Make a business out of youtube - free webinar

When it comes to running an online business, use what I call “the golden triangle” which complement each other perfectly and can cross pollinate each other.
How can these platforms cross pollinate, why do the complement and how you can get a insanely good ROI.

In my article: “How to start a successful YouTube business” I dove into the ways you can make money with YouTube. 
In this article I expand on that with three platforms as an addition to your YouTube channel to expand your business opportunities.

1. YouTube

The first angle of the triangle is YouTube itself.
YouTube is the only social media platform where content lives “forever”.
The content on the Facebooks, Instagrams and Twitters are irrelevant tomorrow.

YouTube is an evergreen sales pitch machine that delivers warm leads on your doorstep.
If you make a YouTube video, you can talk 24/7 to the whole world when you are in bed sleeping, at the hairdresser, under the shower or kissing your wife.

By giving value for free, you establish authority and create trust (“that guy knows what he is talking about”).
The next step is to cash in on that trust by creating a product or service to sell to your YouTube audience.
Refer your audience to your website to make the sale.

2. Website

The second angle is your website.
A lot of YouTubers missing out on the extra opportunities that a website provides.

Hosting and domain name will only cost you as little as $50 a year.
A website can be as simple as a WordPress website with all your videos
Not having a website is a crime against your own success and wealth.

See your website as a means to attract extra traffic to your YouTube channel in an inexpensive way.
A website is a crucial part of your ecosystem, just like a mailing list and other social media are.

What can you put on your website?

Blog
A weblog with all your videos and/or all your transcriptions and/or video descriptions.
You need all the promotional help you can get with your YouTube channel.
If Google can help you by getting visitors to your website, you can feed that traffic back into your YouTube channel.
By publishing your scripts or transcriptions, you make your content discoverable by Google.

In my opinion, those $50 is well worth a weblog with your videos alone.
With a weblog you attract Google’s attention (and thus visitors), that are potential customers for your product that didn’t came via YouTube.
By using a weblog with content you already made, you simply multiply your chances for a sale because more people visit your website.

Your web shop
with ebooks, t-shirts, courses and other products.

A mailing list subscription form
If you show the subscription form next to your weblog with your videos/transcriptions, or you show a popup to gather email addresses from visitors, you have an extra opportunity to gather subscriptions outside of YouTube.

Your contact info
All your (other) social media details

Additional freebees
Like checklists, spreadsheets, ebooks, accompanying your videos.

Viewer can download them when they fill out their email address.
If you list your freebees publicly, it can attract visitors to the site via Google without YouTube even involved.

I have two websites that feed back into my YouTube channel.
The two websites have different goals.
I deliberately choose to fill them with different content, because Google doesn’t like duplicate content on websites. 
One website is my personal website for my Dexxter Clark brand, this is going to be broader in the future than only music production.
Here I have a blog with all my videos with a little description per video, a description you normally would type in your description box on your YouTube video detail page.

The other website is specific to music production and selling my product: a music production course.
To gather relevant interest from Google I make full blown blog posts out of my video scripts (and add a relevant YouTube video to the blog post).

3. Email list

The third angle is the email list.
Four key reasons why you need an email list:

Backup
Bear in mind that you don’t own YouTube.
If YouTube decides they want to go another direction, or they delete your channel for whatever reason (copyright strikes?? community strikes?? Fall out of grace of the algorithm??), then you are out of business.
 Building a fallback via email is a useful way to reach your fans and customers when your YouTube channel is gone. 

Money is in the emails
YouTube ad revenue does not make you are rich man, but emails do.
You have an interested audience, assuming you obtained email addresses out of free will by their owners. Your email list is a list of warm leads.

I love email because it’s a one-man-show.
When viewers read your email, your competition is not around the corner.
On social media your competition is displayed next to your content and just one click away.

The second reason why I love email because it doesn’t penalize you for sending people away, in fact it’s the opposite, it rewards you.
All social media do penalize you, also Google when it comes to your website.
There is no harm done when the marketing strategy you took for the email campaign doesn’t have the desired effect.
The potential of an email list is huge, especially a large one.

