Meredith 0:00
Three months ago, I started this podcast, video brand infusion as a video podcast on YouTube with an audio podcast hosted by Buzzsprout. And today I want to share. How did it go like has it grown my audience? Has it generated revenue, and is it worth the extra time and effort to create videos along with a podcast, or to create a podcast along with the videos that you create. Let's talk about it here on Video brand infusion, episode number 15, I'm your host, Meredith Marsh, and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can generate consistent revenue and build your video brand online. And if you don't already know this about me, I am pro video. So if you're looking for some validation on the idea that video podcasting doesn't work and YouTube is a waste of time, you came to the wrong place, honey. So I published my first episode of video brand infusion on April 4, 2024 and I'm recording this on Friday, June 28 so it hasn't been a full three months, and I skipped an episode last week, but it's basically been three months 90 days. I launched with three episodes already in place. So that's why I'm on episode 15, I want to break down some stats for you, like the fact that my podcast videos on YouTube have over 8000 views, and the audio episodes have read at little over 500 downloads. That's a pretty big difference. So what does that mean, and does it even matter? Plus, I want to share what the actual results are in my business. If you listen to this podcast, you know, I'm not just here to grow an audience. I don't think anyone should be just here to grow an audience. You're here to grow your business. So we're going to talk numbers like leads and sales from the video podcast on YouTube versus the audio podcast. And ultimately, I just want to riff on whether it's worth it to take the extra time to create a video podcast, or if you already create YouTube videos, is it worth the extra time to create an audio version of that and throw that into a podcast RSS feed? Does it actually pay off for you? Somehow? I want to share my experience with that. I always was kind of against podcasting on YouTube because it just didn't make sense to me personally, but once YouTube started to shift towards wanting to have their fingers in the podcast space. I thought we we should probably look at this and give it a try. I have talked before about how I hemmed and hawed about whether to start a video podcast on this channel, on my main channel, or start a whole new channel. And I was, like, spinning my wheels for a year, or, like, over a year, because I could not make that decision. The conventional wisdom of starting something new on YouTube is, if it's for a different audience, then it should be on a different channel. And that's really what was hanging me up in the decision was, is this for a different audience? Because my YouTube channel, when I look at the actual analytics and look at the actual topics in content, YouTube sees my channel as content about creating videos, gear, setup, recording, software, editing, creating videos, right? And so that's how people are finding me on YouTube when I would publish something on my channel that had anything to do with revenue, it performed awful, like, low views, no comments. It was just like, not received. Well, didn't really do much for me, and so I was very leery of putting content around creating a YouTube funnel and generating revenue with courses and programs. I was very leery of talking about that on my main channel. And what ultimately helped me decide to just go ahead and do it was where I want my business to, to head, where, you know, the the audience that I want to attract, the people that I want to work with, are people that create videos, and so they have to have gear and set up and record and edit and use software, and they're doing that for their online business. They're doing that to create. Other audience so that they can generate revenue. You know, I'm a huge proponent of looking at your analytics and using your analytics like a crystal ball to help you make decisions about what to post on your channel and what not to post on your channel. And this is a case where I just made a judgment call and went with my gut and made a decision based on what I wanted to happen, like best case scenario, it works out great, and people love it, and my audience grows, and life is good. So let's talk about some of the stats, because I just got an email the other day from buzz sprout that said I had reached 500 downloads. And I was like, Woohoo. That is exciting. I wonder how many views the videos got on my YouTube channel. So I went and looked that up, and it was like over 8000 8000 views on the video podcast episodes themselves, not 8000 on like all of my videos, just the ones that are like the podcast episodes. But this isn't an apples to apples comparison, right? Because I already had an audience on YouTube. There were already people there to watch the podcast episodes that I put on YouTube. So it does make sense. When you look at the numbers, it looks like, wow. Of course, video podcasting works, but when you take into account there's an existing audience on YouTube, there is no existing audience where my RSS feed is. And so of course, there's going to be way more views on YouTube than downloads on the podcast. What really surprises me, though is how well