Deleting Videos, Spider Web Strategy & Selling Digital Product with a SMALL channel | Ep 52

Are you struggling to grow your YouTube channel, even with the "spider web" content strategy? In this video, I'll share my best tips for managing a small channel and generating revenue through digital products.

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Transcript

Have you ever wished that you and I could just sit down and have a coffee chat and pick each other's brains? Or you could pick my brain, or I could help you over whatever roadblocks you're running into right now with YouTube, or creating videos or editing videos, or selling a digital product with your YouTube channel?

One thing about me is I actually love chatting about all of those topics, and I wish I could sit down with anybody from my audience and have a coffee chat, but since that's impossible, unless we happen to be in the same room together, I think this episode will be the next best thing. If you happen to be new here, my name is Meredith.

This is Video Brand Infusion, episode number 52, and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can become the go-to person in your niche and generate consistent revenue with YouTube. And as much as I'm definitely a YouTube girl, one social platform that I've really been loving lately is threads.

And that's actually where I got most of the questions for this video. So if we're not following each other on threads yet, please go look me up. Search meredith marsh.co, and I'll put a link to it down in the show notes as well. Connect with me there. Say Hi. Tell me that you came from my podcast or my YouTube channel so that I can follow you back.

what I love about it, I think, is that it's quiet. You know, YouTube is loud, it's chatty. TikTok is very chatty. All of the platforms are video. And I love video, of course I do. But I kind of love just scrolling through conversations and being a part of conversations on any kind of any topic, right? Like what shows I'm watching or what's happening in the world.

And of course I do like to post threads and have conversations about YouTube and video marketing and digital products and video editing and all that good fun stuff.

I love that it's just text based. You can post videos, you can post images, but like you don't have to in order to participate on the platform. So just whatever thoughts come off the top of my head, I can post them there and I think we should follow each other. So hit me up. So this first question comes from Celine, who is a video brand Academy member, and she said, I'm in the messy beginning phase where I don't quite know where to focus my time and energy.

I've got the videos mapped out with my spider web. Good. And um, I feel locked in on that now. It's the peripheral businessy stuff I'm setting up to link in with the videos, other products and audience while I'm still quote YouTube small.

And I of course love this question because Celine is doing the work. She's following the spiderweb strategy that I taught inside of the 90 days to one K YouTube subscribers bootcamp. So it sounds like what you're saying, Celine, is you have the plan, you know what you're supposed to be posting as far as YouTube, like what videos you're gonna create next to fill out your spider web.

But what about everything else?

And I am not a hundred percent sure what, um, peripheral businessy stuff you might be talking about, but when I think of like the businessy stuff that kind of goes hand in hand with creating YouTube videos, even when you're YouTube small, as you say. Um, I think of things like email marketing, setting up a email list, creating some type of a lead magnet, which is.

As you probably know is like a free PDF cheat sheet guide, something that you give away, um, to your audience. They put their email address in, it automatically gets sent. So I use Kit, um, for my email service platform.

And one nice thing about Kit is you could just start building your list and not have to have a website. you know, you could create that opt-in form for the cheat sheet or the lead magnet or whatever it is that you're giving away. You can create all of that stuff and it just lives within Kit and it doesn't have to go live on a website somewhere.

So that's probably like I. The businessy stuff. Number one thing, aside from making the videos and setting up the channel and following a strategy,

I'll also mention that being in the messy beginning phase, you are doing exactly what I think anyone should be doing in the messy beginning phase, which is, um, picking a strategy and committing to sticking with it. Publishing once a week or twice a week, or once every other week, whatever it is, sticking to an actual uploading schedule, not so that, you know, it doesn't really matter what day of the week you publish on, like that really doesn't matter.

But what matters is that you're building this library of binge-worthy videos and you can't build a library of binge-worthy videos if you're never uploading. So, you know, I think you are, you're, you, you're in the messy beginning phase, but you're like. You're doing it, the fact that it's messy is evidence that you're doing it.

and I know from past conversations with Celine that she's been uploading videos and not really looking too much at the analytics. So I, I will be very curious to see her analytics on, hopefully on one of our analytics accelerator calls so that we can kind of deep dive and see how are things going?

what can we tweak? What can we change, what can we improve? you know, as you move forward from the messy beginner phase to the, you know, messy middle phase and speaking of analytics, this was actually a question that I got as a, um, comment on one of my videos. It wasn't even part of my call for questions, but I got this question from, Li Aria.

I don't know how to say that. Maybe it's not all one word, but the question is, we have almost 300 videos on the channel but the views are super low, and in the last couple months we have been trying to use the spider web method. Great. Another plus one for the spider web method, but we have lots of videos on our channel that are outside of our web.

