Episode 228 – About the Youtube Algorithm

Paul

Hello everyone and thanks for joining us for this episode of the Marketing Guides for Small Business podcast. My name is Paul and I'm joined by Ken Tucker from Changescape Web, Ian Cantle from Outsource Marketing, and Jeff Steck from Telerica Marketing Systems. So today we're talking about the YouTube algorithm. It's not geeky, don't worry. It's about how you can understand it and use it, but it isn't guesswork. It's a very sophisticated algorithm. Most you probably know that Google actually owns YouTube and it tries to predict what viewers want to watch and show them what they want to watch and understand. Understanding how it works can help you grow your channel and reach more viewers. So Ken, can you talk about the evolution of the YouTube algorithm?

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. So in the early days it was really all about view count. And so, you know, what that basically means is, you know, what was the biggest ranking factor tended to be if your videos were being viewed or not. And so people used to do things like batching videos and then blasting out all of their friends and getting them to go watch that video within the first 30 minutes that it was published, you know, to try to increase the view counts and that helped get it listed in the algorithm and displayed to other people. Unfortunately, that led to, you know, where there were clickbaity titles and thumbnails that were created. So then in 2012 there was a shift to watch time started to become more important. So that was, you know, how long could a particular video hold, you know, a viewer's attention. And then it did increase, you know, the creators to do a better job of storytelling, you know, creating higher quality videos and really focused on delivering value. In 2016 or so, used to look at user behavior more deeply, looking at things like likes on a video, shares, comments and session time. So how long somebody would stay on YouTube after watching your video also started to incorporate, you know, some, some surveys to measure satisfaction of the viewers. And now in 2025, what we're seeing is AI driven personalization. So the algorithm deeply rooted in using AI and machine learning and it now customizes recommendations by looking at an individual's watch history and preferences, engagement metrics like time, click through rates, likes, comments and shares viewer patterns among similar audiences. And so that's also led to the rise of YouTube shorts playing a pivotal role. These short term videos now serve as a great discovery tool and often help to reach a broader audience more quickly. And therefore, you know, are playing that key role in individual watch history and user engagement and things like that.

Paul

Yeah, it's always the crooks and scammers that make everything difficult for the rest of us. So Ian Ken touched on this a little bit. But how, without going into technoland, how, how does the YouTube algorithm work?

Jeff

magic. That's all you need to know. It's magic. In, in a sense it, it is so sophisticated that it is kind of magical in a way. Like all the algorithms. It's incredible the human ingenuity that's been put into serve a purpose. Right. And as with everything Google does, the purpose of its algorithms are to keep people using their tools, especially the. On the SEO side, right, paid side is an entirely different conversation. But on the SEO, the organic side, the longer you'll stay on their platform. So in this case we're talking YouTube. The longer you stay on the YouTube platform, the more it benefits Google and its advertisers. So you know, some of the key things about the algorithm are the behavior you show. So personalized recommendations are based on the user behavior analysis. Like what do you watch, how long do you, do you watch things for? You know, what are the topical interests? You have those, you know, even things like where are you located? All of that kind of stuff can be, can play into Google even takes into context that you're, you're viewing context. So you know, what time of day is it, how long have you been on there? I, what I find fascinating because with, with the advent of smart TVs and how I use YouTube personally, I, I'm looking at it as a user, but also as an SEO and kind of a data scientist, I'm trying to figure out like this is so interesting how now this is specifically related to the ads that show up when I'm watching YouTube. But it's kind of part of the, the user experience, so that's why I'm mentioning it. But even like how long the YouTube ads are, I don't know if you guys watch stuff on smart TVs through YouTube, but I always find it interesting like the, the duration of ads differ radically and I, I haven't analyzed it enough or researched it enough to know like what is it specifically that Google's looking at whereby it will extend the ads from like a 30 second ad, sometimes it's even like a 10 to 20 second ad right up to like two minutes. And I always find that interesting. Just, you know, something is going on in the algorithm. But Google's looking at click through rates, watch time and retention, negative feedback. Right, because you can provide feedback, engagement metrics, am I liking videos, am I commenting on them, am I sharing them? All of that kind of stuff plays a part. You know, I, how do I interact with suggested videos? Because Google's serving up suggested videos through its algorithm based on all of the things we've already talked about. And then yeah, the YouTube shorts is an entirely different algorithm as I understand it. And it, it, it's more reflective of like what everybody's trying to do, which is copy TikTok. And that's just fe an endless stream of you know, click algorithm bait to, you know, just keep you swiping, keep you on there as long as possible. But you know, focusing on what users are engaging with and their satisfaction is really the key thing to making the most of that or understanding the algorithm.

