Transcription
contractors. I got 1.4 million views on a YouTube channel I started four months ago without ever going viral. If you are a plumber, HVAC, electrician, garage door, roofer, painter, other home service business, you're going to understand in this episode why YouTube is so key, not to directly make the phone ring, but to drive engagement that then causes you to stand out when that homeowner is making a decision. So your LSA in Google ads, social media, other kinds of lead gen cause them to say, "Hey, I know that guy."
I'm Dennis U and I do a weekly episode every Thursday on the marketing mechanic covering issues like this so that you guys can understand how you can own your own marketing. And by the end of this video, you'll understand how does this affect social media? How does this affect what kind of video strategy you should be doing across Facebook and X and LinkedIn and Instagram and Tik Tok and why YouTube is a little bit different than these other guys. So stick around. Uh, let me know like, share, and comments uh questions that you have. I'm here to help out. I'm a real human. I'm not an AI. And everything we do is based on real experience. And the stuff that I'm teaching you guys how to do are things that I do for myself and we demonstrate and document in hundreds of other home service businesses. Okay?
So, you can see we went from nothing to 1.4 million views just in the last few months. And it wasn't because I went viral. It wasn't because I had this one crazy video. But if we look at the content, let me show you. So, in a previous video here on this channel, I talked about what kind of content to make on YouTube, how you need to start the beginning with a hook. So, "Hey Dallas homeowners, did you get hail damage on your roof?" Right? You're, it's very clear in the first few seconds, right? "Hey, are you an HVAC company? Here's how to rank in the maps." "Hey, are you looking to," you know, whatever it might be, it's very clear city name service you provide. So, this is for local service businesses. And when you make these videos, you'll see some of them get maybe a few hundred views, some of them get a 100,000 views. And this is just the nature of creating content.
Now, what happens is when you are looking for a greatest hit, and we're talking about evergreen content, content that is a story or it's with your crew or it's about your relationships, it's about things that are maybe not related to painting or broken air conditioners or directly your work, but you know, so people kind of get to know who you are, right? Because they're scrolling YouTube, they're having dinner. Maybe you're watching you're, you know, having dinner right now and watching YouTube because you want to learn. And what you'll see is that some of this is just the last 28 days, 369,000 views. So, you're going to see that I've spent $2,200 in the last four months to drive about 300,000 views. So, I think that's like a penny a view, something like that. But, I got 1.4 million views. So what happened is I got a million organic or free views because boosting the paid views. It was good enough that because I paid for the first few and it's good enough that people said, "You know what? I actually like this guy. I'll subscribe and I'll watch a few more of his videos." And you know this to be true. When you find a video that you like where something's helpful, you might see what else that guy or girl has on his channel. You might see other videos from that person or that company kind of showing up on the side and you click on that on a related topic or whatnot.
Okay, so let's take a look at this. Now, this content, some of these are pretty short. This is only a couple minutes long. So the average view time, hopefully you can see that is a minute 14, 2 minutes, a minute, two and a half minutes, four minutes, 2 minutes, and then you'll see some of them might even get up to seven or eight minutes, 4 minutes, 7 minutes, and 6 seconds. And what we're looking for is a balance between the average watch time and the percent completion rate. So, when we have one minute videos, sometimes we'll get, I'm not even kidding. I'll show you here. For some of these other HVAC guys and plumbers, we'll get 98%. Can you imagine that? That's a boosted video. Most people you just click skip. Like on social media, the average watch time is 3 seconds, right? Tik Tok, it's even less than that. But if 98% of the people are staying for almost the whole one minute video, what that means is A, the content is good, but B, more importantly, the YouTube organic algorithm says, "I'm going to find other people that are just like this other homeowners in Plano that are looking for a new door, right?" And YouTube and Tik Tok and Facebook, you know, Meta is very good at finding other people based that's the whole point of the newsfeed. So on the paid side, if you boost it the right way, it'll just extend the same algorithm that works organically.