the podcast episodes do on YouTube, because I was expecting that, you know, there was a small segment of my audience who were interested in the topics that I discuss on the podcast, and those people would listen to it, and that would be great, and that would be like, good enough, right? But when I started publishing, like, the first three episodes, I uploaded all at once, and then after that, it was every week on Sundays, the comments that I've been getting from you guys have been incredible. They've been detailed and thoughtful. And you know, wow, thank you for helping me think about this a little bit differently, which is, like, that's why you create content, right? So that's very fulfilling and gratifying to me to see those comments, and that's wonderful. But also the videos themselves, like views wise, are actually doing really well, way better than I expected. To give you a few more stats, I'm just looking at a group of my podcast episodes on YouTube alone, and I have brought in $140 in ad revenue, okay, which there's no ad revenue coming from the audio feed. And even if there was, it wouldn't be $140 worth. It might be like 14 cents worth. I've gained 86 subscribers directly from those podcast episodes. Okay, coming over to my Buzzsprout stats, in the last 90 days, 513
Meredith 8:31
downloads episode number seven. Start YouTube from scratch, how I tell my clients, has the most downloads at 47 and looking over at my YouTube stats, that is the video that also has the most views, that has 988, views, and that one also gained me the most subscribers. Buzzsprout tells me that my next episode, will probably get 44 downloads, which I guess is one way of thinking about like, how many people are subscribed to the podcast, and I have no way of knowing if those 44 people found me on YouTube and now they also subscribe on the podcast, or if the podcast itself is somehow gaining its own subscribers. I have no idea, but if you want to know a little, a little secret, if you're listening to this as an audio podcast, in the description, there should be a link there where you can send me a text. And Buzzsprout has this really cool feature where it opens up your text app, you can shoot me a text. I can't respond to it, and I don't see your phone number or anything. I don't it's totally anonymous. You can tell me if you found me strictly through audio, and you've never you didn't even know that Meredith on YouTube even existed when you found this content and. Me, know, or you just shoot me a text and say hi, I think I can put the link in the YouTube description too, so you can check that out in the YouTube description and test it out for me. So what are the actual results from a business perspective? And like, did me having a video podcast generate revenue for my business. That's what you probably want to know, right? Well, I set up a completely brand new lead magnet, basically, for the podcast that I pretty much only promote on the podcast. So in the video podcast episodes and the audio podcast episodes, you hear me talk about creating a set and forget it YouTube funnel, and I created a lead magnet, which is a video where I explain the ai t method, and I show you how, how I set up a YouTube funnel, how to set up a YouTube funnel for your business so that you can generate revenue, so that lead magnet is completely like, sort of like, self contained to the podcast, because I really wanted to test this out, if I'm going to create content, it needs to help the business grow, And the way I do that is through building my email list and selling my courses and programs. So how did this shake out? This is according to Google Analytics, Google Analytics four, by the way, and I created UTM parameter links, or links with UTM parameters. If you're a nerd like me, you know what I'm talking about. But basically what that means is I'm able to in my analytics track whether my traffic came from YouTube or the audio podcast. So I had 107 users land on my lead magnet opt in page, right? So 107 people according to Google Analytics, nine of those people came through the podcast audio podcast link. So you would have been listening to the podcast in a podcast player. You click the link, that's nine people. That's 8.4% of those 107 users, 58 people came through what I call my billboard video. That's the first episode, the first video podcast episode in the podcast, 58 people. That's 54% 30 people through my profile visits, which means my YouTube, like bio, or maybe even, I don't know if I have the link in, like my instagram or my Tiktok, but profile visits, that was 28% which I was actually really surprised by that. And then 10 people came either from the blog or direct or not, says that's 9.3% now, again, we can't really compare apples to apples here. We of course, there's going to be more people that came from YouTube. There's more people that watch the video podcast on YouTube than listen to it on audio, right? So 54% of my leads came from YouTube. 