Paul

See there? And I thought the purpose of Google's algorithms was to make Google money.

Ian

Well that, that's why I even mentioned paid ads, because that's how they make the money. Right. They don't make money when, exactly how they make money when we create videos. Yeah.

Paul

But you know what's interesting? When we talk about Google's looking at the videos, you watch user behavior. And I don't think they have any way to account for this. I know they don't because if I'm, let's say I'm doing research on a topic for a particular client, I normally would never watch those videos. But I find YouTube showing, suggesting these videos related to that.

Ian

Yeah, I see that all the time. I mean I, you know, I have, I have a, a friend who owns a flower shop and I am not like an avid flower shop. You're a bird watcher. But all of a sudden when you start to like research their channels, their websites, their, you know, SEO, you start to get a lot more flower related ads, you know, recommended videos, all that kind of stuff.

Jeff

Yeah, it is, it is one of the, you know, hidden hazards of the business that we're in. Right. Is yeah, these algorithms must, must wonder like what the heck is this going to do is interests and things are so varied and broad in terms of topics and searches. But that brings up a tip for anyone who wants to kind of shield themselves from that a little bit. You know, you can go to a different browser, go to private window, turn a VPN on. There's a lot of ways to shield the stuff you're just passingly or casually interested in from the stuff you truly care about.

Ian

Just, just, just as a quick anecdote, I, I remember when my kids were younger, well I, and I mean younger, you know, when they were teenagers. I have two daughters. And the funny thing was, is that when they were, they would use my. My Google login a lot because it was set up on the TV on some of the computers we used as a family. And so I'd go back into YouTube and they would, you know, bookmark a whole bunch of things, and it might be on, like, makeup, it might be on, you know, manga videos, all sorts of kind of eccentric teenage tastes. Right. And then all of a sudden, I'm being served up all this stuff, and I'm like, where is this coming from? Oh, yeah, that's why. So, you know, parents beware. You might see some interesting recommended videos.

Paul

At least you knew what they were doing.

Ian

It's true. Yeah.

Jeff

And then when certain things popped up, you go, hey, we need to have a conversation.

Ian

Yep.

Paul

So, Jeff, the next few questions, because there's a lot in this. So I kind of. I'm gonna kind of break it up between.

Jeff

Yeah, we're gonna run Robin this one.

Paul

So. And I have some suggestions in there. So how do I improve my organic reach on YouTube?

Ian

Yep.

Jeff

So let's. Let's kind of set the stage for that question. So YouTube is itself a search engine, right. You can go in the top and you can, you know, ask it a question, type in some keywords, type in some topics, and it will go out, and it will look for videos that match that. It's actually the number two search engine, and it's owned by Google. So there's a lot of crossover between them, as we're just talking about. So that's why you want to improve your organic reaches, so that when people are looking for. Not necessarily for you by name, but for what you do as a business, what you're into, the content, you're providing that type of content, you want it to be found. So when we talk about improving organic reach, that's the goal, is to get seen organically, not having to spend money on ads to grow. And of course, just like any other marketing channel, SEO type of thing, social media type of thing, you can grow organically or you can grow by paid ads. So we're going to talk specifically about getting found in YouTube searches. And to a certain extent, you know, if you do a Google search, YouTube videos will show up in the organic part of Google as well. So really what we're trying to do is get found. Get our YouTube videos found organically. Probably be a direct search in YouTube, but possibly elsewhere on Google. So just like a lot of things with SEO, it comes down to A lot of these structural things that you need to do along with your content. A lot of the metadata that sits next to the content itself. So the content in the YouTube world is of course, the video, the metadata.

