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YouTube Video
YouTube video can be very impactful because next to Google, YouTube is an incredibly powerful search engine in its own right.
That means knowing how to harness that energy can accelerate the growth of your business, product, or service, but how can entrepreneurs tap into this phenomenon effectively and efficiently?
That’s what I’ll be exploring with our next guest, YouTube expert, Matt Hughes.
What You’ll Discover About YouTube Video:
* Why small businesses have an advantage in creating YouTube video
* How to find great content for your YouTube video
* How to optimize YouTube video descriptions
* The biggest mistake everyone makes with their YouTube video
* How long does it take to build marketing momentum with YouTube video
* AND much more
Guest: Matt Hughes
Matthew Hughes is a YouTube video expert based in Leicester, United Kingdom.
In 2013, he started a video company that he ran for seven years, traveling the world and creating corporate videos for clients ranging from one-man bands through to billion-dollar companies.
Fast forward to 2019 and having witnessed firsthand video’s rising influence and power in driving exponential brand growth and customer acquisition, Matt created the King of Video brand to help small business owners confidently create consistent video content that connects with their audience.
In 2021 he turned his focus to YouTube with a goal of getting 1000 small businesses to 1000 subscribers using YouTube as the primary platform to grow their business and make money by strategically creating video content.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Marketing episodes.
Contact Matt and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and TikTok.
And check out Matt’s King of Video website for more YouTube video information and resources.
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How to Drive More Business Success with YouTube Video
YouTube videos can be very impactful because next to Google, YouTube is an incredibly powerful search engine in its own right. That means knowing how to harness that energy can accelerate the growth of your business, product, or service, but how can entrepreneurs tap into this phenomenon effectively and efficiently? That’s what I’ll be exploring with our next guest, YouTube expert, Matt Hughes. Stay tuned!
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner and I have an amazing guest for you today. He’s Matt Hughes.
Matt helps small businesses and creators leverage the power of video and YouTube to grow a following, foster their brand, and maximize their revenue potential. He’s been creating winning video for clients globally since 2013, and after seeing how it can be leveraged to drive exponential brand growth and new customers, he founded the King of Video brand in 2019 to help business owners confidently create consistent content that connects with their audiences.
He says being small can actually be an advantage for businesses and creators, and I’m dying to hear more about that, so let’s have him join us now.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Matthew.
Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here. Hey, I could do with that kind of introduction every single time. If you could be around when I step on stage, that would be amazing.
I’ll see what I can do. Well, it’s good to have you here, Matt. I am really fascinated by this idea that you think being small is an advantage for businesses and creators on YouTube. Would you please help us understand what you mean by that?
Well, I think it’s about being agile, really. I think when you’re – whether you’re a big business or whether you’re a big YouTuber, being a big YouTuber, there’s a lot of pressure on you to create good content, create better content than the previous video, and being a small YouTuber or even a small business, in the same way you have a bit more flexibility.
You can try things. You can make mistakes. And because you’ve not got a huge following, actually that can be a real big advantage because nobody really notices. And so, when I’m getting people to start on YouTube, I’m like, “Let’s make those mistakes now. Let’s get them out the way. And then as we grow the audience, as we get more people watching these videos, we’ll come across much more confident as we move forward.”
And actually, if you take a look at some of the bigger YouTubers and sort by oldest to newest, you’ll see that’s exactly what’s happened with their content. I call it sorting by embarrassment because if you look at their oldest content, it’s usually pretty shocking.
Pretty shocking. That’s great. I think that happens with any type of new endeavor, that we make mistakes in the beginning. It’s just so visible in a video and it’s something that could be distributed globally that people are reluctant. And then there’s also the whole learning curve and concern about costs and the commitment it takes to consistently produce YouTube video content that people want. How do you address that concern?
So, I think you said costs there, right? And I think, actually, for the most part, I think there’s preconceptions people have about creating video content. And the things you’ve just mentioned are all of those normal things that people come to me and they say, “Matt, I need a new camera. I need a new microphone. I need all of these things.” And actually, you can just start with your mobile phone, cell phone, as you guys call it. Like you don’t need to invest in anything, really.
