One Spoon At A Time

On Monday I posted about passing a milestone on YouTube – going over 3 Million Video Views.  The sharp eyed amongst you would have noticed that I was closing in on another milestone – that milestone of course is 10,000 Subscribers.

In the last 30 minutes I passed that milestone:

And here’s three lessons learned from getting 10,000 Subsribers.

1.  I Never Asked ANYONE To Subscribe.  Ever.

Think about that for a moment.  Not once, not ANYWHERE, in any of the 210 videos that I have on YouTube have I ever said: “Please subscribe to my channel.”  Or edited an annotation that says the same.

And yet if you listen to all the YouTube ‘goo-roos’ out there, you’ll find this is one of their constant pieces of advice.

WTF is up with that?

People who use YouTube will automatically subscribe to Channels that they want to see more content from.  In the same way that people who follow blogs will use RSS feeds.  Or the same way that people on Twitter ‘follow’ the tweeps that they like.

You don’t have to ask them.  Every time you have more than one call to action in a video, you diminish the effectiveness of all the calls to action (because the viewer is confused about what you want him to do).

Don’t waste your call to action on getting people to subscribe to your channel.  Here’s why that’s a waste of time:

2.  If I Want To Contact Those 10,000 Subscribers, I Can Only Do It In Batches of 25

Yep, you read right.

If I want to send a message to my subscribers I can only do it in batches of 25.  That would be 400 separate cut and paste copies of the same message each time I wanted to send a message out to my ‘subscribers.’

Forget that.

Instead, the biggest learning of the last post is repeated in this post too – so you get the idea I’m trying to send:

3.  Work Out How To Get People Off YouTube – And Onto Your Website…

And even better, onto your mailing list.

If you can work that out, then YouTube IS a brilliant place for people to discover you and then go back to your website and take action.

There’s More To Content Marketing With Video Than Just Throwing Videos Onto YouTube

I’ve been Content Marketing with video for four years now, almost to the day.  In those four years I’ve ran lots of experiments.  Tried out different things.  And worked out how to maximize the YouTube views you are getting on your videos so they laid to getting traffic back to your website.

Plus come up with a bunch of strategies I’ve not heard the YouTube ‘goo-roos’ talking about – things like video guest posting, content curation with video, why you should use other Video Aggregator sites and not just YouTube, understanding how video works in the Sales Cycle, dissecting the Call To Action down into its core components.  And more.

And all of that information is laid out in my Course – The Content Marketer’s Video Playbook.

As it’s Thanksgiving Week, I’m offering a special.  For a few more hours you can get it for $399 instead of $499.

At midnight on Wednesday 28th November (EST) this offer goes away.  AND I won’t be accepting any new members until 2013 at the earliest.  (If you’re a subscriber to my email list here you’ll know why).

Here’s the link again:

The Content Marketer’s Video Playbook

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