Lessons

Lesson Info

Finding your Fans

So, let's dive into really the first phase of building your business and building your brand on YouTube, which is finding your fans. Because in order to actually build a fan base, you have to find your fans first. Which seems a little weird right? Because ... Has anyone here had that experience of I have a really good idea for a video, so I'm just gonna post it online? Without doing ... Yeah, Monique. I appreciate how much you're agreeing with me today. (laughs) I love it. And the thing is, I've done that too. So, when I first was kind of tapping into YouTube ... And I come from a television background, so I had those same fears and struggles that we talked about earlier. I was thinking I have to have a set. I have to have a set like this. I have to have lights, I have to have a fancy camera. I have to have all the things if I'm actually gonna do well on YouTube. The irony is, I made a few videos like that, that I thought were really brilliant and that I thought were great content. Pos...

ted them onto YouTube and got crickets. Has anyone had crickets on their content before? Yeah, Jared thank you for volunteering first. It's not a fun thing to admit, but we've all been there. (laughs) It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good when you get no response on your content, but it's also a really good and valuable lesson. And if you can take the ego out of it, you can go why didn't that work? And the reason the content wasn't working for me was because it wasn't focused on value, it was focused on what I thought was interesting. I was talking about news stories and social media trends and things like that, but it was all things that I tapped into. I didn't ask my audience, I didn't tune in or survey. I didn't study or do research, so I was just guessing and hoping that someone would watch. Anyone done that? Yeah. How'd it work out for you? Not well. (laughs) So what we're gonna do now is actually prove that you'll have an audience before you even make a video. Doesn't that sound way better? Yes. (laughs) So in order to find your fans, we have to figure out where they're hanging out and what I need you all to remember ... If you remember nothing else from our time together, remember this. YouTube is a search engine. It's owned by the largest search engine in the world, Google, obviously. Your fans, your followers, your customers are searching for you right now. You just have to show up. And you have to show up in the right way, which is what I'm gonna show you today. Make it easy. So how do you find your fans? This is where you wanna start taking notes. Everyone watching at home, get out a notepad. Most important, kay. So first and foremost, you want to have a 'mastered that' list. This is the most fun cause it's kind of like patting yourself on the back and saying I've done a lot of things, I'm good at a lot of things. And how often do we do that? How often do we say I'm really good at this. What most of the time we're saying is, I have so much to learn. Riva and I were talking yesterday and she said last week she was driving home when she, right before she got the email to come here, and she said "I need help". I've been there, I get it and you think you're not good at something. You think you need to improve, which is great. It's a humble place to start from. But also keep in mind every single person in this room has a genius zone and all of you have mastered something that you can share with the world and that's where we wanna focus okay, we wanna stay in the zone of genius. So the 'mastered that' list is first. The second step is compiling a list of FAQ's. Frequently asked questions. This is so powerful because if one person in your tribe or in your customer base has a question for you ... I like that you're nodding your head as well. (laughs) Has a question for you. There's about 1,000, if not a million, other people online who have that same question. One of my most popular videos, again filmed in front of a window no lighting nothing, was about how to film a video on your phone. It has over a million views on it and when I made it I was like this is okay I guess. But I kept getting asked that question of like how are you making these videos? Cause I'm not a video person and I own up to that. I'm lucky at this point I have a team, I have an editor and YouTube has allowed me to get there because it's built the business so much. When I started for the first year, I was doing it all myself. So people kept asking, how are you making these YouTube videos? They look professional, but you're doing them yourself with no experience. I just filmed I used my iPhone. I have a little stack of books. (laughs) As my tripod and that's what I do. So FAQ's, focus on those. When we're going through these, does anyone in here right now or even at home, I would love to hear in the messages and in the chat, what is something on your 'mastered that' list or your FAQ list? Does anyone wanna share in here? Something on their 'mastered that' list. I know you can Sue, I know you're itching to. Yeah. (laughs) Suebee Zimmerman everyone, she's here. Hey. (laughs) (audience claps) So, Instagram