So as a result, when I get this stuff organically and I find something's working really well, I'm going to put a dollar a day against it. And it's not advertising. So it might be, you know, the best content strategy for home service businesses or how to get a knowledge panel or, you know, here I'm interviewing David Carroll from Dope. I'm wearing his hoodie, right? And interviewing him about his story. So other people who are home service businesses can also aspire to grow from two million to 10 million and from 10 million to 100 million because we're interviewing Tommy Melo or Dan Anteneelli or whoever it is, right? People in this case I'm interviewing home service businesses, but you're interviewing other contractors, other people in the neighborhood, other people in your city to be five mile famous, right? And so I'm not selling, he's not selling. We're just sharing. Right here, here's one on how to actually use Chat GPT. Is it to promote a course? Is it to get people to enroll in some kind of program? No. We're literally saying, "Here's how we do this." And if you're a longtime watcher, thank you. You know, we're not trying to sell. We're literally trying to show through examples so that you can apply this yourself. And some people will hire us for services. And the same is going to be true for you. So when you show your team in action, when you show, you know, the birthdays, when you show, it doesn't have to be things like that, just anything like a day in the life. And you might say, "Oh, well, I'm a roofer. My my life is boring. Why would anyone care about being up on the roof or hail damage or things like that?" You'd be surprised when people connect with the fact that you're involved as, you know, Anthony of Anony's Lawn Care is the coach for his soccer team and he also puts on silly Halloween costumes and his son Andrew also, you know, holds up yard signs and say, "Hey, Anony's lawn care, you know, it's snowing outside and we'll actually show up even when the other guys won't show up when it's minus 10." Right? I think that's something he posted a couple days ago. You can see it on his Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. And so these demonstrate personality without selling.
So almost everything we have here is just teaching. We're just teaching. "Hey, what what is what HVAC quote, right? How does a tool work? What are the actual numbers that we're seeing?" And there's so many of these. Some some of these are short. Some of these are 20 minutes. Some of these are an hour. Some are 30 seconds long. And then what happens is that when you have this content, you boost it for a dollar a day or in some cases you could boost it for $10 for a week. That's $70. But I like to boost for a dollar. There's a whole discussion around why a dollar a day instead of why 10 or 20 or why not go into Google Adwords and you choose YouTube as a placement because you can and you can do retargeting and you can choose very, very specific things but which is a whole another discussion. But what we're trying to do is make you well known in your neighborhood.
Now when we have certain kinds of content that just seems to perform better, we can go to any one of those and then hit boost. For example, I can come to this video and then from this video provided your admin on the channel. I don't like to watch myself in my own videos. >> So, we're doing an audit of a Houston HVAC company that got ripped off for $20,000. Doesn't even matter who who the agency was, but here's how we could tell, right? And a lot of people have watched this and shared this because we're honestly showing here's the data, right? And it's Donovan Brown and even Donovan says, you know, "Hey, we want everyone to see this video, right?" So then I can come in here and hit promote. And then you go through the whole process of promoting the video, video views, not subscribers because we're not it's not for vanity or website visits. And I'll show you what both of those look like. And then you go through the very simple process of you don't even need to change your headline and description, you know, it just comes in and it shows up as an ad. But the key is that you're just showing stories. It's not professional videographer stuff. It's just cell phone stories. It could be vertical video, which is for less than a minute, anything long a minute like this in landscape. And what you're going to find is some of them do better than others. And they're going to show up here under promotions. So you can see we spent $12 and 910 people saw it. So about a penny each time someone sees it. And 139 people stayed for 30 seconds, which is generally a view. So then you decide, is that worth it? Are you willing to pay in this case 6 cents? I'm Asian. I'm good at math. $71, 2600 views and you know $48,700 views. And you do the math on this and as you could see what the average watch time is, you could say, "Well, if someone's staying a minute and a half, well, clearly they find the content interesting. So, am I willing to pay in this case $33 to get to reach 94,000 people that YouTube is saying based on who's watching, paid or not, can I find more people that also are more likely to stay and watch?" In this case here, 13,945. Let's call it 14,000 people stayed and watched for $33. That's 2.5 cents. Less than three cents to earn someone's attention and be able to keep it.