Feed back into YouTube
YouTube rewards you for sending viewers to their platform.
With email you can drive new traffic to your videos.

Dedicate an email to promote your new video, or even an old one.
YouTube is filled with so much junk, and your channel is filled with 500 videos, your fans are happy that you make selection for them to watch.

Besides selling a product to your mailing list subscribers, you can ask them to subscribe to your YouTube channel.
I was surprised how many subscribers on my email list weren’t subscribed to my YouTube channel.
When I asked them to subscribe, I saw a bump in the subscriber statistics on YouTube.

YouTube notifications are unreliable
The notifications algorithm doesn’t notify every subscriber, even when they enabled the bell notifications.
Even if viewers do get notified, you might have chosen a moment that you will be buried under hundred other notifications.

Take control of your own notifications by sending new videos to your email list.
You fans may not open your email, but at least they got a notification.

Building an email list takes time

Therefore it’s useful to start with an email list when you start a new YouTube channel.
Do it now, if you haven’t done it already.

Not only building the list takes take, sending good emails too takes practice.
By the time your channel is big, you know how to send proper emails.
Grow both your skills at the same time.

Freebee

Asking people to subscribe to your mailing list doesn’t work (anymore).
People receive a lot of (spam) emails on a daily basis.
Having a compelling offer however, does work!
That compelling offer is a freebee in exchange for the viewers email address.

A freebee could be:

A free ebook
A checklist or a list of manufacturers/products/tips etc. you talk about in the video
A quick start guide. A brief one or two page summary on how to get started with the basics.
A cheat sheet
An email course
A transcription of the video
A template. You can think of a word processor template for a script or agenda. Music producers use templates for their music for example
A mini course (this can be a teaser of a paid course)
A webinar

When I started my first YouTube channel, I was two years in when I started my email list.
In hindsight, that was way too late.

I should have started the list when I started the channel.
With that experience in my pocket, when I thought about starting a new channel, I also thought about the freebees to give away and wrote an ebook before I even shot the first video.

What do you tell them?

Make sure there is value in the mailings for your reader/viewer.
They don’t read your future emails when there is no value exchange, for example when you are only selling your product in your emails.
If you give value to the people, they keep reading your emails, and are more likely to purchase the product you also offer in the email.

What do you put in your emails?
First of all, update them on your new videos.
Videos that are coming up, reacting to frequently asked questions, behind the scenes, interesting developments in your business niche, a new ebook, a new product you try to sell etc.

How many times should you send an email?

As many times as possible with a maximum of one a day.

It’s very easy to miss an email.
If you send an email with eight videos once every four weeks, if a viewer misses one email, they miss eight videos.
With eight separate emails each dedicated to one of your eight videos, your viewer misses one email, they have still have seven mails left to see.

Marketeers have studied the phenomenon of customer choices in a store.
In week one, customers could choose between ten different ice cream flavors.
In week two, customers had only the choice between four ice cream flavors.

The store sold more ice cream in total in the second week with only four flavors.
The same thing applies to emails: target one email to one video (or one product) and give viewers only one link to click in that email.
People are lost for choices, so make it easy for them, give them no choice.
This is also how squeeze pages on websites work: you can only click one button: “order product”.

Mailing list software

Managing your email list by hand is not efficient.
There are websites that can manage your email lists and allows you to send emails.

You can start for free account with a service like mailchimp.com or mailerlite.com, but there are many others.
Those free accounts have a limit in the number of subscribers, but to start out and try it, it’s perfect.
If those are too expensive and you are tech savvy, you can install php scripts like ccMail, phpList, poMMo, webinsta or OpenNewsletter.

I am hesitant to host mailing software on my own website.
I don’t want my domain or ip-address blacklisted on lists of anti-spam organizations.
Email-list-companies will do everything in their power to prevent that from happening, it’s their bread and butter on the line.
When you are serious about YouTube and want to take it to the next level, take a look at my video training program: Viral Strategy.
The program takes you step-by-step through the process of getting views, subscribers and going viral.

For new creators I included a module that guides you step-by-step through the process of starting, creating and setting up a YouTube channel.