If you want to take the plunge and get started on Youtube – or polish up your channel, there’s no better person to learn from than Nick Nimmin. This video powerhouse hosts a podcast (Comments Over Coffee) and a wildly successful Youtube channel teaching YouTubers and video marketers how to learn and leverage the power of online video.
And we aren’t kidding when we say wildly successful – Nick has 793,000 subscriptions to his Youtube channel.
But get this – the thing that makes Nick just so great is that he has run the gauntlet, the same one that most of you might be about to run now. He didn’t want to be on video, and he was nervous about what would happen once he started.
“I did not want to be on camera. I just didn’t want to be that guy. I’m like older at that point in time. YouTube is a kid’s thing. And I had all these things rattling around in my brain, plus, in addition to that, I was like, what if somebody that I know ends up running into my YouTube channel, then they’re going to give me a hard time about it?
Like, Hey dude, why are you on YouTube? I had to overcome those hurdles in order to even get on the platform in the first place.”
-Nick Nimmin
It’s safe to say he figured it out. And he’s sharing his tips, tricks, and wisdom to help you make the leap, too. In this episode, we discuss:
- How to optimize your Youtube account
- How to use your audience to skyrocket your content discovery
- Organizing your Youtube channel and making use of series
- What equipment you really need to start filming on Youtube
And so much more!
Watch the full episode here!
On Why Youtube Works Better Than Other Platforms for Discovery…
“The reason that it’s an amazing platform is that – as you probably know if you are doing any type of marketing or you’re putting out content of any kind already – when you put out content on a lot of these platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn and Tik TOK, what happens is you publish a piece of content and then it really quickly becomes difficult to find.
So in the moment when you publish that content, maybe for a very short time after that, the content might do well. If you have something that performs extremely well, then, in that case, sometimes it’ll surface, but for the rest of us who don’t make that type of viral related content, it’s a lot more of a challenge and you just stay on that hamster wheel that grind of just constantly putting stuff out, which you got to do kind of on YouTube as well.
The thing with Youtube is that they have all of these different discovery features. So in addition to YouTube itself being a search engine, it’s also a discovery engine. And what I mean by that is if you put together content that people enjoy – in terms of they click on it and they end up watching the content for a competitive or an acceptable amount of time – per YouTube, then in that situation Youtube will show you on the homepage.
They’ll recommend you next to other content. If you do end up showing up in search and people respond to you well, in search on YouTube, you can also show up on Google and all the other textual search engines that also display video results as well.”
On Finding Your Audience on Youtube…
“So when you are targeting a specific audience on YouTube, it really helps with things, because the way that YouTube works is that if you have people that are positively interacting with your content, YouTube will find other users on the platform that are using YouTube like the people that are positively interacting with your content, and it will show your content to those people.
So as long as you can get those people to click, and then they enjoy the content as well, then that whole thing just keeps getting amplified until people slowly stop responding to the content because they’re not as good of a candidate for your particular content or that particular video.
So when you’re targeting the audience, it helps you in that regard. And it also helps with authority, because that’s a thing on YouTube, just like it is in the blog world. And you start creating a channel that is a resource for a certain type of content for a certain type of viewer.”
On Why You Should Stick to Only a Few Topics…
“Let’s say that you have a channel and you’re publishing a piece of help content in terms of how to use Tailwind. And then your next video is a vlog and then you have a gaming video after that. And then after that, you have your trip to Florida.
Then what’s going to happen, is people that came in from that Tailwind video, they’re gonna love that Tailwind content from you. They’re going to subscribe to your channel and they’re going to possibly comment. Maybe they’re gonna give the video a thumbs up. Maybe they’re going to share it with somebody or maybe they’ll click on another Tailwind video if you put it together in a series.
But what’s going to ultimately end up happening there is YouTube going to detect, Hey, these people from this Tailwind video are really happy. Great interaction with this channel. So because of that, this next video that’s published, we’re going to show it to those people first.
And then what can happen is the initial response of that video now, just to be clear, this is the initial response. Long-term the video can end up being fine, but the initial response, which is really important on YouTube, can really be impacted because YouTube is going to show it to some of those people that enjoyed that Tailwind video recently. And when it shows that new video to them, since they care about Tailwind and they don’t necessarily care about your day or your trip to Florida, then, in that case, is those people aren’t going to click. Which is then going to impact the performance of that video. And then they’re not going to show it to as many people.”
On Why You Shouldn’t Just Focus on SEO…
“When people are looking for anything in search, they’re looking for the content that you’re making. Right? So it’s easy to get people to click on it. It’s easy to get people to come in and to deliver your value to them.
Where it’s hard is when your content shows up on a home page. When it shows up in those places and you’re competing with a bunch of other content that YouTube is also predicting that that particular user is also likely to enjoy. So that’s where things get really serious, because if you can get good at that part of it and getting people to click on it from there, then search starts becoming less and less important because you start getting really good at getting people to click.”
On What You Need to Get Started…
“Phone. If you have a phone you have everything you need.”
On Planning Your Youtube Content…
“Think of it as you’re publishing content and sets. So instead of publishing one video, you’re actually planning it. Like four or five videos and those videos are going to become part of a series.
And when you put those videos into a playlist, you actually mark that playlist as a series playlist. And then that tells YouTube that those videos are related to each other in some way, which then YouTube is more likely to show the content in that playlist next to other videos in that playlist when people are watching it as well.”