Now, is this one video? This one is, you know, "How do you Oh, what? Yeah. How do you get Google a Google knowledge panel?" Right. We're not selling anything. We're showing them this is how Google understands entities and every and everything about Google is about entities. It's the first episode here in this marketing mechanic YouTube and you understand that Google doesn't rank websites. It ranks entities. Your company's an entity. You are an entity. The products that you carry are entities. The the main city you serve, that's an entity, right? And there's information associated with the entities. The entities are linked together, blah blah blah. And so that's what we're explaining here. Even the people that claim to do SEO, they don't even know what that is. They're salespeople, right? Not mechanics, not search engine engineers like me. I'm older than I look, right? And so you have some of these and Google loves to show 10 rows per page, which drives me nuts. I like to see 50 plus. In this case here, there's 36 of these. And I put a little bit of money against each of them. And some of them will just do better than others, and I'll put more money on it. So, these are all evergreen, meaning it's a story. It's not a Christmas sale. It's not promotional. It's not like, "Hey, here's a piece of news or the Vikings won." It's not. It's evergreen means it will always be good. It's not tied to calendar driven content. Oh, it's Veterans Day. It's Fourth of July. It's not calendar content.
So, when you find one that works well, so this one here, "The $10,000 website that the plumber, you know, that made the mistake and why it is and how do you tell and how do you avoid that issue and how what is if you did pay $10,000 and it was a good website. Here's how you can tell, right?" I go through all the different factors. Some people load that up in the Chat GPT saying take all the stuff that because they don't want to stay and watch this video which is, you know, whatever 18 minutes long or something. So they run it in the Chat GPT and say, "Hey, take all this stuff here and grade my website based on this." Right? "If you're talking to Dennis, pretend you're Dennis. What would he say?" Right? Fair game. I love that. I I in fact make these videos because I know Chat GPT is going to take this and repurpose it and you can make your agent smarter and smarter, right? Which is a whole another. We have two other episodes on that here in this channel. But you can see here if I find one, let's say this one, this one I paused because I ran it for $4 and I looked at the average watch time and I guess it was too technical, too much math. People just like checked out because they didn't, you know, they hated high school calculus or something, right? And I went into a lot of math. Sometimes I geek out. So I saw it wasn't working, so I paused it. And other ones, I'll put $149 on this one. Well, why did I do that? Well, initially I only put $7. So, a dollar a day for seven days. And I see, hey, you know, people are staying and watching for four minutes or something like that. And this $149,000, sorry, $149. I don't spend only for like a Starbucks or whatever you want to spend that kind of money, but they have a lot of location. It's not my money, it's theirs. And 327,000 people saw this for the $149. Call it $150, right? That's less than um like a tenth of a penny. And so I got 74,000 views, which is insane. And I got some subscribers. People stayed around. Why was this interesting? Well, then you go back to the video. Maybe it's because I was in Turkey among these ancient Roman monuments and I talked about how the structure and foundation of these ancient Roman monuments from thousands of years ago are very much like the structure of your business and your Google business profile and your website and your social media and how all these pieces fit together. And so I thought it was okay, but the data tells me that people like that video versus here I'm making one that let's see like this one. Let's see. No, that one did pretty well. Oh, this one. Yeah, the new Chat GPT browser, which I think is amazing, right? I go on and on about that. I think this is the best content. I think, oh man, this is going to crush it, but it doesn't. And so, because it doesn't, then you don't want to put more money on it.