The most important thing to do is actually start creating content. Because when you create content, you flex those courage muscles. You start to become more confident on camera. And then you also kind of figure out the things that you need to learn as you go. And it’s really funny because when you first create content, you’ve got all these ideas of things that could go wrong, but actually, when you create it, you start to – it changes the way you think about creating videos.
You’ll start to think, “Oh, maybe if I added this shot in,” or “maybe if I did it in this way,” or “maybe if I changed the structure of my – the words that I’m saying.” All of those things happen after your first video. You need to get the first one done in order to make that change and start increasing that, improving your video content.
Well, let’s talk about the content aspect of all of this. I would imagine that the goal of the entrepreneurs listening right now is to find a tie on – a tie in rather, to YouTube videos with their own products or services. They’re not so much interested in becoming the social media influencer who generates clickbait for the sake of clicks. How do you recommend they find a meaningful nexus?
I think, for me, when I’m working with businesses, it’s about being strategic with your content. In fact, I often don’t – if somebody came to me and said, “Matt, I want to be a YouTube celebrity and I want to get millions of subscribers,” I’d probably say you’re not the kind of person for me. What I want to do is work with business owners and entrepreneurs who actually want to focus on growing their business, bringing more leads and more sales to their business.
And if you think about that first, actually, the way you create content, the kind of content that you create and what the next step is for the viewer on their journey, that all comes together into a kind of nice structure for how you position all of this content. And also, if you think about that as well, a lot of the time when I’m getting people to create their first set of videos, I say to them, “What are your customers asking about your product or service? What are the common things that they ask you that you could create a video of?”
“And then the next time they ask you that question, you could send them the video.” And there’s so much power in sending them to a video or what I call your own personal Netflix channel because you’ve got this YouTube channel that’s got the answers to all of these questions, and then they’re much more likely to buy from you. So, it’s all about having that strategic sort of full picture view of what you’re going to create with this asset, library of content that you create.
That sounds great and it makes a lot of sense. Now, let’s go a little bit beyond the content itself because you got to post it on YouTube. What advice do you have about optimizing descriptions to get it noticed? What’s the most important thing to focus on?
Well, the most important thing to focus on is the thumbnail. And I remember I went to L.A. in 2018 when I was – I had 117 subscribers at the time, and I was just thinking about getting onto YouTube, and I went there and I expected all these big, huge YouTubers, millions of subscribers between them. They stood on stage, and they were telling us lots of things that they could do.
And one of the first things I learned, they said, “You can make the best piece of content, but if nobody clicks it, clicks on that thumbnail, then they’re never going to see it.” So, the thumbnail is probably the most important thing. Now, there’s lots of things you have to do before that. You have to do your research, and you have to think about the kind of video that you’re going to make, but actually, the thumbnail getting them to click.
To go and watch that video is the most important thing. And you said this is going to air in a few months’ time. There’s a slight change. I will say this. The caveat that there’s a slight change coming where YouTube now gives you a preview of the video. It’s like the first five seconds that might change the thumbnail story that I’ve just told you, but I still think it’s important that clicking the thumbnail and checking the analytics to see how many people are clicking it off the back of the impressions, that’s what’s going to make the big difference. Of course, description and the things that you add in, the tags and all that kind of stuff.
The titles, they’re all important as well, but it’s that that graphical thing that’s going to grab their attention that’s super important.
Well, I’m glad that you clarified that, because some people may not be familiar with the term thumbnail.
Yeah.
And it is the little image that people see.
That’s it, yes.
And I believe that you can upload a separate thumbnail or YouTube will just grab something, a screenshot from the video itself. So, having control is probably the better option. No?
Yeah, yeah. Totally. And actually, there’s a great tool that I use called Tube Buddy. What you can do is do A/B testing. So, you will choose a thumbnail and you can choose an alternative version of that thumbnail, and the software will swap it out for you every day for 14 days. And then it will tell you which one is most likely to be clicked.
So, you’ve got a much better chance of finding a thumbnail that’s working for you. So, it’s a bit more of an advanced step, that thing. I would say if you’re getting started, don’t worry about that too much at the start, but it’s definitely something that’s worth knowing it’s available when you’re really getting into your analytics.
