Does the Yap Challenge Actually Work for Long Videos??

The "Yap Challenge" is everywhere on Instagram right now (thank you, @jessijeanathome!) but as a long-form YouTube creator, does Jessi's "Yap on Camera" program even apply to long videos? Well, I bought the challenge, and I want to share 3 things to look out for if you're all in on YouTube and sticking with longer videos.

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Transcript

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It's almost impossible to open up Instagram or TikTok these days and not hear about Jesse Jean's Yep challenge. And I've been thinking a lot about this. One, because I actually joined the challenge and I want to talk about why in just a minute, but also I keep wondering how can this apply to YouTube? Does it apply to YouTube? Does it apply to long-form content? And I have some thoughts on that. So let's get into it. If you're new here, my name is Meredith. I'm here to help you look good, sound good, and feel good on camera to build your binge-worthy video brand. And if you're a business owner, like a coach, a course creator, you have a service that you provide, and you're looking to gain clients, customers, YouTube is the most powerful way to do that. And you can train the YouTube algorithm in your first seven videos, in your next seven videos, if you already have a YouTube channel set up. So I want to talk a little bit more about that and how you could use the Yap Challenge, Jesse Jean's Yap Challenge, to work on YouTube so that you can launch a client-attracting YouTube channel, not just grow a YouTube channel, not just be a YouTuber, but actually use YouTube by being yourself, talking to the camera, yapping, if you will. Let's get into it. So it's been a couple months, maybe a month, maybe like actually, I think it's only been a month and a half since Jessie Jean on Instagram. I'll link to her Instagram below so you can check her out. But if you're on Instagram at all, you've probably heard of this yap challenge. If you haven't, you've probably at least seen a whole new influx of people talking to the camera with a microphone in their hand like this, which has been a trend, a phenomenon, a something on social media over the last couple of years. Um I was hoping it would die out, but it's not. It's it's it's blowing up even bigger now, the whole um holding the microphone thing. And I'm not mad at it, it's fine, it's it's whatever. Anyway, what Jesse Jean has done is really like created a movement around encouraging people to show up on camera, show up as themselves, speaking confidently to the camera, and and speaking to their audience in like a real human way, which I love. Now, this trend has mostly been, as far as I've seen, this trend has mostly been on social media, meaning Instagram, TikTok, short form content, reels for the most part. And as a long time, long form content creator here on YouTube, who s still 100% believes that long-form content equals long-term growth as a business owner, and I have lots of reasons to back that up. I'm not gonna get on my shorts and short form content soapbox. The question that has been in my mind is how does this apply to long form content? Does the stuff that Jesse Jean teaches and encourages and coaches and the prompts that she provides in the app challenge, does that apply to YouTube? Does it apply to long form content on YouTube? And I can tell you for sure 100% it does. How do I know that? Because I bought the app challenge. I bought through cohort one. Technically, I found the checkout page after cart clothes, bought it anyway. For $300, I was like, heck yeah, I want to see, I want to see what all of the hype is about. And you know what? It's really good. It's a really good program for figuring out what to say to the camera. Not because it tells you what to say to the camera, but because it helps you to identify who you're really speaking to and what you want to communicate with those people and how you want to show up online. Not in some like manufactured way, but in your way, in your human way. And you know what? I'm kind of tired of seeing all the yapping videos talking about yapping, but at the same time, I have loved seeing people that have been following for a long time on social media. I I have loved seeing them show up more as human, more as just like, I'm gonna talk to the camera like a human. I freaking love it. I'm here for that. So yeah, I bought the yap challenge. One because I was curious could what Jesse Jean is teaching work on YouTube? And like I already mentioned, for sure it does. I also just like had the FOMO and I wanted to get in on what everybody was talking about. But I'm not really an Instagrammer and I'm not really interested in growing an audience on Instagram. I like social media for the social part. I like the personal part, I like the human connection part. But on YouTube, I like talking about YouTube. I like talking about business, I like talking about making videos, I like talking about YouTube strategy, I like talking about launching your client attracting YouTube channel. So that's what I want to talk about today. How you can launch a client attracting YouTube channel and create long form content like eight minutes long, ten minutes long, twenty minutes long using the exact frameworks that Jesse Jean teaches. Now I'm not giving away anything that Jesse teaches, so like go by her course. But last week I hosted the first ever just launch your darn