What I Learned From 9 Months on YouTube

Long form videos, content creation, and algorithms oh my! It’s enough to give even the best marketers a headache, when it comes to growing your YouTube following.

Today, Dustin Brohm is sharing some great advice and pitfalls he’s learned since starting his YouTube channel. He’ll share how he originally began with audio waveforms, then graduated to podcast video episodes, and how that affects his channel today. Dustin also explains what types of videos work best depending on the content, and audience expectations. Are you training the algorithm to ignore your YouTube videos? Listen in to find out.

 Mentioned on this episode:

Massive Agent Podcast on YouTube

Dan Parker, Realtor - Best Life San Diego

Gary Vaynerchuk on YouTube

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Transcript

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On this episode, I'm going to do a little recap of what I've learned from being on YouTube and doing one YouTube video every week for the last 10 months. Some mistakes I've made, some changes that I'm about to make, and why ultimately I need to start a new channel. I love to buy houses. I like to sell houses. What is up, everybody? Welcome to episode 198 of the Massive Agent Podcast. I am your host, Dustin Brohm. And today I'm going to give you a little recap of the last 10 months of doing one YouTube video per week and what I've learned. Like I teased in the intro, I need to start a new channel. And I'll explain why that is and how I came to that conclusion and what you guys need to know if you're currently doing YouTube, if you're not, if you're about to, because I've learned some things, all right? That this is a nuanced conversation. And I didn't understand that. It was it was much more this or that or black or white back when I started this YouTube journey in what was it? Um January. January 2021. Yes, I'm looking down because I have some notes. January 2021 is when I really started doing one podcast episode per week with the video on YouTube because prior to that we were not. And so I have some data for you. I have some stats. I'll tell you, you know, about growth or lack thereof, all that stuff. So that if you are doing YouTube or going to get into it, you need to know some things. And now that I know some things, I've got some serious changes to make. I need to start a new channel. I'll explain why that is. Um, first off, welcome to the Massive Agent Podcast. If you're new, I am your host, Dustin Brome. I'm an agent in Salt Lake City, founder of the Massive Agent Society lead gen and um you know organic business business generation. That's what it is. It's it's the organic business generation program, Massive Agent Society.com. And I run um a team of 190 agents across 35 states, the Massive Agent EXP team. Um, so that's kind of cool. That's fun. That's that's my day job, right? Um, but I'm here to teach you guys how to be better marketers, how to get more deals, how to attract more clients, how to be more profitable, and ultimately how to have a great freaking career as a real estate agent. Because I've been doing this for 11 years now. I believe I believe that the real estate industry is by far the best industry to build massive wealth because there's so many different ways to do it. But you've got to pay attention, you have to know what your strengths and weaknesses are, you have to learn some things, you have to do, and you have to have some consistency. So consistently, I've been posting on YouTube one video per week since January of this year, since January 2021. All right. So that was uh I've done 36 straight weeks of putting this podcast in video form up on YouTube. And if you guys are not not yet subscribed over on YouTube, please do massive agent on YouTube. You can you could if you're listening to this and you're like, I wonder what it'd be like to watch the episode, just go over to YouTube and watch it. Um kind of cool. So, and I'm gonna go over the stats so you can see you know how many subscribers I have and all that, all that good stuff. So I've been I've been doing one video per week for the last 36 weeks. I started at episode 160, we're now at 198, and um I've learned a lot. Okay, so if you guys remember back in December, January of this year, I was telling you, hey, I'm gonna get on YouTube, it's too big of an opportunity. You know, I've got to do it, and here's what I'm gonna do. Um, what I what I've learned, so okay, let me back up. My plan was to do the full podcast episode, then break clips from the episode out and post those as well. And then in addition, speak on certain topics, like you know, Zillow just announced this thing, here's what it means, or did you hear about this stat? Here's what it means, or blah blah blah, that type of stuff. So that the three different pillars is what I had planned to do on the Massive Agent YouTube channel. And I started doing that in the beginning, and I realized I was getting no