Well, that is good to know. In your experience, because you’ve been doing this for a while, what do you see the biggest mistakes people make with their YouTube videos and their YouTube channels?
I mean, the biggest mistake really is just not publishing video content. I know that might seem pretty obvious to say. If they don’t have videos, nobody’s going to see them, but honestly, I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs now, and I’ve worked with people that have spent seven months with me coming to my meetings.
We have a meeting every Friday and they come to the meeting. They say, “Yes, I’m planning to do this. I’m planning to do that.” And they get into this analysis paralysis of planning their content, and they never publish a video. And it’s so frustrating because I’m like, “Come on, guys. This is a video platform. It’s a video membership,” like, “What are you doing? You need to publish a video.” So, you’ve got to get it out there. And like all of that – we talked about it earlier.
The preconceptions of what you think about this video content, like in a year’s time, you’ll completely forget about the first video. So, you’ve got to get started and you’ve got to start publishing that content. I think once you do that, and then you add in some consistency to it.
So, you’ve got a plan, a strategic plan for the next six months of what content you’re going to publish every week. And you only need to do one video per week. That’s a good enough strategy to get started with. Then you will be winning once you’ve got that plan. And it’s funny because as you – just before you called me, I’ve been sitting here and I’ve got – I’ve created this Excel spreadsheet with a planner of like, “This is what I need to film my videos by. This is when I need to publish my videos.” Like doing that kind of extra work ahead of time really helps you stay organized to make sure you stay consistent.
I can see the value in that. I am also curious about your thoughts about TikTok because that’s all video, short videos and maybe the length makes a difference. Although I think YouTube has been encouraging people to post short videos. But between the two platforms, what are your thoughts?
It’s a great question because this is how I solve my problem with people not creating long-form content. This long-form content, 5 to 15 minutes is what I recommend. People will spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they’re going to put in all of that space. There’s a lot of time to talk about content there. I have to talk about whatever it is you’re going to talk about, but – so how I get them started is I say, “Okay, if the big goal of this long form piece of content is too much, it’s too overwhelming, why don’t we start with YouTube shorts?”
So, I’ve got a 28-day shorts challenge. You do one video every single day for 28 days. And what that does is it does all of the things we’ve talked about on this call. So, it gets you creating content. It gets you improving your confidence. It gets you to try some stuff, see what works, see what doesn’t work. And it also gets you on those platforms where you get instant gratification.
So, YouTube is a longer-term strategy. Definitely, you can have a video that you’ve put on there, two years ago and it will just suddenly take off after two years. But that’s a long time to wait for a lot of people, so they go, “Matt, I want something that’s quicker. I want something now.” And that’s where TikTok Shorts, Reels, all of those things come in because we can practice and can start creating that content.
We can get it on there. We can see some results straight away. And I promise you, if you did a one minute video for 28 days, it wouldn’t matter how good you are at creating content, it wouldn’t matter how nervous you are, what kind of content you create. By the time you get to that 28th day, you’ll absolutely be a creative genius.
That’s pretty good. I like that, the 28-day challenge. You mentioned something about people getting frustrated with results, and especially if somebody took so much time and energy to create what they think is, “Oh, this is a really great video. How come I’m not getting more clicks? How come people aren’t sharing this?”
How much time do you feel somebody should give their YouTube channel or a particular video before saying, “Oh, this isn’t working for me?” Because not every social media channel is ideal for every business. First, you can’t be on all of them at once, unless you’ve got a huge social media department dedicated to it. It’s just so difficult, but I think that’s also some of the reluctance of people wanting to try it. It’s like, “Oh, all right, I could maybe do this,” but the consistency and so forth.
But if they try it for a month, is that enough time to get some traction? What are your thoughts on that?
Okay. Great question. You’re not going to like my answer to this, and I’m sure anyone listening is not going to like this answer either. But I’ve got my own podcast and I interviewed this guy, Jerry. Jerry has 125,000 subscribers, and he did this great thing. He did a five-minute video every week, and it was like a five-minute social or something like that. I can’t remember the exact name of it, but he did it, and I interviewed him.