Do you think we should delete videos that aren't just about this one topic? Okay. This, this is a juicy question. Do you think we should delete videos that aren't just about this one topic?

So in, in a word, no, you should not delete videos. Um, even if they are outside of this one topic, however, you could unlist them, and I wouldn't just willy-nilly go, you know, deciding. Well, this isn't part of our topic, so I'm gonna unlist it. What I would do is go into your analytics in your YouTube studio, look at the videos that YouTube is telling you.

Are your top 10 videos in the last 28 days? and if you think about the viewers of those top 10 videos, the question you really wanna ask yourself is, are those viewers, the viewers that we are trying to attract to our channel, are those the right eyeballs, so to speak?

Do we want to be attracting those viewers? So if you're trying to build a spider web with a certain topic or within a certain niche, but the. Videos that are currently driving the most views on your channel are way outside. The question is not so much like the, are these topics unrelated? So let's get rid of them.

It's more like, is this attracting the right people? Are the people that are coming in the right people, the right audience, the right viewers? Because the algorithm is audience. The algorithm is viewers.

so, it would make sense that if you have like a collection of your top videos that are bringing in new eyeballs, but your new videos are not aligned with what those new eyeballs wanna see, then it would make sense that your videos in your spiderweb would have low views. I don't have X-ray vision, so I can't see the channel, I can't see the analytics.

I have no idea what the niche is, but those are some of the things that I would look at. so it may take some time before you see any difference or see any kind of effect from taking that kind of action. I like to think of YouTube like a cruise ship. And you can't just stop a cruise ship. It, it needs a long stretch of space in order for it to even slow down. And if you're gonna turn, you have to be slowed down to turn or else like everything's gonna fly off.

You know, it's not a speedboat, it's a cruise ship, and you don't want to have this like, major upheaval. It's powerful and it's fun and it's a party and it's a good time. But. It's kind of a beast to maneuver.

Now, here's a question that came in from David at Gen X Retirement Rescue on Threads, who is also a Video Brand Academy member. This was actually a comment on a thread I made about niching down the age old question slash topic slash debate on YouTube. Should you niche down? Do you have to niche down?

What is niching down? You know, I go back and forth. Niche. Niche, it's all the same, but. But the hill that I will die on, is that a niche is not a topic that you stick to religiously.

It's a space that you create for your ideal audience, for your ideal viewers. It's a space that you create. And yes, if someone asks me, Hey, what is your niche? I'm gonna basically tell them about my topic. Like, oh, I help solo small business owners create videos, grow their brand on YouTube, grow their YouTube channel, generate consistent revenue online. Like I'm gonna basically tell you the topics and the general gist of what I do.

But when you are like planning out your topics, or planning out your channel, or trying to decide the topics, like the actual videos you create on your channel.

The niche or niche is really like, just sort of like the bubble that all of your topics and what you have to say and what you have to share and what actions you want your audience to take. Like the niche is kind of like the bubble that encompasses all of that because it's the space that you create for your audience.

Like in the episode from last week, 51 with Sophie, she is a fertility coach and a lot of her videos are on nutrition is her niche nutrition. No, but she's creating a space, she's creating a niche. Niche for her. Ideal clients, customers, students, and she's a fertility coach. Nutrition is a part of that.

She's got this whole spiderweb that is like a niche within a niche. It's super specific. and it's not like she can't start a whole spiderweb about medication Or mindset or, you know, getting your partner on board or something, right? That's, those are all different niches, but they all fall within this space that she has created around fertility, and it is a space that she created with her desired audience, her desired client, customer, student in mind. And she's not stuck on sticking to one specific topic.

She's committed to whatever she has to create, whatever she gets to create that's going to help her audience, that's gonna help her, her clients, customers, and students, and help her help more people.

but I did get this great comment from David at Gen X Retirement Rescue, um, where he said, my topic is retiring on a budget for Gen X. I talk about places to live that are great, but affordable and how to supplement income without a job. And, um, he said, this feels like creating a space, not just a topic, or am I completely off base?

And I agreed he is creating a space with that. It's not just, oh, it's just this is retirement for Gen X. It's not just, um. Finding places to live that are great, but affordable. It's not just like, oh, I only talk about supplemental income without a job. Which still like, honestly, that is a great topic right there.

It's all of those things. It's like a niche within a niche, and it's a space that he's creating for his desired audience, desired client, customer, student.

and I love that. Now, speaking of clients', customers, and students, I got this excellent question from the aligned Alchemist on Thread's. Sunita, I think if I'm saying your name correctly, Sunita. so she mentioned how do I sell on YouTube when my audience isn't big enough yet for a low ticket course?

