Transcription
If you're a business using YouTube to find more clients, or if you're just really curious about getting started, there's something you should know: 2024 is completely rewriting the playbook for businesses on YouTube, and it's about to get a whole lot easier for you to connect with your perfect customers. So, in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how business content is changing on YouTube, how it can work better while saving you time, and how you can use it yourself to grow your channel like never before.
But first, we have to look at the old way of doing YouTube and why it just isn't working anymore. A perfect illustration of this is the Jack in the Box. You turn the crank, and oh, God damn it! At first, it's fast, it's exciting, and it keeps you on the edge of your seat waiting for the pop. But after a few times, you're desensitized, and you know exactly what to expect. It keeps kids entertained for hours, but for grown-ups, it's just a bit silly.
Now, imagine working on a puzzle. It takes time, thought, and effort, but when you finally fit all the pieces together, it's super satisfying. That's the style of video that's taking over in 2024. All those fast-paced, heavily edited videos you see all over YouTube are entertaining, sure, but they don't really stick with you. What videos like these lack in punch, they more than make up for in genuine connection and the ability to turn viewers into actual paying customers, which is what you're on YouTube for in the first place.
As recently as just a few months ago, I was pretty fixated on the editing of my videos to the point where my editor knew that the rule was something had to happen on screen every 4 to 7 seconds. That wasn't just arbitrary; I'd heard from all the YouTube editing experts out there that that's what you wanted to do to keep people interested and keep them from leaving my videos. They call this kind of editing retention editing because it's just there to keep as many viewers as possible through pure overstimulation. Since almost every video gets a pretty huge drop-off in views in the first 30 seconds, I was willing to throw everything at those 30 seconds just to stop the bleeding.
But then, earlier this year, I actually hired a producer for my channel to help me with everything from thumbnails to editing my scripts to actually coming up with topics that you guys would like the most. He came in pretty hot with a YouTube trend that I never would have thought of on my own. So, Yousef, what is this trend that you're seeing now with these educational videos?
There's a lot of creators like William Brown and Charlie Morgan that are now creating super high-value content where they're just very informal, very value-based, and they're getting hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of thousands of subscribers just because of the amount of value that they're able to give. So, it feels like YouTube now is prioritizing value over everything, especially for people who are educating on YouTube. This is great news because a lot of times, you know, things like retention-based editing and trying to make your video too perfect can take away from the educational value of the content. In other words, the pendulum has swung from that need for constant overstimulation to a calmer pace where viewers can actually settle in and learn the thing they clicked on the video for.
Even the king of over-edited videos, Mr. Beast, is changing his ways, saying that he's slowed down his videos, focused more on storytelling, let scenes breathe, yelled less, added more personality, and created longer videos. His views have skyrocketed as a result. Why do you think that the average viewer is gravitating more toward this new style and away from the overly edited stuff?
I think it comes down to expectations. At some point, viewers probably stopped watching heavily edited content because they realized that it is not giving them the value that they thought they would get by clicking on the thumbnail or reading the title. They realized that the golden nuggets are not in the super flashy types of videos. The constant zooms, animated text, and all the whooshing sound effects that used to keep people's attention have just become too predictable to be as effective anymore. Knowing that pretty much gave me permission to scale back on all the editing tricks that we used to rely so heavily on, which let us put out videos quicker and slow down enough so that I could connect better with you, my audience.
So, if you thought that doing YouTube means Hollywood-level production values, this should be a huge weight off your shoulders. Take wedding planner and YouTuber Jamie Wolfer, for instance. My then-fiancé and I used to watch her when we were busy planning our own wedding, and we pretty much binged hours of her stuff over one weekend. Then we'd keep going back whenever we had another question that popped up. There was no retention editing, no graphics, really very little b-roll, if any. Even though she could have easily thrown in some wedding stock footage here and there, she didn't need any of it because she was giving us useful information that we needed. Her fun personality and simple approach not only kept us interested but also took her business for quite the ride.
First of all, she was able to completely stop chasing down clients at expensive wedding expos. It gets even better than that because she also used her new skill for creating simple videos to make a DIY course that she could sell to engaged couples all across the country to teach them how to plan their own weddings. That addition quadrupled her revenue. Now she's got the freedom to only take on actual clients when she wants to. Jamie's success is a testament to the power of creating authentic, relatable content on YouTube. Her simple and straightforward videos resonated with her audience and drove significant business results. This is a valuable lesson for any service business owner who is looking to use YouTube for growth. You're now much more free to spend less time convincing people to stick around, so you can now just focus more on connecting with them through what you can teach them.