I said, “Jerry, what do you think your success was?” And he said, “To be honest with you, Matt. All I did is I decided I was going to do YouTube.” And he said, “I just wanted to give it one year.” He said, “I would just publish a video every week for one year, and after that, I will make the decision of whether this is working or not.” Now you just asked me the question and you gave – you picked a random amount of time and you chose a month.
I think most people do the same thing. They think a month or two months or three months. It’s very rare that somebody says they’ll try it out for a year, but in reality, that’s the amount of time where you’re going to have to do something. I don’t think there’s anything really where if you give it a couple of months, it really takes off. You might get that a little bit on TikTok and Reels. You might have something that kind of a unicorn approach that something takes off.
But if you really want to go hard and create something that’s going to give you a long-term results. And I think having one simple video every week for 52 weeks, that’s where you’re really going to get the magic stuff. And the thing is, Jerry got those results after a year. And I think if you’re strategic with that as well, I call it your signature, but I always call the YouTube videos that you create your signature video. It’s like your best piece of content.
And then I’ve got this content repurposing framework where we take that video and we create 47 pieces of content. It might sound like a lot, and it might sound like a lot of work, but actually, it only takes about an hour to two hours to do that. And imagine if you created one video a week for 52 weeks, you then repurposed it and created those 47, 49, 50 pieces of content, whatever it is.
And you did that for a year. You would have 2,500 pieces of content. Now, imagine what that would do for your business if you were pushing out 2,500 pieces of content every year. It would be insane. And you can do this with a team of one creator, the business owner, and a VA or some kind of resource that’s going to do the content repurposing for you.
Well, this is fascinating about the content repurposing. Are you slicing pieces from that original? I mean, can you give me a concrete example? I’m really fascinated by this, Matt.
Yeah, sure. So, I run as I called it, “Tube Fest,” which is on May 23rd in the UK, in Birmingham, and we’ve got a wonderful sponsor coming to us. And I met these guys in San Diego last year, Social Media Marketing World, and they’re a company called, “Opus Clips,” where they called “Opus,” and I think it’s Opus.pro.
And the reason why I bring them up is because what happened is I was speaking to this guy named Connor, the marketing manager, and they were just launching it at Social Media – it’s like the day after Social Media Marketing World. And he said out loud what this program was. And basically, you take your signature video, your YouTube video. You put it into Opus, and it uses AI to create these videos, these short form content videos in portrait, so you can go and stick them straight away on TikTok, or Reels, or whatever.
And it gives them like a score out of 100, virality score out of 100. And with one video of like 5 to 15 minutes, it will create 10 pieces of short-form content. And that’s just one use case or one example where you can take a long-form piece of content. You can stick it in that software. It takes about 10, 15 minutes to learn and do its thing, the AI thing, and then it just spits out this content.
So, you do nothing. You just literally upload the video and go away, and it’ll send you an email when it’s done, and it sends you all this content back. Like how easy is that? It wasn’t easy like that five years ago. I had to have an editor. We had to buy some software. We had to get them to find the best bits. All of that work is now done for you, and you just drop it in this software and away you go.
So, I think it’s that kind of thing where, again, thinking strategically – I know I’ve said strategic a lot because it’s really, really super important when you’re trying to get good results from this stuff. Thinking strategically, using the right tools. Yes, there’s a cost associated with Opus, but using the right tools and being efficient with what you’re doing can really make this actually one of those things that you decide to do that probably before this call, you were thinking, “Oh, my God. I’ve got to spend more time doing YouTube videos.”
But hopefully, I’ve persuaded you that you can actually do this signature video and it will make your marketing so much easier afterwards.
This is amazing, Matt. I mean, on the one hand, it’s scary, but I’m curious about how accurate or good the AI derivative work of all of this is because – are they just making scrambled eggs out of it, or is it still intelligible in a way that that makes sense?
Yeah. Well, so, I suppose if you look at it this way, the AI is very good now. So, if your audio is good, it will get really good transcripts. Even with someone like me with a working-class English accent, it still kind of understands what I’m saying, and it would be – the transcript is very good. If you’ve got like an interview, a podcast, like a video podcast is perfect for this because it takes the two shots, one of you, one of the interviewee, and it puts them on top of each other. So, it does all of that for you.