Paul

What's metadata? Can you explain that?

Jeff

So metadata is the stuff that is not the content itself. It goes around it, it relates to it, it gives more information about the content, gives hints, clues, tips, or sometimes the way I'll describe it for what this content is about. So that if, you know, somebody's doing a search that's going to show up before, I mean, the video, they're not going to be in a search result, see 10 videos automatically playing, right? They're going to see description of 10 possible videos, or as they scroll through, they're going to see different videos and it's going to have, you know, the headline of the video, it's going to have a little couple sentences about it, maybe some hashtags. Certainly if you're in shorts, you're going to see the hashtags that are loaded there. So what we're talking about is when you create a video and upload it, there's a lot of other stuff you need to do along with it to put all this metadata, the side data that goes along with the video, to help it get found. So just like you would do that type of thing in a blog post on your website, you know, you're going to have the meta description, you're going to have the title. All of those things are important in YouTube as well, because they will be seen. So when you create and upload the content into YouTube, you want to make sure that you're addressing the keywords that you care to be found about. And this will carry into what you record in the content as well. Because we're going to talk in a minute about, you know, transcriptions and things like that, but you want to, as you're talking naturally through your video or however you're generating the video, whether it's a, you know, AI generated explainer video, you know, whatever it is, you want to make sure that you're hitting the keywords that you want to be found in search in the content and then outside the content in terms of how you describe it when you upload it. So the tags, the meta description is the kind of the short description of what the video is that gets people think of it as a enticement for people to click on it. So the keywords in the metadata that you upload are very, very important for getting found organically because it's, it's what the algorithms are going to look at and index when they're trying to match up your video for the search that somebody's doing. And when people see the search results of what they could click on, it's, it's also going to help lead them into that. So metadata, just think of it as the data that's off on the side and it gives context about the video. Video. And again, use keyword research to figure out the most likely keywords people are going to be looking for so that your video can match up. You know, I describe search as a question and answer machine, right? People are asking questions and you want your content to be the answer. So you want to line your content up as best you can with the questions people are asking, the phrases they're using, the way they're searching for it. And that extends to the file name. The file name of the video can have keywords in it. So don't upload, you know, video, 1, 2, 3, dot, you know, whatever, xyz.mp4, right? Put the keywords that you care to be found for and that are relevant to what the video is about actually in the file name. Use them in the title of the video that's going to show. Use them in the description and then tag the videos with the keywords and that will help the content be found. You can use AI to help with that. You can, there are even AI tools I don't necessarily recommend. You start with the video and then take it into AI and say, tell me what the keywords are, tell me what the description should be. Because again, you need to think of that in advance and optimize for it before you record the video. But certainly once you record it, then you can take it back into AI and say, hey now generate a two sentence description for me, generate a short concise title for me. And it will do that. But you really want to work on optimizing that. The description itself can be a lot longer in two sentences. The first two sentences are what's going to be seen, but in the description itself be, be liberal with describing what this video is about, give a lot of details. You can outline, you know, key things you're going to talk about in the video. You can, even if it's a longer video, break it into segments, use the chapters function. You can timestamp things and then in the description you can list out the timestamps, let people know before they start watching the video what it's going to be about and why they want to stay and watch more of it. We're going to talk about that in a second. But be detailed, kind of give them the short version of what the video is about to entice them to watch the full version of the video where you give them all the details and all the information and then in the description. That's a good place to put calls to action as well. You can have links, you can put a little mini advertisement for your business or whatever you want people to, to do. So take advantage of all these features. It's more than just recording a 30 second video and uploading it and then the transcription. Once you do have the video, you can turn transcription on. You can maybe for a more accurate transcription, taken into another tool or even a human. I think that's largely being replaced with our services that will have humans listen to the video and actually type up the transcription, but take that transcription and set it up with the video as the actual transcription. And again, this is searchable content, so it can help with being found. It can also help in the accessible community, people that maybe have a harder time hearing what the video is about, seeing it. And that's where also turning transcription on, turning captioning on in the video can come into play. But it has SEO value as well for getting found. So again, it's about taking advantage of all, all the tips and tricks and all the bells and whistles and all the things that you can do besides just hey, here's a piece of content, let me upload it. It's all those other things that get set up and then the last thing before I'm going to hand the baton off on this one is what we're really shooting for is whole, whole video views. So you want people to watch the whole video, not be in 10 seconds and then jump away. If they jump away, then the problem, okay, I'm getting an echo now, so my lag must be back. If they jump away from your content actually counts against you. So you want to create really compelling content that is as long as it needs to be. What's the Abraham Lincoln quote? You know, how tall are you? I'm tall enough so that my legs reach the ground or something. I'm as tall as I need to be, but not taller. That's what you want your videos to be as long as they need to be, but not longer. Just don't drone on and on like I'm doing right now. Set the hook, have a really strong opening statement, provide the information that people needs, match the expectations you set in the title, the title, remember, is a little bit of an advertisement for your video. So I think Ian was talking about, you know, spammy thumbnails and spammy headlines. Don't do that. Set an expectation that your video is going to meet and then meet it in the video. And then divide the video up where it's appropriate and use chapters. Let people know what they're, you know, signing up for. Signing up for in the sense of watching the video and give them a reason to want to stay for the whole thing. And if you're looking at your analytics, use your analytics. And if you see people dropping off your videos early, consistently, then you've got a question, why? And maybe you should shorten your videos. Maybe you should break them up into two. Maybe you should do a better job of setting expectations up front, but take advantage of all the features that Google has to get found. And then make sure that once people find you, they're staying around for the whole video because you're adding good value to them and providing the expectation, meeting the expectations that you set.