And I love this question because in my experience on YouTube and in my business, like I can tell you without a doubt, the most powerful revenue streams are the ones you have the most control over. So digital products, courses, low ticket, high ticket memberships, um, coaching programs, like all that kind of stuff that you create that belong to you and you have control over versus affiliate marketing, working with brands and relying on ad revenue.

But there's a huge misconception that you, you have to have a big audience to have even a low ticket offer. Now, I don't know what Sunita means by a low ticket course necessarily because low ticket is. Relative. Right. I've heard people talk about a thousand dollars course being a low ticket program. I don't think a thousand dollars is low ticket, but it probably depends on the niche.

I don't know.

the way that I like to think about this is a couple ways. There's a couple, there's a couple, I guess, caveats to this. One is like. To use myself as an example, when I first started my channel, I knew that I wanted to figure out how to sell a course or a digital product of some kind, but I didn't know anything about that.

I didn't know how to sell. I didn't even really know that creating content on YouTube and selling a course or a program or digital product was selling. Like I, I didn't even make that connection, which sounds ridiculous now that I think about it, but I didn't even think about it that way because I didn't know what I didn't know.

But knowing now what I know when I look back on that, I think if I were to start from scratch today, like start a whole new channel in a different niche right now. I would have some kind of a low ticket, um, offer, whether it's a course or a guide or, um, like some kind of an AI tool or something. I would have that from day one because now I know I would be creating content that is specifically targeting my ideal customer or ideal client for that offer.

this is kind of where things get a little cloudy on, on YouTube because the game of YouTube is like, make YouTube happy, create content that brings. Viewers to the platform and keeps them on the platform, create content that adds value to the platform. If you can do that, YouTube's gonna love you for it.

The algorithm is gonna love you for it. And you know, there's a lot of different, you know, kind of strategies and ways to trigger the algorithm by selecting your topics and looking at your analytics and things like that. But if that's all you ever did on YouTube, then you're not growing your business.

And so it clouds things up when you have to kind of answer to the algorithm, so to speak. You have to create content that makes YouTube happy so that the content reaches as many people as possible, but you also have to create content that grows your business. And the way that I kind of, um, straddle both of those things.

is to be like insanely and almost creepily knowledgeable about my target audience in terms of what problems they're running into, what are they searching for, what are the obstacles they're running into in trying to achieve whatever the desired result is that they're trying to achieve, that I'm trying to help them with, you know, with my content and with my business.

What are the alternative solutions? That they have tried. What are the tools that they are using? When I know all of that about my audience, then I can do some keyword research. So I'm like doing the businessy stuff of knowing my target customer, knowing how best I can help them, and then do some keyword research, do some YouTube research, do some analytics research on your own channel to determine where do things match up,

like where is the overlap there? So, to give you a real life example, right now on my channel, you're gonna see I have a ton of Ds script tutorials, how to use DS script. So DS script is a tool that my target customer, my target audience, target client, target, uh, student might be using to create content that they might be searching.

How do I do this? How do I, how do I animate my text Indie script? How do I edit inde script? How do I export? How do I remove silence? How do I this, how do I that All of those D script questions. D script is the tool. I don't necessarily. Want to be the Queen of Ds script, which is a lie. I do wanna be the Queen of Ds script.

Uh, but that's not the goal of my business. But I know that my clients and customers, a lot of my clients and customers are using DS script. So when I show up with the answers to their questions and I show up with a cheat sheet that you can download, and now you're on my list, and now you see I have a membership, and now you see I have a video editing made easy course.

You might just say, you know what? I don't think I wanna watch hours and hours and hours of tutorials on YouTube. Maybe I should just get into her program. Maybe I should just buy her thing.

And so that's one of the ways that I, um, approach YouTube as a business owner. That applies to any business, any niche. What are the mistakes, the problems, the obstacles, the tools, the alternative solutions that people are using, that people are searching for? How do I do this? How do I do that? They're searching for those things on YouTube.

You show up as the subject matter expert in that thing and then show them. That you have more value to provide them. Now they're in your audience and a percentage of them are gonna go, what else does she have? What else can she help me with? And if you have a low ticket course or product, digital product, or some kind of a service or membership or whatever you have to offer, a certain percentage of those viewers are going, they're gonna seek that out because they're gonna want the shortcut that you provide instead of, I mean, we want them to binge your whole channel two.

Um, and they may, but we want to be able to provide, like from day one, a way for them to work more closely with you. So if that's a low ticket course for you, then, then that's a low ticket course, and that can exist and provide value and make sales from day one. If the content that you're creating attracts the right customer for that low ticket course.

now, some of the questions that I was asked about this coffee chat scenario, um, aren't really possible for me to answer in a podcast episode. Like Lauren said, can you workshop my YouTube funnel script? You're so brilliant at that. And to that, I would say, and if anybody is curious about creating a YouTube funnel with your channel or like.

