it took off.
So, by this time, the channel had 80,000 subscribers.
And over the next 5 weeks, the channel grew to 160,000 subsribers.
Yeah.
And we went from making below $1,000 in ad revenue to $18,000 of Ad revenue in a single
month.
-Wow, crazy.
-So, just because of that one sequel video....
And where 160,000 comes from over the next 2 years, the ad revenue from that one video
was $160,000.
And I used to be a partner with Kris Krohn on that channel.
All that ad revenue went to me.
He got the lead revenue.
Do you know how much the lead revenue was?
-No.
But I bet more than 160,000.
-My estimate is that it was over 3 million dollars in revenue just from the one episode.
-My goodness.
Nate, was there a bunch of groundwork?
I mean you talked about laying a solid search foundation.
But what are we talking about?
Like months of work?
Years of work?
Like how long had it been?
-This was actually 3 and a half years.
The first 2 and a half years, we only launched 1 episode per week.
So, we are implementing my strategy.
For familiar with my strategy I have 5 ingredients.
We we're following the first 4 ingredients.
But ingredient number 5, we didn't start...
Which is 5 episodes a week.
We didn't start that until 2 and a half years.
And so, the channel at that 2 and a half year mark grew from 12,000 subscribers now, a year
later we're up to 80,000 subscribers.
Okay?
So, that's the point we're at.
-Yeah, okay.
-Now, I am actually curious.
Have you seen any of the videos on the Kris Krohn channel?
If you have, let me know the topic that you learned from him below.
-How did you know that this was the topic that people would be interested in?
-YouTube analytics is awesome.
YouTube really provides us all the information we want on why a video performed well, why
it didn't.
You can compare videos to each other.
And really break it down.
And so, just from studying the analytics, I saw this opportunity and thought, "Well,
this video is getting a lot of suggested traffic."
And that's we look for.
That's what we look for --videos that the algorithm is saying ,"We want to send people
to this topic".
So, just by making another video on that topic.
And our goal was to make a better video.
But better means something that the algorithm will see is better.
So, that means we have to keep people's attention even longer.
You know, some people in reality might enjoy a shorter video.
But the algorithm wants more watch time.
So, we had to create a longer video that will keep people's attention.
-Nate, you call this a sequel.
Is this a strategy that you came up with on your own.
Or did you learn it from somewhere else?
-Yeah, the sequel strategy is kind of commonly known.
And where it's most used is people will find another video on YouTube on somebody else's
channel that's done really well.
And they'll create a sequel of that video.
Kind of like a copycat video which is fine to do if it's your own content, right?
And I've tried that sequel approach.
And I would say maybe 5% of the time, it will actually get you good results.
I found that when you do a sequel on your own channel, you have a high likelihood that
that one is going to take off.
And in fact, like Noelle Randall is a channel that's exploding right now.
She's up to 280,000 subscribers where in August, she was at 16,000.
So, the channel has had huge, huge growth.
The first video that took off was "How to get business credit with poor personal credit"
. We created a sequel.
As soon as we saw that one launched, she wasn't flying out to Utah to film for another 2 and
a half weeks and I knew that I needed to write that way.
So, I said, "Can you film a video on your own and just give us the footage so that we
can put out a sequel now?
And then when you come to Utah to film again, we'll film a variety of topics on business
credit."
Which we did.
And usually the spike goes up and then settles back down at a higher baseline.
Well, this spike took off and it never settled down.
We kept it going.
So, it really worked.
-Were you surprised by the response?
-Yeah.
Kris and I, we're blown away by the ad revenue side of it.
We had no plans, it was not our focus to make ad revenue from the channel because it was
a lead generator.
The channel was generating leads for the real estate side of the business which at one point
I got a split of those commissions.
But then when the ad revenue went up to 18,000 in a single month, we both took a step back
and like, "Oh, I guess this can become a thing."
-Yeah, sure.
-So, we adjusted our partnership at that time.
Because he wanted a piece of that ad revenue too.
-Nate, so you had the sequel but you had the original prior to that.
Did you feel like there wass something special about that original episode the first time
you saw it?
-No.
We filmed so many videos sharing his stories, sharing different principles.
We just followed the leaf strategy.
And we put out hundreds of videos on answering these questions.
And we had no idea which one would rise to the top.
To reference Noelle, when we told her which video will spike, she's like, "That one?
That one spiked?"
Because she's known for Airbnb real estate.
And she has made so many amazing videos.
She had no idea that her video on business credit was going to be the one to spike or
like pop corn kernels.
Which one is going to pop first.
So, it's kind of fun.
You never know which one is going to spike first.
You may be interested to know that you can actually make a lot of money on a very small
channel.
Like really small.
Even if you're only getting hudreds of views.
As long as it's backed by a business.
I have a video that will explain how you can do that.
So, go watch that one next.