Paul

And you can also embed that video on your website with that transcription.

Jeff

Oh, absolutely. There are so much you can do. And we talked, have talked before in other podcasts about repurposing content. Video is a great starting point, and then you can derive social media posts from it. If it's long enough video, you can probably derive a blog article from it. Video is a great starting point. And then you take it into AI tools or just, you know, manually edit it and get a lot of other content from it.

Paul

All right, good, Good stuff. So, Ken, let's move on to you with same question.

Ken

Yeah, so I'm going to start out by focusing on things that are getting people to watch your videos and come back and watch your videos. So first couple of things are like the, the conversational conclusions, the way that you end your video, if you will. Do you have a call to action to ask people, hey, if you like this video, check out my next video on and. And point them to that video. Using end cards to help just automatically direct people. We'll talk a little bit more here in just a second about playlists, but having videos and playlists that are autoplayed so that people can just kind of continue to watch all of that. And really what you want to try to do is you want to try to guide the viewer's journey. And so having a series of videos that you're. That you're talking about can be very, very beneficial. This goes back to exactly what Jeff was Talking about, you know, in whole watched videos, you want to, you want to try to get your videos to be watched the whole way. And you know, having end cards, having calls to action at the very end, even a verbal call to action. Like I said, you know, if you like this video, check out these other videos is a great way to do that. The goal is to keep people on your channel. When you keep people on your channel, that's a signal to the algorithm that your content is worth sticking around for, but also potentially recommending. So next I want to talk about subscriptions. So subscriptions are also a signal that the viewer finds your content valuable enough to where they want to keep coming back. They want to know when you're producing new content. So you can grow your subscriber base in a variety of ways. You can have personalized calls to action where you ask them to subscribe and they get weekly bonuses, subscriber only perks where maybe they get behind the scenes videos or exclusive Q and A sessions using watermarks or you know, features that YouTube provides so that it always makes it easy for people to subscribe to your, to your video or to your channel. Make sure that that's always turned on. It's just very important to do that. It increases your channel's authority and visibility as you grow more and more subscribers. Again, it's just a great signal to YouTube that people find your content valuable enough to subscribe and want to be notified as you create brand new content. So serial views. So this is where having a playlist that you create is really important and having that set to autoplay, creating a video series, for example, a 30 day challenge or a seven day, you know, seven day sprint or something like that, where people know that there's going to be a series of videos and they're going to come back and they're going to watch those over the course of whatever time frame you specify. That's really powerful. And with each video, have a little bit of a cliffhanger or a teaser to get them to make sure that they come back to catch the next video in that series or in that playlist. You know, for example, you know, come back tomorrow and I'll reveal how this, this particular tip helped me gather, you know, increase my search rankings by 50% or something like that. So the longer people watch, the longer they stay on your channel, the more they watch all your videos all the way through. That's really gold to the algorithm. So that's really what you want to be focusing on. Then you also want to make sure that you're cross promoting your content. As Jeff mentioned, you know, content repurposing is, is a, is a great strategy and video is, is the best piece of content that I can think of to repurpose. You can use content, you know, that you take from your YouTube video that you put on YouTube, turn it into YouTube shorts that's actually on the YouTube platform, but it's, it's smaller bytes, it's more consumable. Take the, take certain clips, chunk them out and, and post them on social media. Instagram, Facebook, Tick Tock, Twitter, x, you know, LinkedIn, whatever. Your platform of choice is upload those video clips directly to those channels so that you're maximizing the visibility of that video content of those short clips that you're putting, you know, on the platform. Because every one of these social media platforms, they want their, their own unique content posted. They don't like to send people off platform. But what you can do is you can upload short video content to Instagram or TikTok, Facebook, whatever, and then have a link and a call to action, you know, and like a first comment to drive people to the full YouTube video or to subscribe to your YouTube channel to learn more or to take advantage of, you know, some asset that you've