traction. Okay. I I'm like, this I'm having no growth. And let me back up even more. So prior to January 2021, all I'd been doing is through an automated process called Repurpose. Um, it's this program called Repurpose. You can massive agentpodcast.com slash repurpose takes you right to it. You can you can see how it automates taking a podcast episode, turning it into a YouTube video, not with the video, but just the audio and then the little waveform thing. But I was publishing those on YouTube because I had this channel open since March of 2018. So about two months after I launched this podcast, I started the YouTube channel, the Massive Agent YouTube channel, and and I've been putting every podcast episode up there, every one. And it's just been automated. There's been it's it's been, you know, boom. So I've noticed though that because of the the previous well, three something years of just training the YouTube algorithm that here's what this channel is all about. When I started doing new things, the algorithm didn't recognize that. The algorithm's like okay, like it wasn't showing it to new people, uh, because it I had trained it over a long period of time. So, I mean, spoiler alert, I've kind of like my channel is is it is what it is. It's for podcast episodes, full length. It shows it to people who are willing to watch or listen to uh large amounts of it, right? People that are just looking for a quick 45-second video, whatever. It YouTube is not showing my full length, you know, my hour-long podcast episodes to those people. That's totally fine. But I didn't consider that in the beginning. Okay. So, what I've learned is YouTube, YouTube is it is a giant search engine. Okay, it's a giant search engine. And you train the search engine just the same way you train a social networks algorithm. And when it's a search engine, you have to you you have you have to have consistent content, otherwise it doesn't know what you are, right? So I had trained it, and then all of a sudden I'm giving it some new stuff, like some shorter form stuff that was maybe seven minutes long on a topic instead of this, you know, 45 or 60 minute long deal. It didn't know what to do with that. So it didn't do anything different. And so I saw zero growth at all. So I know that I've had a little bit of growth in in the subscribers because now if you're watching, if you're listening to the podcast, you can now watch it. And some of you guys have have done that, but not nearly to the extent that I thought. And I've been I've been surprised at the lack of new audience growth through YouTube, uh, because it's just an old stale channel. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to continue on this channel, the Massive Agent channel, with these full-length episodes because I'm recording it anyways. I have the video. Why not put it out there? And some of you guys, I know because you've you've sent me messages, have said, Hey, I really like to watch it instead. I can just watch it on the desktop while I'm in my office and I prefer that. Cool, I'm going to continue doing that. But to get the growth that I really want to be found and discovered by new real estate agents and and the new audience, I need to create a new channel from scratch that that the algorithm and the search engine um it doesn't it hasn't made up its mind yet. So when I when I do start the shorter form stuff on certain topics, uh, that you know, maybe maybe newsworthy stuff or um educating on a certain topic that's not the full-length podcast episode, all then YouTube will see it as, oh, this is completely different content, which it is. A five-minute long video about Zillow acquiring showing time, for example, probably a bad example, but you get it. A five-minute long video on that is very different than a 60-minute long podcast episode. And the viewer is very different as well. So I'm gonna be starting a new channel sometime soon, you know, probably by the end of uh by the end of the year, to do just that. But I need to separate them. I thought that I could separate them with playlists, but I can't because the algorithm had already made up its mind. Had I started this channel from scratch in January with the full-length podcast episodes, it might be a different story because then I could train the algorithm right from the beginning that hey, there's different types of content here. I still don't think that's the best. And and here's here's why I believe that starting a new channel is the right one. Joe Rogan, okay, the Joe Rogan podcast. Enormous, right? He he has millions and millions of people that watch the podcast on YouTube, or at least they did before he went to Spotify. And then also he had another channel called JRE Clips, Joe Rogan Experience Clips, where clips from the show were taken out instead of this three or four-hour long podcast episode, it'd be a 13-minute segment on a certain topic that it could actually give a headline to. Hey, they speak about this, or here's