Or, and no offense to Dan Anteneelli, I interviewed Dan Anteneelli, and you know, I put $28 on it. I got a hundred views. That's 28 cents a view, which could be worthwhile. I mean, you're selling new HVAC systems for $15,000 and that that 20 cent view resulted in the phone call. You can track all this, right? You can set up your tracking. You can set up your tag manager, your UTM parameters, all that kind of stuff, your Google business profile to see where people came from, all that, right? Another episode. But for what we're doing here, which is thought leadership, people didn't stay and watch the video. So our quality score, which is Google's in Google Ads, they they give you a a score based on do people engage with you or not basically and how relevant it is. Facebook calls it a relevant score, but quality score and relevant score are actually the same thing. They're measured the same way, just different names. I guess Facebook didn't want to copy Google so they called it a relevant score instead of a quality. It's the same thing. So you know, is it because they don't like Dan Anteneelli? Is it because I probably rambled too much at the beginning of this introducing him? Or is it because it showed my face and I'm not as well known as Dan Anteneelli? Or maybe, you know, who knows? But whatever it is, whatever the reason is, maybe the topic wasn't interesting, but this one didn't do very well, right? That's okay because it was an hour interview and we can cut other clips out of it. And then those become shorts. Shorts used to be a minute less. A month ago they said it can now actually be three minutes because Tik Tok increased theirs to three minutes. And you can see that we can boost these as well. And some of them, you know, here 34 views. No one seemed to care about that. Like I thought that was really good because Google changed their algorithm their whole guidelines from EAT to EAT. So instead of uh expertise, authority, trust, it's experience, expertise, authority, trust. And I went on about that for a minute and 10 seconds. I thought that was insightful. I think that's really important for contractors to know, but contractors, they don't they don't think so. So, even if I think it's amazing, we let the data determine what the winner is. And we can see here that, you know, Google, YouTube didn't think it was very good. And other things they do a lot better, like this one here, 16,000. And we're not chasing views. If I wanted to chase views, I would just post pictures of puppies and bacon and, you know, things like that. But when we find things that are winning, then we start to turn them into promotions, right? And we boost it and it's so easy. So you can see how these are doing.
Now check this out. This is something people don't understand. So when I look at the analytics, like people like, "Why am I why am I boosting a post?" Like here, I'm I'm boosting a whole bunch of these videos and because I find some of them that are doing better than others, right? See how long they're staying, look at how much the cost per view is. But this is where people they have false precision when they look at the data, right? Because you might look at this and say, "Okay, well, according to the previous screen, we got a total of 300,000 views. I think I spent $2,200." Yeah, here it is. I add Chat GPT, add it up, and $2,920 across 36 promoted videos, 2.5 million impressions, 345,000 views. So that works out to .0085. So less than a penny per view, right? So if the channel has, you don't have to be good at math to see this. You see the channel has 1.4 million views. We've paid for 345,000. So, does that mean that if I didn't run those paid views of 345,000, I would have gotten 1 million because I do have 1 million organic views. 1 million views that were not paid for. So, people are like, "Yeah, well, you you know, you would you would be at a million views instead of 1.4 million. Not that that matters, right?" No. Here's what's going on. I post videos. I post a video. It gets some organic traffic. I boost it. And then if the video is good, and that's the if that everyone messes up on, then if that person likes it, they're going to maybe watch three more videos on average, right? So each one that I pay for is like buy one, get three free. So I probably, if I didn't boost anything at all, maybe I'd be at a 100,000 views instead of 1.4 million because there's a follow on effect. So even if I you see how that works, right? So I I earn people's attention. It's like the Costco ladies giving out the free samples with the toothpicks. You try one, if you like it, you'll buy a bag of the tortilla chips or buffalo bites or whatever it might be, right? That's what's going on here. So it's not that YouTube is great or not great. It's it's a sampling platform, right?
So, if I completely stopped advertising now, which I don't even call it advertising because saying advertising means I'm trying to sell. I'm just paying social postage. I'm paying to get our It's like the post office. I'm putting a stamp on my content and giving you good content, not mailing poop in a bag, right? And if I've done that and I've developed some trust and you've seen me four or five times, you see who I'm with. So you as a San Antonio HVAC guy like Elmer Zubiate and you've seen his face, you know who he is. Let's say he launches in a new market like Phoenix to do HVAC because he has a non-compete in the current thing because he sold the PE but he can go to markets outside of Texas. Then he can start to build awareness. TV, radio, YouTube is basically another form of TV and radio, right? And so we are building multiple touches. We're showing that we have trust in our neighborhood, in our service areas where we serve. Our trucks are running around with Dan Anteneelli's branding, whatever it might be. And then when it comes time for them to do that search in Google and they see the local service ads, they see the three-pack map results, they're like, "I kind of feel familiar like that guy. I I kind of recognize him. I know some of these other people that he's with. I know that organization. I also go to that the same mall and I have coffee at that Starbucks or whatever it is." Like that's what we're building here. We're doing all of this not to drive an immediate phone call which is people will say, "Oh, there's no ROI on this. This is a vanity thing." No, no. We can actually trace this through. It's indirect. But you can still measure how many more clicks and website visits and calls you're able to get because you are building your brand here. You're building awareness. We can see how long they're staying. We can see if they come to the website and thus if I completely cut off all the boosting. I continue because it's built the subscriber base. There's this kind of memory. I'll continue to get way more views than I would have otherwise organically. So maybe I only get a,000 views per video instead of 20,000 or 30,000. So there's this, you know, organically I get this, I boost, so it goes like this, but then even if I cut it off, I still get a higher level of residual, right? There's still this ongoing effect, this halo effect.