created, you know, that, that is tied to a video series that you've created. So there's really just, you know, a lot of ways that you, you can do this. It's all about, you know, just getting people to watch your, your videos and stay engaged and, and, and take advantage of a lot of the features that, that YouTube does give you advantage of. As Jeff, as you mentioned, I mean, I think a lot of people, they make the mistake where they literally just, they create the video, they stick it up there, and that's all they do. You know, they, they type in a minimal description because it's a pain in the butt because it's like, oh yeah, I need to have a subscription. So they do it literally just to get the video posted, but you're missing a big opportunity if you're not taking advantage of these other strategies. And there are a whole series of tools I'm sure we'll probably talk about, you know, that can help you do, you know, do things to, to make it easier to manage your videos and increase your organic reach.

Paul

All right, good answers. Ian.

Ian

Yeah, man.

Paul

So analytics, thumbnails, shorts, all that. How does that help me improve my organic reach?

Ian

Yeah, I mean, if you don't, if you don't know, I mean, to to actually use analytics you have to have created some videos and be able to look at the analytics right within, within YouTube. But it allows you to look at things like audience retention, like do people drop off in my video at a certain point? This is actually really good intelligence because you know, if you're putting up really long form videos and people are dropping off at the same spot, that tells you something, right? The other one is click through rates. It'll actually tell you what the measurement of of particular videos of how many people saw your thumbnail and how many people clicked on that thumbnail. Super powerful. And, and that will lead into the discussion about thumbnails. But. And then demographics and traffic sources. Where are people coming when they actually are watching my video? That's super, super powerful. And then engagement metrics like likes, comments and shares are people engaging with the content that I'm creating. So all of that metric information is available through YouTube Studio. If you're not using it now, you should, especially if you're a content creator or, or have started and want to understand what content I should be creating. On top of all this, I would actually recommend with all of the optimization conversation we've already had, I would highly recommend like an easy button for optimizing your content is to use things like Vidiq Tubics. There's a bunch of plugins or extensions that you can use with YouTube and what they allow you to do is not only see metrics at a deeper level in many cases, but they will help you do the keyword research related to the keywords and topics of the videos you even want to create. So they can help you in guiding actually what content you're going to be creating by giving you information that you really can't find anywhere else on YouTube. And then as far as the. So I talked about how the analytics can actually tell you a little bit about click through rates related to your thumbnails. It's really well known that one of the key things to actually getting people to click on your thumbnail into your video is the quality of thumbnail. Like you absolutely have to create a compelling thumbnail that's going to get people to click on it. Some ways to do that. Canva has some fantastic templates. You can use those eight really good thumbnails. Adobe Express is another option, but Canva just seems to be so ubiquitous now. Title optimization, those tools I mentioned can help you with the title optimization and they can help you before. I mean I always recommend doing this before. Like if you plan well, you'll Execute better. So. But they can also help you do these optimizations after the fact once you've uploaded your video. Title optimization, really, really important because if your title isn't compelling, your thumbnail's not compelling. Why would anybody click on it? You can do split testing. You can test different thumbnails and different titles to see what's going on. And then lastly, shorts. Shorts. Obviously, YouTube Shorts is a growing area. I don't think it's really caught on. You know, it's certainly not at TikTok levels as far as popularity, but really, you know, as Ken was talking about, both Ken and Jeff actually talked about repurposing content, creating short content from long form content. What it's so powerful at is it can be kind of more of a top of the funnel type content because it engages people, it kind of punches them in the face. They're like, whoa, I got to hear more of that. Because people like getting punched in the face. Just some tips. Thanks, Ken. You know what's really powerful about those short form videos through YouTube shorts is that you can focus on one idea. Like just get one idea across, make it punchy, make it effective, make it powerful. And then make sure you turn on captions or put. You can bake captions in as well. And then that, that is just a really great way to get that content out there. That can then lead to your longer form content or some other resources you have.