8% came through audio only. So that covers the traffic, where the traffic to my lead, like my lead magnet, came from, right? What about the actual number of leads? It's somewhere around 76 or so. It's a little hard to tell, because I tested my lead form a couple times, and I had people that I know have gone through the funnel just to, like, check out the funnel. They're not, they're not like a legitimate lead. So best I can tell, I've got about 76 and I've had seven sales of my YouTube funnel, course. So it's something somewhere around, like 6.5% conversion from leads to sales, which, in in my experience, is an excellent number in terms of actual dollar amount. We're talking about, like around 4000 ish dollars. So when I look at this, I'm kind of thinking like, okay, so is the is the time and the effort that I put into creating the content for the podcast and getting them published and everything is that worth $4,000 but let's not forget that, because of the way that YouTube works, because of the algorithms that take place on YouTube, The content that I've already published continues to get views and leads and sales over time, and for me, when I consider the comments and the engagement and the emails that I've received from people who love the podcast and love the topics and I love Korea. Creating the podcast as well. Then to me, yeah, I it, it's it's paying off for me, not just monetarily, but also just from a business perspective and from a like fulfillment perspective. And I have more thoughts on this, and I don't know if I should just put these in another episode or what, but we're here, so let's talk about it. I still continue to see, or I hear people who are pro audio podcast, people who claim to not be anti video but anti video podcast, people who are just adamant that it takes so much extra time to make videos. Takes more money. It takes more effort. It's going to take you more time to edit.
Meredith 15:45
There's people out there saying, Well, you have to edit the audio version, and then you have to edit the video version, and it's just not worth it. I just laid out for you the answer to is it worth it? For me, coming from somebody who already has a YouTube channel, already has YouTube equipment, video equipment, and already knows how to edit videos. Is it worth it for me? Yes, of course, but I do want to share a couple of key, key components, or key reasons why I think it's working so well for me, and one of them is because I am recording as a video and editing as a video, and then I have completely automated the process of turning it into an mp three so I'm using auphonic. So how do you say it? I have a workflow setup with auphonic where I take my video and I drop it into a Google Drive folder, the minions in the cloud, they take the video and they turn it into an mp three and actually, before they do that, they add a little audio outro to the end that is completely pre recorded, and it also adjusts some of the audio levels and stuff like that. And then it spits it back out in Google Drive for me, and I can just upload that to Buzzsprout. It's the same title, it's the same description, everything else is the same, and I'm only editing it the one time. So because I have that workflow in place for me, it's a total no brainer. The other thing too is obviously, my background is in not just creating videos, but in YouTube. And so it's really sort of second nature now to come up with podcast episode titles that are also good hooks, when you consider the fact that I know what works for me and for my channel when it comes to titling and ideation and thumbnails, because I've been doing it for so long, and because I have an established channel that I think is part of why The podcast works so well on YouTube, because I already have an established pattern here, like I already know what I'm doing here, and it's not that much different than coming up with the titles and topics and thumbnails for a regular YouTube video and my podcast Episodes are relatively easy to record. This one is a little bit different. I'm a little bit off of my regular framework for this particular episode, but I have a script framework that I use for every single episode, so that I don't have to think about the format. I don't have to wonder what I'm going to say where and when. All I have to do is think about what the topic is, and it's kind of like fill in the blank for me. So I am planning to continue with the podcast here on my channel. I initially, when I started out, I thought I'm going to do like, three months and then take a break and regroup and figure out, do I still want to do this? I already know I still want to do it, but over the last month, quick side note, I've really been like recording my videos the day before they get published. This is I'm two days before right now, and so I'm getting a little bit burned out from not being ahead of the game, and so I may take a couple weeks off, or I may be back next Sunday. It kind of depends how next week goes for me. But if there are specific topics that you're hoping that I cover on the video brand infusion podcast, please let me know down in the comments and try that text link, see if you can send me a message. And if you want to see some of these numbers for yourself, where you're getting views, those views turn into leads. Those leads turn into sales. Episode number one of the video brand infusion podcast is where I break down exactly how my YouTube Funnel System. Works, what it looks like, and how to create one for yourself. So I will put a link down in the description to episode number one so that you can start generating consistent revenue with the content that you're creating. Whether it's a video podcast or just a YouTube channel, it'll work either way.