So, that's what I want you guys to understand. And the beauty is when you have these different videos, especially when you do stuff with other people and you're leveraging their trust and you're building relationships with with their audience so their audience knows about you and vice versa, which is called a collaboration, which is like what influencers do. But all of us should be building relationships with people that we know and respect and people that you know maybe you like Ken Goodrich right and you've mentored him or he's mentored you you know Tommy Melo maybe you know you want to be able to grow like him then reach out to him and say hey I'd love to have you in my podcast right all all these things to be able to show that you you to the homeowner that you are a person of integrity that You are in this business because you really care. You're not here just to try to, you know, sell grandma on a unit that she doesn't need when it's just a $600 repair. You want to sell her a $30,000 top-of-the-line unit, right? No, you're trying to because homeowners are increasingly, because PE is coming in, they're increasingly saying, "I don't know if I can trust these guys." So, this is how you're building trust. YouTube is the best way to build this kind of trust. And it's not cuz I'm trying to get to a billion views to be like some kind of Mr. Beast. It's that I'm demonstrating by example that by making raw videos like this, you can do the same thing on your cell phone, even in a hotel room like this. And you can by example teach your technicians that they're not there just to install, right? They're there representing the company. They're there getting an extra $20 per review that they provide. They're there honoring Mrs. Smith. When they're in the house, they're wearing the uniform. They're on their best behavior. They want to get the five stars because they get a bonus on that. They also get a little bit more if they make a video while they're there, while they're on the roof, while they're spraying for pests, while they're inspecting the garage door, while they're referring leads to other people in your network. And that's what YouTube allows you to do.
And the last thing I'll say is that this can be repurposed. These videos, they're not made for YouTube. I'm just showing you mechanically what happens on YouTube and showing you real performance. If you want, I'll log into some of the guys that gave us permission so you can see other home service businesses. Same thing works. Introverted people. Doesn't matter what the category is. As long as it's a Google local category and you have an office, you know, that kind of thing. You're not just an individual, you know, power washer, just you, but you actually have a company. This works, right? Because you repurpose this to Instagram Reels. Take the video just as it is. You repurpose it to Facebook. You repurpose it as a post on Google Business Profile. It's real. It's not AI generated. It's not AI enhanced, right? Do that and homeowners will see that you are everywhere. And when they have a broken pipe, when their roof needs replacing, when there's a problem, then Google and Facebook and Chat GPT and all these guys will start recommending you because they can see based on the actual user behavior, who's engaging with you. They take that into account. They can see the patterns of traffic like Chrome browser behavior, maps and directions when people click on the YouTube video like, "Who's this guy? It was interesting. I think I want to subscribe." And there's a click to the website. You know, YouTube and Facebook and Tik Tok and all these guys take that to account. Then then you take the same stuff and you repurpose, meaning you copy it over into X, which was Twitter, and you feed it in the Grok. Who notices that? Now you're ranking inside Grok, which is Elon Musk's AI engine. Kind of like Gemini and Chad GPT and Anthropic and all those other guys. Now you're winning search and social. Now you're not falling for the AI, SEO, GEO, rank in Chat GPT and do it now before your competitors buy the secret tool or have the magic whatever. You understand what it is. It's reputation that spread in multiple areas and you're paying just like you would pay for a bigger billboard or pay for direct mail or whatnot to get your message out there. I hope you found this helpful. I'm Dennis U. I'm a former search engine engineer and I want to see you guys as contractors own your own marketing. Any questions, holler. We would love to see you guys win.