channel already workshop. And in that workshop, I gave the exact blueprint, the exact seven video launch sequence blueprint. I call it the Magnificent Seven. I'll put a link down in the description if you want to get the magnificent seven, seven video YouTube channel launch sequence to launch your client attracting YouTube channel down in the description below this video so that you know exactly what those seven videos are and the exact jobs that they do for your channel because they're not just random and it's not just like doing keyword research or anything like that. Each video has a specific role and a specific job to train the algorithm, to train the YouTube algorithm to put your videos in front of your target audience, in front of your ideal clients and customers. Now, this is where I think the idea of like mixing the Yap challenge with YouTube gets really exciting because you're not just throwing videos out there on Instagram where they like get views and then stop getting views. You're publishing real content, like your expertise, your your body of work, like the meaningful things that you have to say that you want to reach people with and help people with, you're putting this body of work on a content platform that is not just a feed of social media. So let me tell you the three things that I would be thinking about if you have Jesse Jean's Yap Challenge, if you bought the Yap Challenge and you're going through the app challenge, but you also want to utilize YouTube with the content you're creating, these are three things I want you to keep in mind as you think about creating long-form content with the challenge. And if you if you have no idea who Jesse Jean is, and if you aren't in the app challenge, then this will still apply to you. Because if you if you are an expert, if you are a coach, a course creator, if you have something to say, if you are a business owner with something to say and meaningful content to create, this will apply to you as well. So, number one, there has to be an overlap between what you want to talk about, what you want to say, what your expertise is, what you want to be known for, what you want to be the go-to expert on, and what your ideal clients and customers are actually wanting to watch. And I'm phrasing that specifically to say, I'm not just talking about what people are searching for. I'm not just talking about just what they're typing into the search bar, I'm not just talking about search engine optimization or keyword research. That plays a role for sure on YouTube. That's a really powerful way to get views on YouTube. But I'm not just talking about what your clients and customers are searching for, I'm talking about what they're really seeking and what they're actually clicking play on and watching. Because what I have seen with my content and with my clients is they're often clicking on topics like the title and the thumbnail. They're clicking on topics and in hitting play on concepts that they would have never even thought to search for, but they feel it deep down. It's like the idea of saying the quiet part out loud. Do you know what I mean? It's like, oh, oh yeah, I have been thinking that. Well, she's talking about this thing, she's talking about this thing that no one else is talking about. I have to see what she has to say. There's multiple algorithms going on on YouTube, right? There's search, there's what shows up on the YouTube homepage, which is different for every user. And that algorithm is based entirely on that user's individual like viewing habits and viewing behavior. There's this suggested sidebar. Even the search results, if you scroll down past like the first, like I don't know, 10 or 12 or so search results on YouTube, you start getting into like videos that are just being suggested for you, and they're not necessarily search results. There's like all these different algorithms going on. Plus, if you're a business owner, if you're a smart business owner who's building your email list, you also have an email list where you can be pushing your YouTube content to as well. So there's a whole other um like sort of personal algorithm going on on people's email opening and clicking and consuming habits, right? But the point remains that there has to be an overlap between what you want to be the go-to expert for, what you want to be known for, what your expertise is, and what your ideal clients and customers are seeking to watch. That is classic content marketing, that is like old school content marketing. You can't just show up and start spewing off whatever you feel like talking about off the top of your head without any regard to what people actually are interested in hearing about and expect people to be interested in hearing what you have to say. A classic example of this is when you create topics, you create videos where the topic or the title is um, it's like on a concept or on something that you are an expert in, you already know about it, like you already know this is something you wish your clients and customers and students knew about, but they don't know that yet. So they're not searching for it, or even if they do find your channel, they're not clicking play because they're like, that that's not me. I don't need that, right? They have no idea what it is, they don't know what you know. If they knew what you knew, they wouldn't be searching for help in like the problems that you help people solve or the um the the pain that you help people get out of in