Turning your YouTube channel into a funnel is kind of the way that I like to think about it. Reach out to me and let me know because I'd love to chat with you about that. But this last question is from Ryan, who is Howell Night Owl? Howell. Night Owl, yeah. On threads. I'd love to learn more about what tools and techniques have worked for you as you've gone through your journey with so much out there. It's nice to learn directly from those several steps ahead, um, on what to avoid and areas to focus on 

now, I can't tell you how many times, and we were just talking about this in the most recent video Brand Academy meetup, I can't tell you how many times I've worked with clients one-on-one who have paid me to, you know, basically to consult with them on setting up their camera, their lights, like make their videos look good.

I'm not there in the room with them. It's all remote, right? Um, but we've set everything up. Everything looks good. Everything sounds good. We've planned out their YouTube channel, planned out their topics, planned out their spider web, use the strategies that I teach inside of VBA, and then when it comes to actually recording the video, they don't do it.

they'll say, you know what? I actually don't really have time for this. And I, you know, I actually, um, I need to, I need to get my website set up first, and I need to do this or that or some other thing first. And then, and then I'm gonna, I'm, then I'm gonna do this YouTube thing They're afraid to hit record. They're afraid to actually hit record and see what happens when they're actually on camera. And what happens when they actually publish that video on YouTube? Because people are gonna see them. People are gonna see them and watch their content. and even though. That's the whole point of creating the content. Our brain still, um, tries to protect us from anything that might go wrong or any negative feedback or any negative comments 

So I mentioned that because I think that's a, a definite trap. Um, as much as it breaks my heart, it's a definite trap. That you can fall into, um, that, you know, you use tools, software set up as a little bit of a shield for all of the reasons why you can't possibly hit record yet.

Uh, and you know, the, and why I say it breaks my heart is like, and I'm not saying that Ryan does this or is doing this, but it breaks my heart because you obviously wanted to do it. Like you had some, like you felt compelled to, you know, like I have something to say. I have something to share. I have, uh, there's a way that I know that I can help people, that I can help more people.

Um, you chose YouTube, good choice. it breaks my heart when I see that people like take all of this action to do it, and then they get hung up when it's time to actually record. And then that means that their content never does get out there because it never does get made. But one of my favorite, um, techniques, I think I, I don't know if this is a technique, it's more of a strategy. It's a technique and a strategy. One of the smartest things that I ever did was when I started my channel, I batch recorded like 10 or 12 videos in a week. I, um. Sort of like set time aside to do it when my kids weren't there and my husband wasn't there.

And I, because I batch recorded and then I sort of edited as I went each week. It gave me the space to, I wasn't immediately on this hamster wheel of creating a new video every week. 'cause I had already done the hard part of recording, which for me at the time, and like what I just said, sometimes the hard part is the recording.

so I had the hard part done and editing was the easy part. So I had like 10 or 12 videos ready to go at the very beginning of 2015. That gave me the time and space and like mental space to sort of like catch up to getting in to a weekly rhythm and.

Basically what I did is, and this is a strategy that I teach, we have like a step-by-step strategy inside a video brand academy. But basically what I did was I followed, um, I created a series of how to use, um, what's it called? GoPro Studio, which is GoPro's video editing software. So I just created a series how to use GoPro Studios, step one.

Like, here's how you import your footage, here's how you cut it up, here's how you do this, here's how you do that. And it was just a series showing how to, um, how to make it. So I had talking head like intro and outro, but the rest was just my screen.

And that is not only a fantastic YouTube strategy, especially when you're first starting out. So, but not only that, it's, it's a good technique because you can batch all of that stuff.

Of course, you would batch all of it. It would make no sense to record step one this week and step two next week. Just do it all at once and have it recorded. And then if, you know, if talking to a camera, like for me was not a natural thing. I didn't know what I was doing, but it was like I can do it well enough for an intro and outro, but the rest was just my screen.

That was a perfect way for me to sort of like, dip my toes into the water of talking to a camera and creating videos.

And now here I am just talking to a camera. Um, you know, not just the intro and outro, but the whole thing, the, the whole thing. It's just my face now, if you like this style video where I'm just kind of answering, you know, seemingly random questions, um, and you want more like this, let me know in the comments. Like maybe give me your questions in the comments. And if you're not following me on threads, if we haven't connected there yet, just a reminder, head over to Threads. Follow me, meredith marsh.co.

Let me know that you came from my YouTube channel so that we can connect, act.

and let me know what questions you have for my next question. Answer coffee chat, roundup video.