Today we chat with Sean Cannell, CEO of Think Media and co-founder of Video Influencers, all about YouTube secrets and success.
Sean is a YouTube expert, international speaker, business coach, and the best-selling author of YouTube Secrets. Sean built a seven-figure media company helping entrepreneurs and creatives build their influence and income with online video.
His YouTube channels have over one million subscribers. His videos have been viewed over 100 million times, and he has been featured as one of the “20 Must Watch YouTube Channels That Will Change Your Business” by Forbes.
Sean and his team are on a mission to help 10,000 people quit their day jobs to do what they love. He is passionate about giving tactical, practical advice to use video to spread your message.
He is from Arlington, Washington, and currently lives in Las Vegas, NV, with his wife Sonja and their two dogs, Rosie and Sophie.
HOW TO GET GOING ON YOUTUBE
Brandon Birkmeyer: What are the things I need to take this Zoom interview and make it YouTube appropriate? Would you recommend Upwork, or some other tool, or a company that can do editing? What about the transitions and the branding of that?
Sean Cannell: Number one, Vidchops or something like Video Husky are under $400 a month. You could get them to edit four videos a month. You just upload the footage to Dropbox and they’ll chop it up for you.
It’s like any onboarding of any team member, but once you get that system and that template good to go, you’re good to go.
For under $800 a month, you get unlimited edits (which really means every 48 hours.) You could be doing around fifteen videos a month. That’s a lot, so that becomes super affordable.
If you want to pull it in-house, you could use something like Filmora, which is a cheap video editor on Mac. You could use iMovie or Final Cut 10 and keep it super simple, or Adobe premier, if you got fancier.
YOUTUBE EDITING MAY NOT BE YOUR FIRST STEP
However, I would definitely recommend to most people listening, think about outsourcing the editing. I know this might feel like pressure because editing is the saving grace of, “What if I mess up? I have a chance to clean things up.” I would try to do as much heavy lifting as possible just in the show itself.
Here’s what I mean. Create yourself a template; just create yourself a script. I know public speaking is intimidating, and I’m sure we’re talking to people who don’t have a background in public speaking. If you were to publicly speak, it’s kind of like going live on any platform online.
You’re up there now. It’s thirty minutes long. You have to roll with it. Let’s say, for example, you hosted a panel at a conference as an interview show. You are not even the main thing. You just have to keep it going good, bad, or ugly. It’s going to be thirty minutes.
PUNCH PERFECTIONISM
My answer, Brandon, before even how do you edit, is don’t edit. That’s what I was telling my friend Cary. In his case, he had a team and whatnot, but was still thinking, “Well, how do we introduce this as a new workflow? This is another level of complexity.”
Don’t even worry about it. You can worry about that later. If you just commit to pressing record, punching perfectionism in the face, and getting started, then you just start uploading those videos.
What that creates is what leadership expert John Maxwell calls (as a law of leadership) The Big Mo. What you need is momentum. You start getting momentum and you start going, “Ah, I uploaded that 30 minutes straight-through recording four weeks in a row.”
CHANGE YOUR YOUTUBE MINDSET
I encourage people, especially on this getting started, in the hurdles and the mindsets and the insecurity. I get it. However, I want to encourage you that when you start posting content on YouTube, there probably will not be a lot of people there, especially if you’re really starting from scratch.
I actually want you to flip how that feels. How that could feel is, “I’m just wasting my time. Oh, why is nobody watching? Is this even worth doing? Sure enough, this verifies how my parents made me feel, that no one is going to accept me.”
FOCUS ON GOALS YOU CAN ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISH
Stop with all the negative self-talk, man. Here’s the deal. You have got to use your season in obscurity to prepare you for popularity. I actually think it’s a blessing to potentially commit to a year’s worth of YouTube videos, not focused on results goals, but focused on output goals.
This is such a mindset hack. We focus on results goals. We set goals like, “If I don’t get to one thousand subscribers or ten thousand subscribers in the next six months, I’m a failure.”