is my jam in case you didn't know. Yes, Instagram is her jam, yes. But there's also aspects of my life and personality and experiences that I'm able to weave into YouTube. And I have found that my biggest challenge is delivering concise clear content and infusing your personality, so its not robotic or stale. Right, right. Right. Fair enough. Well what's something that you feel like you've mastered, outside of Instagram. Let's talk about something in your life you've mastered. I could think of a list of five things, cause I know you quite well. (both laugh) Giving strong business advice specifically to women and helping them understand that having confidence comes with experience and you just have to start. So just giving sound business advice would be number one. Kay great that's gonna go at the top of your 'mastered that' list cause I agree. Sue was one of my first mentors in this industry and I know she has great advice to give when it comes to building businesses. Yes. What's an FAQ that you get all the time from your community? How do you have so much confidence to do what you do? There you go, two topics. Business advice, or even themes for your channel, which is great. Business advice, mentorship, and then also confidence, self belief. Have you done videos on those yet? Not on confidence. Interesting. We have found, and I'm curious to hear what you have to say. We have found on our channel when I do go off Instagram, because it's Instagram specific, those videos don't typically don't get as many views. So, we tried shaking it up when I was doing more on business habits, a day in the life of what keeps me motivated. So, when you go off of what people subscribe for, I find that it's been challenging for us. I completely understand that and I'm actually going through that experience right now as maybe some of you have seen. So, I started the channel by accident, as I mentioned, and I think this is a really good topic for anyone watching at home and anyone in this room. You might start with something, and we're gonna talk about this today. You wanna start with something that's gonna build you the most momentum and gonna give you a fan base, which is really focusing on the FAQ's and focusing on that zone of genius that you know people wanna know from you. So that's why it's important to listen to your audience and focus on the community hubs in your industry and figure out what are people tapping into, what do they want to know. That's gonna get you momentum, it's gonna get you views and subscribers. What's gonna build relationships for the long term is sharing a different side of you. So for me, I've always been the YouTube expert or social media expert or the video marketing expert and it was really safe for me. We're getting deep here. (laughs) It was really safe for me to stay in the zone of I'm gonna continue to help people because then I don't have to show myself. I don't have to talk about anything personal and here is the honest truth. If I had started talking about personal things, I wouldn't be where I'm at now on my YouTube channel, I know that for sure. It would've taken a lot longer to get to where I am and that's fine if that's your MO, that's fine. But for me I realized okay there's a definite business aspect to this, which can grow my lists and grow my audience and grow my customer base, that's awesome let's do it. But I'm now in a place where I'm ready to share more of myself because I've had a lot of experience getting to this place. I feel empowered now as an entrepreneur, I feel like I have the experience to actually share that. So I think it's really tapping into where you're at, what you feel like you truly know and sharing that. Once you get there. That's good advice. Thanks. I'll try it, I'll let you know how that goes. Well, I'm here for ya. Okay so FAQ's is another thing that we want to focus on. The next piece of this, as I mentioned at the beginning, trending topics. What's hot in your industry right now? And if you can, be really tapped in or tuned into your industry, your niche, and focus on what's kind of on the rise and make videos on that, you're probably going to be the first person to make a video on it. Which means that you're going to get all the traffic. Which is ideal. Which is accidentally what happened to me for my first video. The next step is community hubs and competitors. So I really, I actually don't like the term competitors because I think if we're all uniquely ourselves, you don't have any competition. So you don't need to worry about it, however for research purposes it's really interesting. So I'm gonna show you guys how you tap into other channels with a similar audience to you who are doing well and getting engagement in views and figure out how to use that to your channels' benefit and your videos' benefit. Very interesting to take a look at that and also, again, allows you to see if I make a video on this is anyone gonna watch it or am I gonna get crickets again, so you don't go through that experience and don't use your valuable time and resources to make a video that's not gonna actually gain momentum for you. So those are the four pieces that we wanna focus on. So the 