Ken

Yeah, and another. Great tools too, buddy.

Ian

Yeah, I should have mentioned that. That's a very common one. Yeah, good point. It's very friend, very friendly. Just the name, right? Tubebuddy.

Ken

Yeah.

Jeff

You know when you were talking about the thumbnails you hit on a, a pet peeve of mine. If you don't put your own thumbnail in, YouTube is going to go look into your video and it's going to find, you know, these two or three or four, I can't remember how many they have places where it will generate. It'll grab a frame of the video essentially and use that as the thumbnail. And they're always, they're not always that flattering. You, you might get one that's like.

Ian

Yeah, it's. It. Actually, I think that's part of the algorithm, Jeff. It waits till one eyes open and one eye's closed and you have, you know, stuff dripping out of your nose.

Jeff

And, and, you know, you. And now especially with the AI tools, it's so easy to generate good thumbnails. Like you said, Canva.

Ian

Yeah.

Jeff

And then some of the other things that you hit on for shorts especially, you know, there are, are tools that will take videos and we'll extract out shorts from them. Put, you know, the, the chrome around it, you know, your titles, your intros, your outros will do the captioning, you know, bubble words as you go. You know, there's no shortage of ways to get that done. So almost, you know, no excuse for not doing it.

Ian

Yeah, one, one quick additional point to all that is watch out for computer generated. Whether it's transcripts. Right. Computer generated transcripts and captions. YouTube has that built in. Not always perfect. And even the tools that you're talking about, Jeff, like have a human review the stuff. I can't tell you, like the number of times we catch typos on my name on, you know, like various things. It will just get wrong and, and it's very embarrassing. Especially if you bake in captions on any social media shorts or videos for your clients or for your business and kind of do that.

Jeff

Yeah. The other thing with captions, whether you use YouTubes and you, you know, take a look at what it did and correct it if you need to, or even upload your own, whether you use YouTube's or whether you use one of these tools that generates them, either or don't do both, you don't want captions on top of captions. It's really hard to read.

Ian

We've all seen that, right?

Jeff

Yep.

Ian

I mean I always, I. My preference now having done this for a while and maybe you guys have have your own thoughts, but I. We use a tool predominantly called descript for our video editing, which is incredible. But it will also do the transcriptions. Right. Because you're basically working in the transcription to do the editing and so it's just fantastic that way. So we upload our transcripts when we do videos from descript, but there's other tools too. But that's just the one we found super, super helpful.

Jeff

Yeah, there are many tools and their domains all have AI on the end of them, right?

Ian

That's right, yeah. Anyways, I won't go into it, but get using YouTube people.

Paul

So. All right, Jeff, so what about YouTube shorts?

Jeff

Oh, shorts. You want me to hit more on shorts?

Ian

Oh, sorry, did I cover your topic? I thought that was my tip.

Paul

No, we never really explained. Ken mentioned them, Ian mentioned them, but we never really explained what they were, why you want to use them, what they can do.