your business, right? Like they wouldn't be searching for that if they already knew. So finding the overlap, pinpointing where the overlap is is key on YouTube. Now you can do this with keyword research. You can do this through, I like to call it spying on your niche neighbors to see kind of like what's popping on their channel. You can do this just by knowing what your clients and students that you're already working with are asking you about. Doing this kind of deep dive to find that overlapping content really only takes about 30 minutes if you're using the right tools. It's one of the first things that we do inside of my channel launch lab program because if you don't know how to fill in the blanks of the topics and the titles in the Magnificent Seven, if you're not filling the blanks with the exact right topics, then you're either not going to get views, subscribers, clients from YouTube, or you're going to attract the wrong audience. YouTube is the let them come to you platform. With the algorithm, when you train it to get your videos in front of your target audience, you're letting those people come to you. And then all you're doing is showing up with a new video once a week. Number two, as a human on the internet, you don't have to plan your content as much as you think you have to plan your content. Like nowadays, it's never been easier or more important to just show up as a human. Like, show up is like an unpolished, sometimes makes mistakes, sometimes trips over their words. Human. We want that. We all want that. In fact, I what I notice when I look at people like um like Amy Porterfield or like Alex Hormosy or like the people who have production teams and like teams of editors and all of that, the more polished content of the like big audience people, the least interesting it is because it looks too perfect. And I start to question: is this real or is this AI? Is this just a show or is this a real human? It's never been easier to just be a real human on the internet. Just hit record and start talking. Don't plan for the next three months before you hit record. Plan so much that by the time you hit record, it's almost impossible to show up as a human because you've like planned and prepped and rehearsed and planned and prepped and rehearsed. I remember sitting in my living room, the corner of my living room, that moment where I had spent an entire year planning a YouTube channel, planning all of the keywords, all of the titles, like the whole plan, and then realizing, oh my god, I have to make videos now. I had this whole plan in my head. I could see it, like I could see I'm gonna have a blog, I'm gonna have a YouTube channel, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. I could see it like coming to life in my mind. And then the very last thing, like, if you look at like a project in front of you, you're like, gotta do all this stuff, the prep, the plan, the this, the that. And it was like I got to like record videos, and I was like, oh, I have to actually do the thing. Even just thinking about it right now, I can feel it in my body, that sinking feeling of like, oh god, I have to do the thing. I'm not saying don't do any preparation at all. What do I mean by over-preparing? I it's like overthinking about what you're gonna say in your videos. I've gone back and forth between scripting, not scripting, riffing, uh yapping, all things in between. Like there's a spectrum of word for word script, and just like thinking out loud off the top of your head. I've done everything in between. When I first started creating my videos, I was terrified of saying the wrong thing, and which I did a lot. I mean, I still make a lot of mistakes, I trip up uh my words a lot in my videos. You don't see all of those mistakes because I use D script to edit my videos, and it's really quick and easy to just get rid of a mistake here and there. Or if I restart my sentence, not a big deal. Highlight, delete. It's literally that easy. But I was so afraid of like forgetting to say the thing that I that I wanted to say in the video or rambling. But now we live in this age of AI slop, AI generated video content where it's super polished, it's super perfect, it's super like you see a video of one person sitting right here and they don't really move their head, and their lips move, but their lips don't really match exactly what they're saying, or sometimes it's off a little bit, sometimes it looks okay, but they're not really moving their head, they're not really moving their body, and they're talking a little bit monotone and it's a little bit repetitive. I've seen videos like that. I think it sucks. I think nobody wants to watch a video of an AI avatar. I I just I don't. And as somebody who created an entire video of my AI-generated voice last year, you can go watch go watch my YouTube studio tour and then watch the video that I published a few months later um telling you that that was an entire AI voice of mine. It wasn't an AI avatar, but guess what? It took for freaking ever to make a video using my AI voice. It would have been so much faster to just record the thing. But anyway, my point is I don't think humans want to watch non-human content. I think people want to know that you're a human, they want the unpolished, unprepared, unscripted stuff. Now, do I believe in outlines? Yes, I do. And I have some really tight sort of uh formulas. I call these my anti-script outlines. I'll put a link down in the description below. I have outlines