'mastered that' list. Let's go through some of the things that I've mastered. I've mastered confidence on camera. I know it inside and out, I've been doing this for almost a decade between TV and YouTube. So I feel like I can teach that. I've mastered YouTube SEO. I know how to rank on page one, number one spot. I've mastered how to make a YouTube video. Even though I'm not necessarily a video pro, I know how to make a YouTube video. I've mastered how to speak on stage. I'm here! (laughs) Here we are. (laughs) And I've mastered how to build a community, again, a lot of you are in this room, which is amazing. The FAQ's. What are the most frequently asked questions your customers or fans ask you about? Obviously that's what we wanna focus on here. And what are the most frequently asked questions in your niche? So if you're sitting here thinking I don't have a big audience, I don't know what to tap into. That's where you want to look at other people in your space and figure out what they're answering or talking about. Because it gives you a content clue of what you could add your unique zone of genius to. So one easy way to do this is going to Google. (laughs) And they own YouTube. So I looked up 'social media agency FAQ'. That's all I searched. So if you have a social media agency or consulting agency, as you do Monique, you wanna do this on Google. So I found a list of FAQ's on one of the social media agency's from all over the world. Went in to the first one I saw, clicked on the FAQ's on their website. Saw the questions that were being asked. And I started writing out of these, what could be a video topic? Cause obviously this is being asked by their customers. My customers probably wanna know the same thing. How can I add my zone of genius to these? That's step number one. Trending topics. So what's trending in your niche right now? Songs, books ... There's been a lot of business books that have come out recently. And a lot of books that are getting a lot of buzz. If you can create a review on a book in your industry before really anyone else does or at the early stages of it, you're again gonna attract a lot of traffic because people are looking for reviews of books when they first come out. Interviews, articles, anything that's really hot in your industry focus on that. So the other piece of this is what's trending on social media. Is there a way to integrate it into your content? Is there something that's a trending topic on Facebook or on Twitter or on Instagram that you can leverage as a lesson, as a review, or as something that you can use as an example for your audience, in relation to what you're teaching. Does that make sense, yes? Yeah. So what if you still can't figure out what your fans are searching for? That's okay, it's okay if your sitting here going I still don't think I get it, that's fine. So we're gonna dive into the next step, which is community hubs and competitors. So figure out what kind of content is popular with your target audience by studying competitors and community hubs. You wanna use your 'mastered that' list. So what you do is you take your 'mastered that' list, you type that into YouTube, any of those topics, type them into YouTube, type them into Google. It's gonna bring up millions of search results of other videos about that topic and it's gonna help you figure out how to formulate your topics, how to write your scripts, what you wanna be talking about in relation to that, what kind of videos are getting engagement in relation to the things that you've mastered. So that allows you to do even more research. So, for example, on my channel you can take a look and see, if I was a competitor of yours, you can see by going to the right hand side you can sort by most popular. This is that video I was talking about. How to make videos with your phone. That thumbnail is so bad too. (laughs) But it's still getting views, so 1.4 million views on this. So if I was a competitor, if you were in the market of teaching video marketing or teaching video in general or teaching YouTube, take a look at my channel, take a look at anyone's channel who is doing really well and go to sort by on the right hand side (laughs) And go to most popular and it's gonna show you their most popular videos on their channel. Why this is really interesting too is that I have 150 thousand subscribers at this point. This video has 1.4 million views. So the clue there is that if a video on someone's channel has more views then they have subscribers, it means it's getting picked up in search. That's what you want. You want to tap into search on YouTube. So the other thing is, looking on Twitter. Look up YouTube tips, see what comes up. There's gonna be articles, there's going to be influencers talking about YouTube tips or Instagram tips or fitness, whatever it might be. Look on Facebook, same thing its gonna pull up articles and ideas for you and obviously looking on Google. Pretty simple right? Look on all the platforms. Type in anything that you've written down on your 'mastered that' list or type in any FAQ and you're gonna get a whole load of ideas for topics, videos, articles, things like that that you can make your own.