what so-and-so thinks about this. And so people would watch it to hear about that, but they would never watch a three-hour-long episode with just that person who said those things. You see what I mean? It's a very different thing. So he showed that if you want clips, if you're gonna have clips of the episode that are clips about certain topics, it needs to be its own channel. Otherwise, YouTube doesn't know what the hell to do with it. And so that right there, and he's not the only one that's done that. There's other podcasts, big podcasts that have done similar things, and that's the route that I need to go as well. So hopefully that helps you guys a little bit. Um, if you're doing most of you guys that are doing YouTube are speaking about the the, I almost said the natural community, the local community, which is also natural. You're speaking about the local community. So that's cool. Like that's good. Uh, if you're doing podcasts about the local community, you might want a separate channel. Just think, is this content different? Is would the viewer be different with this type of video or that one, or is it all the same? Is it the same viewer with the same expectations? Okay, the expectations of the viewer that watches a 45-minute long full podcast episode versus the seven-minute long clip, different expectations, right? When they click on the clip, they just want to hear what the clip's about. They don't necessarily want to hear the whole thing. So, yeah, you know, how awesome is that? That now I've got another thing to do. Another thing to add to the list is another YouTube channel. But um now that I've now that I kind of have a system down of thumbnails and all that stuff, by the way, thumbnails are extremely important. I don't think mine are perfect, but I think they're very on-brand and that it's easy to see that it's a full-length podcast episode. So in the beginning, I was taking the full length here, here's something else that I learned. I was creating great thumbnails that people would click on because it captured their attention. They were very clickable thumbnails, but then they'd click and it would start the full-length podcast episode, including the intro. It wouldn't start with you know the topic. Like, for example, uh, one of my best thumbnails said like real estate marketing gold. They click on that and boom, the episode starts. And so it didn't really get to what they thought it would get to for a while. And and so that showed the YouTube algorithm that hey, people aren't watching this video very long. They're clicking and bouncing. So your thumbnails also need to match the type of content. It was a great clickable thumbnail, yes, but it they didn't know it was a full-length podcast episode. So now the thumbnails that I have are much more clear. This is an this here's the podcast episode number. Here's the guest, here's a picture of them, and then here's a quick little like a topic or a teaser on the thumbnail, and then the title of the episode. So it's pretty damn clear. This is a this is an episode. If people are clicking on it, they're probably ready to watch a podcast episode as opposed to just hearing about that topic. So so thumbnails are hugely important. Um, they need to be clickable, but they also need to not mislead people as to what they're gonna get or when they're gonna get it once they click. So that that's yet another reason why I need to do another channel is so that I can for those little those shorter form videos, the clips that are on a certain topic, or a guest said something super interesting about listing presentations. And here's a tip for converting more listings. If I want to do a video on how to convert more listings and a really good thumbnail that's clickable, that needs to be done on a new channel. So, all in all, like it's been it, I would never have learned this stuff without doing it. It's been great. Um, you know, I've grown about 200 subscribers since I started doing these these videos in January 2021. I have 612 total subscribers today. Um, I'm not satisfied with that at all, if I'm being totally honest. Like, I I know that I'm not doing YouTube right, um, but it is what it is. Like 612 people is not a small group of people. I'm not ungrateful, but I'm also dissatisfied because I know that I'm capable of so much more. And then I know that when done right, I should be getting so much more. Um, over so I started this channel back in March 2018, and and back when I was just putting the episode with the the audio waveform. Um, I've had 35 over 35,000 views, 247 videos posted uh since then. And uh yeah, so 247 videos. The algorithm has made up its mind about who wants to see this stuff. So I need a new channel. So look for that sometime, probably near the end of this year. Hopefully that helps. You guys that are that are doing YouTube and and who gave me advice and mentored me a bit on YouTube. You were right, you know. Most of um, Dan Parker, for example, he's like, You need