that help me sort of stay within the, you know, it's like bumper bowling. It helps me like stay, stay between the ditches. So I'm not over-preparing on exact like the exact words I'm gonna say. I know the gist of what I want to talk about. I know the message, I know like how I feel about what I'm talking about, and I know how to sort of communicate what what I want you to know about what I'm talking about, and I just simply follow an anti-script outline instead of going word for word. And I really highly recommend and strongly encourage you to do that with your long form content. So, how do you take a concept from the Yap Challenge, for example, and turn it into a video that's like 10 minutes long or longer? Well, when I look at Jesse Jean's outlines, I look at those and I'm like, yikes, how do you do that in 60 seconds? How do you say what you need to say in 60 seconds? It's so much easier when you have 10 full minutes. So here's a trick that I like to do in my head when I'm sitting here going, okay, well, what do I say next? What like what else do I want to talk about? I just imagine that someone's asking me a question back. It's like a yeah but in my head. It's like I'm imagining you saying, Yeah, but what about X, Y, and Z? If I'm having trouble thinking about where I want this thought to go or how I want to finish up the thought that I'm talking about right now. Again, I'm using D script to edit my videos. It's so easy to just sit here and think for a few minutes and then highlight, delete when I go to edit out the minutes that I was thinking. But all I have to do is think what is the yabba, what is the question or the um what about X, Y, and Z that I can follow up the thought that I just had. So it comes out naturally. It comes out straight from my brain, straight from my mouth, without having to think about it word for word. Do I go off the rails sometimes? Yeah, I do. Have I gone off the rail multiple times in this video? Yeah, quite a bit, actually. Is it gonna be okay? Yeah, it's gonna be fine because I know and I I trust that you know that I'm a human and you're a human and we're having a human experience on YouTube together, right? Now, one of the questions that I got in the Launch Your Darn Channel Already workshop about the Magnificent Seven, the seven videos to launch your client attracting YouTube channel was why only seven videos? Like, why would you only plan out seven videos? What happens when you get to video eight and you're like, now what do I publish? And like I already said, the seven videos in the magnificent seven series, each one has a very specific job to train the algorithm to reach your target audience. But recently I was having a conversation with somebody in person who has been doing YouTube for about two years. They launched their channel two years ago. They have um, I think he had like maybe a couple hundred subscribers or so, and like a few hundred videos, like long form videos. And he said, like, what's wrong with my channel? Like, why isn't anything happening? I'm publishing, I'm posting, and my team's doing this, and I got my editor, and blah blah blah. But when I asked him, Where are you coming up with the ideas for these videos? And he said, Oh, I came up with these two years ago. I recorded these videos two years ago, and I've been publishing them every week. And I was like, Um, how did you know two years ago what videos you were gonna publish on your channel now? And he was like, I have no idea. And I said, Yeah, exactly. And that's that's why your channel's like not working for you. Put a lot of work and effort and time into planning the whole thing, even recording the whole thing. Two years ago, and it's not really working for you. I mentioned earlier that it's actually really easy to train the algorithm, but you can't train the algorithm unless you are looking at what the algorithm is doing, who your audience is, what they're watching, what's working on your channel, like topic-wise, thumbnail-wise, and what's not working, and then fixing the things that are not working. You can't make YouTube work for you unless you're looking at that stuff. And there's really only a handful of metrics in your YouTube analytics that paint the whole picture. It's kind of like uh, I think of this as roadblocks, or like if you think about a waterfall, if you're like you have a waterfall where the top of the waterfall is here, and the the job of the water is to come down that the ledge and like fall down to like the pool down below, right? That's the only job of the water. That's what the water knows how to do. It's like natural, right? It's gravity. Think of the water as like your viewers, kind of like if you have a multiple tiered water fall, right? You have to get people to click play in order to watch the video. You have to get people to watch the whole video, right? Just because somebody hits play doesn't mean they watched your whole video. You need to get people to watch the whole video. And then if you're growing your email list or you want people to subscribe to your channel, they have to take an action. They have to go subscribe to your list or go subscribe to your channel or watch the next video or leave a comment or do whatever the action is that you want them to do. It's these like tiers, right? Your analytics tell you which, like exactly which tier the waterfall is like hitting and not able to like move to the next tier. Like it's telling you where, like where the dam is, sort