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How to Build a Fan Base for Life

How to use YouTube to build a fan base for life. Which is really what we've been talking about throughout this entire process, which has been great, and I feel like we have a really solid understanding of how all of this is going to work, but now we're gonna dive into the actual machine and what it looks like. So, the Evergreen Traffic Engine is what I feel like you can create with YouTube, and it's this machine and engine that works for you all day, every day, leveraging different platforms and different components of your strategy. So, first and foremost let's just review what we've learned. You want to build traffic building topics, or choose traffic building topics. You do that with FAQs, you do that with your mastered that list, you do that with trending topics, all of the things we went over early on in this lesson. Direct people off of YouTube. So yes, you want to direct them to different videos and stuff, but you want to use that conversion call to action so you're capturing pe...

ople and nurturing relationships so that when you do have a course to sell, like Linda did, or you have any kind of product or service, you have a built in customer base that you own and you're not just relying on just viewers on YouTube or subscribers on YouTube. Engage on social platforms and in email. So, if you haven't emailed your list in a very long time, make sure that you're engaging with them, and you're not just doing it to sell or promote something. For my first, let's say three or four months, when I was doing YouTube, When I started I had a list of five people I think, on my email list. And I would still send an email every week talking about the new video I had made and directing people to it, and talking about the experience of why I made it, and what was coming up for me in my business that I needed to solve, and how it could help them. And that list has gone from five going up now to about fifty thousand on our list. Which has been incredible, and that has continued to build our little traffic engine and machine. So, engage with people on your emails, treat them like people, as we've talked about, engage back, respond to peoples' replies to your email, and also on social platforms. So, if people are finding you on YouTube, but also visiting you on Instagram, and on Facebook, and on Twitter, talk to them. Build the relationship further. 'Cause again, relationships are what are the foundation of a successful business, in my opinion. Build a bigger engine. So, once you start to build momentum, you get a little fuel, you get some people who are bought into what you're doing. You have a little fan base, this is where it gets really fun So, you have your mastered that list, you have your FAQs, you have your trending topics, you have competitors and community hubs. That's how you find the right topics, and that's how you start to build that traction. Next, is really directing those people off of YouTube. Like I said, email list, Facebook group, website, social platforms. you can send people to things like this. I have a guide called zero to 100 thousand YouTube Subscribers guide, and I actually had to reverse engineer everything that Linda did to grow her channel. So you can take that and use it for your own channel as well. I have a webinar that I can send people to. I also have our Facebook group, the Be Your Own Boss Mastermind group, which I know there are a few of you in here that are bosses. Woop woop, love it, so I send people to all three places and I choose where I'm gonna send them dependent on the content in the video. 'Cause you don't wanna just say the same thing over and over again, and send people the same thing over and over again. You want to make it relevant to the content so you actually get those conversions, and you actually get people to take action on it. Just because you say something, doesn't mean people are gonna do it, it has to be relevant to the content you're sharing. Engage on social platforms and email. So share peoples' content. If you have people that are following you and in your community and are supporting you support them back, share their content, respond to their content, engage in conversations. Don't wait for people to talk to you, talk to them first. I know it's a novel idea (laughs) I know it sounds strange but it's really, really important. People want to feel seen and heard. That's basic human nature, If you can make someone feel important, feel seen, feel heard, you're gonna have a really, really successful life and a really successful business and brand. Build relationships, please. See these numbers as people, because that's what they are. Treat them like people, treat them with respect, engage with them, don't focus on the fact that you're at five subscribers and you wanna get to 100, focus on the fact that you have five people who actually care. So this is what it looks like, when you want to build a fan base for life. Process of everything we just talked about, all of those different components. If you visualize it, this is kinda how it goes. So we have YouTube at the top of the engine. So the YouTube builds email list, YouTube builds Facebook group, YouTube builds Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest of your platforms. Wherever you want them to be built, they'll get built and the great thing about that, is all of those pieces of the pie email list, Facebook group, all of your social platforms, you leverage all of those each time you put up a new video on YouTube, and you use that community, warm audience, to give you an unfair advantage of ranking even higher on YouTube because people are engaging with your content. Because you've already built out an email list, a Facebook group, all of your social platforms using YouTube, and then you use those platforms to build your YouTube channel. Make sense? That's your engine. That's how you build a fan base for life. So if you want to get started on building your audience from scratch, zero to 