It then does the subtitles, and they’ve got some like templates where you can choose the style of the captions. And then the virality score is kind of a score of how viral it thinks it can be but also based on the actual content. And sometimes I get a video out of it and I’m like, “It doesn’t really make sense.” Without the context, it doesn’t make sense. But for the most part, because it’s just the AI is taking the transcript, the written word of the spoken word, it can say, “Well, actually, this is a full sentence. This is a full paragraph.”
So, if I’m creating a video out of full paragraph, it’s going to make sense to the user that’s watching it. So, I think you’ve got to weigh it up between getting some output that every now and again is not so great or maybe the lowest scored content is not so great.
It’s great. So, out of the 10, maybe you only get seven good ones or five even versus having what we used to do, which was, have a VA watch the video, write down the timestamps, then give it to the editor. The editor would then go and do it. Then they caption it and they transcribe it. Honestly, that that whole piece there, which then we’d have to review the content as it came back, would take hours.
Whereas with Opus, as one example – there’s other tools that do the same thing as well. But with Opus, it would take us a matter of minutes to do that and then just review it. Watch the video back and review the transcript. That’s kind of it. And if you look at people like Gary Vee or the 10X guy, if you look at some of these guys that are flying content out and they’re just everywhere. Hormozi, he’s another guy, right? There’s just – you’re just seeing this content all the time. That’s because they’re using these tools. They’re getting the content and they’re just throwing it out like a machine.
Is it all good content? I don’t know. But really, when you’ve got a product or service, you need to be top of mind when someone is thinking about using your product or service. And the only way you can do that is if you dominate the socials and make sure you’re the person they’re seeing all the time or the product they’re seeing all the time.
Very interesting. Now, these little, short clips, are you suggesting, or do you recommend that they only used on one channel, or like this Opus program that you’re talking about, if it does cut and dice one of your premium videos, should it only stay exclusively on YouTube or also put it on TikTok? What about duplicate information?
Yeah, we put it on all platforms. I mean, the thing is, and back in the day, and I’m talking like five years ago or something like that, they used to say, “Why would you use the same content on all platforms? Because you don’t want somebody going to one platform and seeing the same content on another one.” But actually, the algorithms are so dire now, it’s so unlikely that you’re going to be served the same content, that you can put it on all the platforms, and you might find that one of them takes up, and this is definitely happened to us.
You’ll get a piece of content that takes off on TikTok. You’re like, “Oh my God. This is going to work everywhere.” It goes on Reels or on Shorts, and it’s like dead in the water. You get no views. It’s not working at all. So, absolutely, you should be putting it on all the platforms and testing it out, see what works, see which ones take off. Maybe dial in on that kind of content that’s taken off, but just don’t…
The worst thing you can do is do that one piece of signature content, put it on YouTube, and then just forget about it and not make the most of that content, and you said it earlier. You said it takes time and effort to create this long-form content. Well, make sure you get the most out. Squeeze every bit of benefit you can get out of this content.
Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense, Matt. I really appreciate what you’ve been telling us. In closing, what do you think is the most important thing you’d want our audience to take away from our conversation today about YouTube videos, Matt?
It’s always the same, and that is that I just want more people to take the platform seriously. I say to people all the time that YouTube is for every business. And people argue, and they say, “Oh, no. Maybe it wouldn’t work for my business for this reason, or that reason,” and it is absolutely a lie. It is for every business, and there’s a huge audience bigger than any other platform, in my opinion, of people that are desperate for content from your product or service. And why would you want a competitor showing up?
When somebody searches for a piece of content, why would you not want it to be you, your business, your product, your service that’s grabbing their attention and taking all that visual real estate that’s out there for the grabbing, really?
Excellent. This has been amazing, Matt. Thank you. I appreciate your time and the terrific YouTube video tips for entrepreneurs and small businesses that you’ve shared with us today.
If you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Matt Hughes, his work at The King of Video, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.
Really appreciate your listening. Be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next week with another information-packed episode of Business Confidential Now.
So, until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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