No, you’re not. Like everyone, it’s your race, your pace. What if you flipped it and said, “In the next year, I just want to do fifty-two uploads. That’s one a week. There’s the number: fifty-two. Success looks like hitting the number of outputs, not the actual results.
YOUTUBE BUSINESS MODELS
Brandon Birkmeyer: When you were starting to get going on YouTube, was there a business behind it? Was it just YouTube revenue, or was it was something else like speaking or coaching? I’d like to get a glimpse into that business model.
If someone is getting started and wants to be a personal brand business, what do you think is going to be beneficial in terms of how you design that business?
Sean Cannell: How do you design and monetize a personal brand on YouTube?
Brandon Birkmeyer: Yeah. Is it just ad sense, or is it also, for example, the coaching and the courses? Would you do that at the beginning or would you work towards that?
Sean Cannell: I think that being a personal brand doesn’t have to necessarily be considered an expert, but I think of it as the expert industry or the influencer industry. You can pick your path. There is a buffet of opportunities. We do all of these. In fact, we’ve done all of these at either a six or seven-figure level.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
HOW SEAN STARTED MONETIZING HIS YOUTUBE CHANNELS
Brandon Birkmeyer: But what did it look like for you starting? Maybe you made some mistakes, but what did you maybe learn along the way?
Sean Cannell: I found the shortest path to revenue. Step one is to define what is the shortest path to revenue for you. What is best for your niche or your industry?
For some it’s “I will eventually work with brands.” You could do that pretty early on YouTube. They call them nano influencers and micro-influencers. I’m not really sure what the breakdown is. I think if you’re under thirty thousand, you’re considered a micro-influencer and then you become mainstream as you grow from there.
You can be an influencer for anything: click funnels, Kajabi, a travel company, a skincare company, a leadership education membership site… There are a lot of different things.
UTILIZE AFFILIATE MARKETING
You could partner with affiliate marketing, where they don’t even necessarily know you’re an affiliate, but now you have your custom link.
I figured out how to rank videos. YouTube is a search engine and the videos could be watched for weeks, months, and years to come. People were looking for answers to specific questions, including questions like, what is the best camera for YouTube?
Then I discovered affiliate marketing and that I could sign up on amazon.com, get a link to a camera on Amazon, and put that on my YouTube description. Then when someone clicks that link, if they purchased something, I get paid.
What a lot of people don’t know is that when someone clicks that link, for twenty-four hours anything they purchase I get credit for. Even if they say, “Well, I’m not ready to buy a camera, but it is the holidays and I’m buying my husband a Breitling watch.” I think, “Thank God because that watch was three grand and I just made two hundred bucks.”
It can be anything: diapers, clothes, anything they just subscribed to like I Know What You Did Last Summer on Amazon prime video. You’re getting cuts on all that when they use your link.
FIND THE SHORTEST PATH TO YOUTUBE REVENUE
It depends on your niche and how you’re positioned, but I think the shortest path is affiliate marketing. For YouTube ads, you have to get one thousand subscribers and four thousand hours of watch time to even qualify for the YouTube partnership program.
Once you start monetizing the views you are getting, it might be fifty bucks a month, a hundred bucks a month. This is awesome, but it’s probably not going to pay your rent or your mortgage very quickly.
You want to find ways to do other things. Even better would be your own product. If you’re an affiliate, you might get four to ten percent of a one hundred dollar sale. However, if you have a one hundred dollar product, you get to keep all of that, besides the fees. You could do coaching, consulting, online courses; that could create more leverage.
Brandon Birkmeyer: I appreciate you talking about what you had done. I think we have these ideas, but we don’t ever try them because we don’t know which one is going to work for us. I’m sure it’s different for everyone. Gear was right in your wheelhouse.
Not only was the Amazon hack a great way to go, but also that means that you’re talking to these companies a lot of time and they might be sending you gear. There are some benefits that worked out both ways.
Not everyone’s going to have a gear channel. However, I wanted to hear your story because we hear everyone saying, “You can make money a lot of ways,” but they don’t often go into how did they actually do it.
CONNECT WITH SEAN
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