100,000, this is the guide to grab. Breaks down, reverse engineers Linda's entire process. Every step she followed, and you can grab it at sunnylenarduzzi.com/subscribers it's super in depth it goes over a lot of the stuff that we talked about today. So you have a good recap of it, and you can actually start implementing this to grow your channel, cool? Yeah. Alright should we dive into questions? I know you said that you have to start this slowly, over six months, but I noticed that you had the video that launched you and then the person you talked to, she had the one interview video which really made it for her. How could you make a viral video impact everything very quickly? Mm, Ian you know I don't like this question. (audience laughing) Ian, we're gonna have a talk, okay. So I don't believe in viral videos, for businesses because, I think if you're a big brand, like Nike's done some incredible viral videos, and they can cause they're Nike, and it's great for them. But when you're a small business owner, or when you are a solopreneur, or when you're just starting out in your business, viral videos don't benefit you. Viral videos get you a low quality of views, they give you a lot of views, low quality of views. It's also really hard to figure out what's gonna go viral. My definition of viral, when you're an entrepreneur, business owner, or a solopreneur, and this is exactly what happened for Linda in that video of 5.5 million views, it was a topic that she knew her audience was searching for. Like I said, one person's asking you that question, there's a thousand, if not a million people asking the same question, make the video the right way that we said today, that video can get 6,000,000, 7,000,000, 8,000,000 views. So my definition of viral is valuable content, that's relevant to your audience, it uses your intel, so what do you do for a living? I'm a coach and a speaker. Okay great, using your years of experience as a coach and a speaker, and your unique methods, and your acronyms, and your tactics and techniques that you use with your clients. Implement those in your videos cause it's gonna be new and fresh and nobody else is doing it. So valuable content, intel, relevant content, what does your audience want, what are they searching for, what are they asking for, what have you mastered? What's been really helpful for clients in the past that you can share on a bigger stage on YouTube? Relevant content. Authentic to your brand. That means that you're not making videos that are about cats, when you have a business about coaching. Because if you're making a video about cats, that's a bad example, but say you're making a video about cats you're gonna get cat lovers, you're not gonna get people who want to invest in coaching. You know what I mean? So authentic to your brand, leveraged for your business. So V-I-R-A-L, that's my definition of viral. Leveraged for your business meaning you're getting targeted traffic. I would actually prefer it if you all went home and made a video that got 30 targeted views versus 3,000,000 random views and a lower tension rate. So for you, if you're a coach and a speaker I want you to make videos that will be relevant to your audience. So what is something that you've mastered or what's a frequently asked question from your audience? So I help people stay engaged and stay on track. I'm a consistency coach. Okay, got it, perfect. So videos like how to be more consistent in your life, and I know that's probably a broader topic than we want to do, but something like that is actually gonna be searched by your ideal client versus random people from all over the world who will have no interest in working with you. So you don't want a viral video, you want a valuable video. Does that make sense? I know that was a bit of a beat down, but (laughs) Well, thank you so much. But I'm serious. (laughs) Thank you. I want you all to get results, does that make sense? Yes. Cool, awesome, hi. Hi Sunny, I'm Isa. I'm a model and I don't have a YouTube channel yet, but I just had a quick question about the email list. Say you have your email list built out, what if you're not a great writer, is it an option to do a video for that email list? It totally is and that's usually what I do on Tuesdays. I am certainly not a writer, actually when I was in broadcasting and when I was early on in my career as a journalist, I was told over and over again, "You're a terrible writer." So I attempted at fixing it and read all the books and took classes, but at the end of the day, people like you for you. So how you would write to your best friend is how you wanna write an email. It's similar to when you're looking at the camera and you see a friend versus millions of people. It makes you more relatable. So especially in today's day and age, and I know there's like grammar police out there and English teachers who are like "Shut up." but in today's day and age, it's more about being yourself being relatable, and writing the way that you speak. So I write my emails every Tuesday, we have sales emails and things like that, that I have a copywriter help me with cause it's important, but when I'm writing to my list and I'm writing in a really personalized way, it needs to be my voice, it's really important to me. So I kind of use it as a bit of a journal. A bit of a diary, and just write out my thoughts in a stream of consciousness and come back to it maybe an hour later, make sure it makes sense and then send it out. And I put the video within that email. Make sense? Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Do you place, or does YouTube in general place any emphasis on videos that are uploaded, you know people talk about 4K and 8K and the number is getting higher and higher every day, an average person is at home watching on their laptop or on their phone, do you have to bother trying to film in 4K, 60 frames per second, crazy stuff like that, and is that gonna affect anything? I mean if you're Casey Neistat, sure. And I love his videos, love love love them. I think they're amazing, but what he does, he's a filmmaker. That's his background. For me, my editor who may be watching this right now, hi Der he's gonna be like, "No it's important." Cause he shoots our stuff in 4K now, and we have the top of the line gear which is incredible and I'm really grateful for. But I am a firm believer that start with what you have. Because the average user and viewer does not care. And I can't tell the difference, I don't know if that's bad or good, but I can't tell the difference between 4K and regular, so don't put that pressure on yourself because it'll stall you from actually getting your message out there and creating the impact you want to create. A few people have been asking about YouTube for products. So for example, Kim here says, "I sell umbrellas, I would like to start a YouTube channel" but like some of the others, don't want to be in the videos, and so looking for a way of how to do that. And really if there's good examples of channels that use products, that are selling products, that might be great for people who have a product to go to and check out. Totally, so I have one really good example. I can't say the name cause they're a client, and I just can't say who they are, but they have a really successful planner and journal company. So they sell physical products. And what we did with them is we figured out basically the emotions and the results that people wanted out of their products and services. And we created videos around that. So, how to be more productive, how to be a top performer, how to get more done in a day. And on their first video that we made with our formula, they actually double their product sales of their planners, because people figured out, oh, this is how I actually become more productive. They gave the step by step, didn't pitch anything and then at the end, they said we actually have this productivity planner that's helped our clients go from X to X or whatnot, gave a testimonial and then people wanted to go buy it. And it's continuing to bring in sales every single day. So that's really important to understand. You never ever ever on YouTube want to make a video about your product or selling your product. Because again, it's a search engine. Nobody is searching for the title of your product necessarily, unless it's a really big product. If they are, you could absolutely make a video on what the product's about, but I wouldn't pitch it directly. So someone who's selling umbrellas, there's a couple things here. If you don't want to be in the videos, you can get creative with that. My client Gary who wasn't in his videos and had 11, subscribers from about 800, he focused on delivering valuable information to his audience in a way that was very visual using graphics, text on the screen, and different animations or slides. Totally doable, totally fine. The only thing with that, it's not my first choice obviously, because you want to build a relationship and it's called You Tube for a reason. People want to see you, and that's how they connect to you. That's how they build a relationship with you and that's what differentiates you from anyone else out there, is people like you and your personality, and that's why they're gonna stick with you. So that's my one caveat to it. You also can get someone else to host your videos. So you can ask someone else to go on camera for you. Maybe it's someone who works in your company, that's another option. But to this person, what's their name? Kim. Kim, hi Kim. I would just suggest that you dive into some of the fears around being on camera, and what we talked about today, and what's really holding you back from it. And just do some practice rounds and I would encourage you to give it a shot, because I'm sure that you're much better at it than you think you are. And I think as far as content for your company, you could do collabs with other people who are in your space and make really interesting tutorial videos. Or you could even do a video on, I know somebody who has a channel all about ties. And all he does is different tie tutorials. You could do things like what to do with a broken umbrella, how to fix a broken umbrella, how to open an umbrella. I know there's people searching for that. (Laughs) I know it sounds weird, but it's true. I'll give you an example as well for this. There's a company in Vancouver who does gas and fireplace repair and they obviously have products related to that. Doesn't sound like a really sexy niche, but one of their videos was on how to light the pilot light on your fireplace, has 100,000 views. And they have maybe 60 subscribers, but there's a lot of people looking for how to light a pilot light. So if you're looking for that and you come across their video and you're in Vancouver You're probably gonna fix it yourself, but if you have an issue with your fireplace later on, you're probably gonna go back to that company cause they helped you. So I would start with tutorials you probably think aren't sexy, but people are actually searching for and do the keyword research just like we talked about. She's like, "Thank you for answering my question!" Oh, yay! Thank you Kim, thank you for asking. I'm just gonna sneak another quick one in from Collin G. "Does Sunny ask people to hit the notification bell so people are notified when she posts a new video?" I do, yeah, so who's that? Um, Collin. Hi Collin, yes I do, and I just started doing that since January, so when I say "make sure to subscribe" I'll also say "subscribe and hit the bell to get notified when I go live." Because also they just introduced that they're sending emails out for certain channels and notifications. Which is amazing, so that actually your subscribers will know without having to go on YouTube necessarily, about when your videos are going up. Which has been a big hurdle for a long time. I'm on all these places, so come find me. And lots of resources available to get more information on how to use YouTube to build your fan base and build your business. Awesome, big round of applause. (audience cheering)