Jeff

Yeah, give me my. Take a little bit to expand on, you know, what, what we've already said, I think to a Large part, their audience may be generational dependent, although I'm finding myself getting drawn into more and more shorts. For some of the creators that I follow, shorts are what they sound like. They're a short form media. They tend to be vertical because you've got more and more people that are, you know, watching them on these things and they're not going on for eight or 10 minutes. They're, I mean, what, maybe a minute tops. They're punchy, they're to, to demonstrate something, to get the point across. Yeah, you keep doing that, you're scaring us all, Ken. That's. What was that old Saturday Night Live Hanson. Fran's gonna pump you up. So shorts are, especially in the younger generation. So if that's a demographic that's important to you, YouTube shorts, Facebook Reels, TikToks are all things to consider, but YouTube brought them out in response to TikTok and, and I think Facebook. I'm not sure who came first. TikTok was first, but who came second. No Facebook or, or, you know, YouTube. But they are the short punchy, get your attention, be memorable. They tend to be sticky, they get talked about, they're not long in depth, like I said, dissertations on how to, you know, dismantle an atomic bomb to borrow a YouTube album title. They're just short to the point being remembered and get somebody to take an action and they. If you're not doing them because, well, you know, We've been on YouTube for 10 years, we never did shorts and we don't need to do them now. Well, you're probably wrong. If your target audience is on them, it always goes back to everything we say. Pay attention to what your target audience wants.

Paul

So can you use YouTube shorts like Ken was talking about earlier, about linking out to a, a long form video that covers the topic more in depth? Or is that not an appropriate use of shorts?

Jeff

Think about that. I'd have to go look at the specific technical things for sure. I mean, at the very least you can mention it. Hey, for more, go see, go to my channel because if you're on the short, you can easily get to the channel. I can't remember off top my head what linking capabilities they have them. I would think you probably could be able to. But even if they don't make it easy from a linking point of view, then, you know, you know, look below, you know, click on my channel, go look at the longer form, go look at the playlists.

Paul

Yeah, I, I didn't know either. I didn't know if Maybe you did.

Jeff

Oh, caught us.

Paul

So, anyone else have anything more on this particular topic they want to add?

Ken

Yeah, I, I think, you know, when we had Rand Fishkin on a couple of weeks ago, he, you know, one of the things that he stressed is just, and Paul, I know you say this a lot. Google loves Google. They do, we all say it. And you know, YouTube is owned by Google, therefore, and video content is the top performing content right now and probably will be in the foreseeable future. Human brains are wired to remember visual content a lot better and, and you know, people, it's just a very powerful medium to be able to communicate. So I, I think you got to have a YouTube strategy. You're missing the boat if you're not doing it. And as more and more content is created, what's going to be interesting to see is there's the potential for a mass proliferation of video content that is AI generated without any human oversight review involvement. Somebody just literally plugs in a prompt, generates a video, posts it out there, doesn't even think about it. So there's going to be a lot of work that's going to need to be done from the user base of YouTube to continue to vet and validate information. In some cases that's going to outpace the ability of the tools and the algorithms that are out there. So while it's exciting to think about what's possible, you can literally like Julia McCoy. You know, she has one of the coolest YouTube channels out there in my opinion. She has an AI video avatar that delivers her YouTube video. It uses her voice and it uses an AI video clone of herself that she's used to train. What's cool about what she does though is she's a content writer, so she writes all of her content that her AI video clone says. So she's, she's not just letting something be auto generated without vetting it, she's actually writing that content and then using AI to be the spokesperson and the spokes, voice, if you will, of that content, which I think is a really cool, fascinating idea. So definitely check out Julian McCoy's YouTube channel. Also just fantastic source of information for anything going on in the world of AI.