to do two channels. And I'm like, screw you, I'm not gonna do two channels because I don't want to. That's extra work. Like, one channel is hard enough, let alone two. Now that I've done one, I can do a second one. Okay, it's just post it here instead of there. It's not that big of a deal uh to manage one additional one when they're so similar. So now that I have a system, I can do that. Back then, if I started doing two at the same time, that would have been a big pain in the ass. But he was ultimately right because he knew that that the content was different, the audience was different, the expectations they had was different. And guys, this goes with your other social media as well. Are you confusing your audience? Are you giving them different things? They're like, what? Um, now sometimes that's good. If it's you, like if it's about you and your brand, for example, Gary Vaynerchuk, he talks about wine and the the New York Jets and business and now NFTs and cryptocurrency and all this stuff, right? Which seems like it's all over the place, but it's him, and people follow him because they are interested in those things. And if they don't care about NFTs or the New York Jets, they just don't pay attention to those. They watch his motivational videos or his his business growth videos, right? So if it's if it's about you, cool. But if it's just make sure that you're not confusing people um or misleading them into when when they click on your post, your video, your link, whatever, make sure they're getting what they expect. And not 45 minutes later, but make sure that they're getting what they expect. That's what I've learned. So new you to no new YouTube channel is coming. That's why this current one, the Massive Agent Channel is going nowhere. I'm gonna I'm gonna change it to the Massive Agent Podcast channel so that it's clear it's for the podcast. Uh, I already changed the profile image, the the profile pick so that it says Massive Agent Podcast and not just Massive Agent. So then I'll do a new Massive Agent channel, which will be more topical and clips and you know stuff like that. So there we go. And uh and another thing I'm gonna get into once I hire this videographer. Um, we've been we've been uh putting some feelers out there for a videographer. I'm gonna start doing some blog type stuff, some behind the scenes day in the life of, you know, me going to events or me, you know, whatever. Um, some blog type stuff because I think that's important when you're trying to build a personal brand, which this is. This this is a personal brand. Um, you just happen to be, you know, the audience for it. And my personal brand is just, you know, for real estate agents, because I am one and this is what I do. So hope that helps, guys. Hope that helps. Um, I do want to make sure that you guys know if you are new to the show or you just haven't done this yet for whatever weird reason, make sure you guys go get the 30-day free trial of follow-up boss. Follow up boss is an incredible partner of ours. They are by far the most powerful CRM I've ever seen in the real estate industry. You talk to any top producer, nine out of 10 are gonna tell you, yeah, they use follow-up boss. Nine out of 10. Big teams, brokerages, they all use follow-up boss. Well, that's is that a surprise or is that a coincidence? No, it's not a coincidence. And once you see how follow-up boss works, it's not a surprise either. It's just that powerful. If you are looking to scale and grow and build, you need to try follow-up boss. And how awesome that they're not even gonna make you put in your credit card. Okay, they're gonna give you not just a 14-day free trial, which if you went to their website, they'd give you 14 days. Generous. Well, super generous because you listen to this show, they're gonna give you a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. Just go, just go try it. Use it, actually, use it, get in there and see why the vast majority of the top producing teams and brokerages and solo agents out there all use it. And how awesome that you don't have to pay to try it. Just go check it out. MassiveAgent Podcast.com slash follow up boss, massiveagentpodcast.com slash follow up boss. Uh, they've been a great supporter of this show and of you guys, you know, in turn. So um make sure that you check them out. They are easily one of the one of the best service providers out there in our industry for agents. You just have to take advantage. They're making it easy, they're giving you 30 days, no credit card required. You've got to meet them halfway. Go do it. MassiveAgent Podcast.com slash follow up box. Guys, thank you so much for tuning in today and listening. We only have two more episodes till episode 200. Actually, one more, and then it is episode 200. Got something kind of cool planned for that. Um, so stay tuned. Thank you, guys. Go sell some homes, go close some loans, have a great frickin' day, have a great frickin' weekend. Appreciate you. Take care.