One powerful way to make that connection is through storytelling. People are naturally drawn to stories and tend to understand and remember information better when it's presented that way. By weaving in your own experiences, your clients' experiences, or even metaphors into your videos, you can make your content much more engaging and relatable to your audience.
So, what are some easy video formats that you can try that lean into this simpler approach? There are two formats that immediately jump out to me. One is kind of a loom recording, where you're just doing a screen recording and showing your screen. This is especially great if you're talking through some sort of process or workflow. Again, they don't have to be super pretty; it can just be like a rough sketch. But as long as you're able to show the information visually, a loom video can do really well. If you do this, I would just recommend showing your face at least in the beginning so that people can get to know you a little bit while they learn. Faceless videos just have a much harder time creating that know, like, and trust factor that actually turns viewers into clients.
Also, video podcasts are super hot right now, and they let you go long-form if you want to do that without the need to script anything out. This works particularly well if you have someone else in your business that you can co-host it with. You can just chat about every important topic in your industry that your clients would be interested in. You can even bring on guests, like industry experts or your current or past clients. The Hail Fitness channel does this all the time. Jay brings on his own training clients who talk about their results, and doing this super simple format is responsible for literally doubling his gym's revenue to over a million dollars a year, and that's with under 500 subscribers and an average video view count of around 250 views.
You can do one of those screens in the background where you can write on them, and a lower-tech version of doing that would be, let's say, a whiteboard. If you can use a whiteboard or a smartboard, just show the information and kind of interact with it; that would be great as well. I used to watch Rand Fishkin's Whiteboard Friday series every single week when he did them, showing all of his SEO tricks. But this old style is actually making a pretty big comeback. It combines the casual and relaxed pacing with visuals, so it's easier to take in and really understand the concepts you're teaching without needing any fancy editing tricks. Along the same lines, you could do webinar-style slide presentations, but hey, plain old talking head style videos work great too. There's no need to reinvent the wheel here; as long as your information is good, that's really what people care about.
So, simple is good, but how simple is too simple when it comes to YouTube and keeping people engaged? There's really no hard and fast rule here. Like I said, Jay's killing it with nothing more than her face on screen, but me personally, I like to live by the old rule of "show rather than tell." By sprinkling in some elements that help me tell the story a little more visually, the way I like to do that best is through b-roll clips. If you don't know, b-roll is just the video that plays over someone talking, like this, this, or this. When you do it right, it just adds to the story without being jarring or obtrusive. Now, this is completely optional, of course, but there are a few different ways of doing it.
First, my favorite way is to just take an afternoon and shoot a bunch of stuff that you can use and reuse whenever a video calls for it. You can just shoot yourself doing various things that you do every day, from working with a client to working at your computer, pouring a cup of coffee, driving, putting on your shoes—pretty much any little action that you can think of. The master of this is Matt D'Avella; his videos are gorgeous because he really knows his way around the camera, and he uses a ton of b-roll throughout. But don't worry, you don't have to use nearly as much of it, and it doesn't have to be as well shot either. That's not the point; it's just great to be able to use it to break away from a talking head video every now and then for variety and to help certain concepts come to life.
So, you can shoot it yourself, or you can get a stock video subscription for about 20 bucks a month and just download anything and everything that you'd ever need. Soon enough, maybe even by the time this video comes out, you're going to be able to generate any b-roll clips you need with AI. Another trick I lean on, although not nearly as much as I used to, are GIFs, just to add in some humor now and then and to relate to my audience through relevant pop culture moments. But easy does it; only use these visual elements when it makes sense, and don't feel any pressure to overdo it.
In case you were thinking, "But Wes, your videos have a ton of stuff going on," I have actually pulled back on the editing a lot from where I used to be. But I can still add visuals that I think add a little something extra simply because I've grown to a point now where I've hired a really good editor who can do it. At the end of the day, I do it because I want to, and because what I teach can be so visual. But what's actually going to lead to clients is the value of your content, not the production value.
Another benefit to simple editing is that the simpler it is, the more you can just use AI tools to do all of your editing for you, saving you even more time in the process. That gives you back more time to concentrate on planning your next video's content and how you can better connect with your audience. But if you think your business's YouTube success depends on going viral, that couldn't be less true. Remember Jay, the fitness guy? He's making seven figures a year through clients that he's getting from his really small YouTube channel of less than 500 subscribers. How the heck is that possible? Well, we go into his whole strategy in this video here. It can work for any business, and it's seriously genius. So click here and see for yourself.