Jeff

Can you just spur a thought on, which is a lot of people may have an aversion to doing video and creating YouTube. Oh, I don't want to be on camera. I'm Paul. But you can if you can got through spending an hour or two to train one of these AI tools on your mannerisms. You actually go in front of it and you speak and you run through and it picks up different language patterns and gestures and how you would speak. And then after that it's done and you can generate a lot of content like Julia does. That looks like you speaking, delivering the content and you can look at it and you go, okay, yeah, that's probably AI but doesn't matter if the content is, is well written and, and well delivered, you know, well enough delivered. It's a way for people that aren't comfortable being on camera, don't want to take the time to be on camera, to be able to be on camera without having to go through the trauma every week of recording something.

Ken

That's. Yeah. And that, that, that leads to another point where right now one of the hottest, best performing types of videos is faceless, faceless video where there's not even a human that's on there. You may have a human AI voice, a human voice or an AI generated voice, but the rest of the video is all generated content. And you know, those are performing exceptionally well. We're going to be having a guest coming up here in a month or so, Molly Mahoney, who I know can talk quite a bit about that. She's been very successful with that strategy. Don't, don't, you know, don't let being on camera intimidate you and prevent you from doing video. We've got clients, there's no way they would ever be on video. But guess what? We can write a script for them. They review the script. They make sure it's accurate in the way it describes their business, their processes, what they do, what they value, whatever. We can get either, you know, voice actors or AI generated voice and we can use a combination of their photos or videos that they provide, B roll, which is just, you know, stock video that you can, you can buy from sources or you can have created, you know, your clients can create B roll if they wanted to and, and you can assemble super quality videos that, you know, no human has to show up and be on camera to the extent that you can. It's great. Rand Fish can also talked about the power of Persona. You know, and if you're a good, appealing, attractive in however you define the word attractive, spokesperson, you probably already have a leg up on some of your competitors and maybe all of your competitors. Video is the best platform to take advantage of that. That whether right or wrong, it's, it's, it's kind of the reality.

Ian

I would just add a point to that and that's, don't be lazy. Review the content AI creates and fix obvious issues. I've actually been on the treadmill watching a video of something I'm interested in, and they've done just what you've talked about, Ken. Faceless videos. The content, the, the, the audio content is exactly what I was looking for. But as I'm watching it, I'm like, this is stupid. Like, some of the visuals, they obviously did not watch it and go, that doesn't relate. That doesn't relate. Like, because you have to remember, AI is, is a, A bot. Right. It's, it's. And it's not particularly good at not being absolutely. What's the word I'm looking for?

Ken

Well, up to date for one. Accurate.

Ian

That literal. Literal is the word I was thinking of. It takes things very literally sometimes.

Ken

Yeah.

Ian

Which isn't what you're. You were doing the, the last things I wanted to mention, though, and we didn't really go into this, but make sure your content has a purpose. Like, don't just be like, man, this is the latest thing I got to create content. So you jump in and start creating content because there's lots of people that just want to check things off, check the box off in their task list. So create it with a purpose. Know what that purpose is. And then here, here is the ultimate commandment. Know thy audience. Like, you have to know your audience or you're just wasting your time. Energy, effort, AI processors, like, know thy audience. Look at the metrics as, as you create content and see what people are actually gravitating towards.

Jeff

So. So, Ian, it almost sounds like you advocate having a content calendar and including video on that calendar.

Ian

Dude, having a plan. Right, That's. That sounds fair. You are brilliant. That. Yes, everybody create a content calendar and have a column or a row on video content. I love it, Jeff.

Jeff

As along with all the other content. And again, keep in mind that, you know, you're going to be working common themes and they're going to play off each other and you can derive, you know, different forms of content from other forms of content.

Ian

Yep.

Jeff

Right.

Paul

I think this is probably a good place to wrap up. Thank you everyone for sharing your thoughts and insights on this topic. And thanks to our audience and Ian, can you take us out?

Ian

Yeah, I think so. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. We're so glad you're. You're part of our community. Please share with other people that you think will find this valuable. There's other business owners, other small business marketers that need help. Save them the pain of going down the wrong paths. So share this. Hit smash that subscribe button, as Ken likes to say. Smash it. Punch it. Punch that.

Jeff

That's in the how to do YouTube videos, because that's. I hear everybody saying that now. I had to get a new keyboard. I was smashing button so hard.

Ian

There you go. So thanks for being with us today. And until next week, keep calm and video market on.