of. I guess we could think of it like that. It's telling you what's stopping the water from making it all the way down to the pool below. All you have to do is know what metrics to look for. And so if you plan the next year or two worth of content thinking, I'm just gonna check these off, I'm just gonna check this whole list of videos. I mean, that sounds really great in theory, it sounds really well thought out in theory. It doesn't work on YouTube because you have to know what's going on inside of your channel because we're talking about humans viewing your videos. We're talking about a waterfall kind of making its way, we're talking about creating an environment where humans want to watch your content. It's kind of like a social experiment, but you have to look at the results to see how the experiment is going in order to make decisions about what topics to create next, what topics to not create because they're attracting the wrong people, and what kind of levers and tactics you can use to get people to watch more of your content. If you plan out two years of content, if you record two years of content, you're going to waste so much time and effort to not have it pay off for you. And one of the things I hear so often is like, oh, I don't have time to do YouTube. I'm a like, I'm a business owner, I don't have time to YouTube. And I'm thinking, well, no business owner ever said, I have no time for free clients or free leads or free free customers or free uh exposure. Like maybe if you think you don't have time for YouTube, you've been doing YouTube and it hasn't worked for you, you've just been doing the like hardest version of YouTube. Because it should be creating less effort for you, not creating more effort for you. It should be lightening your load because you have clients and customers that are finding you consistently through free advertising because you're showing up on YouTube with content that you created weeks ago, months ago, that's showing up in search, showing up in the algorithm over and over again for new people that are just about to come down the rabbit hole of searching for solutions to problems that like you are uniquely qualified to help people solve in your business. The good news is one of my nerdy dorky little traits is I love looking at YouTube analytics. I love like getting my hands dirty and my clients' YouTube analytics because it really only takes about two minutes, maybe five minutes at the most, to see what YouTube sees, to see what the algorithm sees, to see where that waterfall is blocking, where the dam is happening, where the roadblocks are that are preventing your videos from getting more views or from getting in front of the right people. And it can sometimes feel impossible to figure that stuff out on your own, which is exactly why I teach my clients how to do this in Video Brand Academy, and I do it for my clients in the channel Launch Lab. Now I haven't gotten far enough in Jesse Jean's program to know if she goes into analyzing any like analytics type stuff. If she does, it's Instagram related. But I do know that she talks about kind of analyzing yourself. How did that video feel? How did you feel? How does your voice sound and how you feel creating content, how you feel showing up, hitting record? It should feel no different than how you feel actually helping a real client or customer, like a paid client or customer. Maybe that's a hot take, but I think you should have the same level of feeling and how you feel. Like if you're excited, if you love helping people, if you love talking to people. I think you should have the same level of excitement for making your content, making your quote unquote free content for strangers on the internet, you know, my love language. I think you should have the same level of excitement for that as you do for working with your paid clients. If you want your content to turn into paid clients, if you want your content to attract people who become your paid clients. Personally, I think it's really cool that you get to do both. That you get to create free content that is actually helpful, meaningful, useful, that helps people achieve the thing or get the results, whatever it is for your niche, for your industry, for your expertise. I think it's really cool that you can do that for free, that you can reach so many people across the entire globe just by hitting publish, just by showing up, hitting record, and then hitting publish. But you also get to create a business out of it by creating content that attracts paying clients and students. It's in my opinion, it's the best of both worlds. Can you apply Jesse Jean's Yap Challenge to long-form content on YouTube? Absolutely. Yes. Do it. And if you want my help launching a client-attracting YouTube channel, I'll put a link down below to the channel launch lab so that you can check that out too. Because YouTube is the most powerful way to grow your audience online. And you can train the algorithm to put your videos in front of your ideal clients in your next seven videos, your first seven videos or your next seven videos if you already have a channel. It's really cool. And I don't know about you, but I personally love the idea of creating content that works for you like long after the fact. Next week, next month, next year. Not just like a feed in the next 24 hours. But maybe I'm crazy. Let me know in the comments if you're tired of the hamster wheel of social media content and you're going all in on YouTube.