From Audio to Viral: The YouTube Transformation of a Podcast

Way back on episode 979, I asked the question, hey, should your podcast be on YouTube?

And we kind of looked at the pros and cons and my Buddy Thomas Umstad Jr.

From Novel Marketing sent me an email with all sorts of stats and graphs and I was like, that is pretty cool.

So we have a boots on the ground report on what works.

If you are like, you know what?

I am gonna start things on YouTube.

Thomas is going to share some things that are going to get you going in the right direction much faster and he's going to explain the mindset that you have to get in as well as save you some money on equipment if you're going to be adding video.

Now, if you have no inkling of ever wanting to be on YouTube, you're dismissed from this episode because it's all about helping those that are on the fence decide.

And some of you may decide after hearing this, I'm not doing that.

And others may, okay, good.

I'm going to cut some corners and I know how I'm going to do it.

So that's what we're talking about.

If YouTube is not for you at all, then we'll see you next week.

Or go out to schoolofpodcasting.com follow follow the show and cherry pick some great episodes.

Hit it, ladies.

The School of Podcasting with Dave Jackson.

Podcasting since 2005, I'm your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson.

Thanking so much for tuning in.

If you're new to the show, this is where I help you plan, launch and grow your podcast.

My website, schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code listnr when you sign up for either a monthly quarterly that's new by the way, or yearly subscription out@schoolofpodcasting.com and as I mentioned, I'm super excited.

Like I was jazzed all day knowing I was going to Interview Thomas Umstadt Jr.

Again.

Novel marketing.com if you like, if you even smell a book, if you're thinking about doing anything with a book as an author, this is the guy.

Like, that is the guy you want to talk to.

I'm here to tell you, so knowledgeable, he's like a walking encyclopedia when it comes to books.

And as I mentioned at the Beginning, he started YouTube with his podcast, right?

He'd been doing his podcast for a while and decided to add YouTube to the mix.

And now he's come back to help us all understand what's working and what's not.

Here's my conversation with Thomas Umstadt Jr.

From novelmarketing.com.

thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

I love the school of podcasting and I love this chance to come back.

Let's start off.

How long have you been doing your podcast?

I started my first podcast in 2007, which is impressive to some people, but I know not to you.

But the current podcast, novel marketing, we started back in 2013 as an audio only podcast.

When did you start integrating other aspects of things like that?

Yeah, so about five years ago.

Five or six years ago, there was a lot of buzz about YouTube and you could take your podcast and put it on YouTube via these various automated tools.

And so we experimented with that.

There was some service, it's not around anymore, that would do it automatically.

It would subscribe to your RSS feed, it would take the MP3, it would put your cover art in a little waveform and make the video file.

And I was like, oh, this is a really easy way to have a YouTube show.

And we did that for like a year.

And it got very little traction because people don't want to listen to YouTube.

The experience of listening is so much better in a podcast app than it is on the YouTube app, unless somebody's YouTube Premium.

And that wasn't very popular five years ago.

But it had a squiggly line.

Yeah, no, the squiggly line is cool, but it doesn't hold your attention for 30 minutes.

No, in fact, it's almost worse than nothing because if there's nothing, it kind of gives me permission to wash the dishes or go for a walk.

But there's this concept.

I used to do radio for a little bit, and there's this concept in radio between foreground and background listening.

So a lot of podcasts, a lot of the two guys talking about podcasts are background listening.

You're like, how is it that this show that's four hours long and three days a week has so many listeners?

And it's like, well, because people are filling these quiet portions of their day with these friendly voices.

Somebody who works on cars might be working.

In fact, our family car mechanic, when I was a kid, he would listen to Rush Limbaugh every morning and at 11 o' clock, and he would listen to the end of Rush Limbaugh when the next guy came on.

And this guy was on it.

Like you thought he was a humble car mechanic, but he could tell you blow by blow what was going on in Washington, D.C.

between the Democrats and Republicans.

So he listened to talk radio all day long.

And that experience of the guy on radio is still happening today.

So that experience that he had listening to talk radio is the same sort of experience for some people listening to podcasts, but other podcasts and a lot of YouTube is foreground listening.

It's lean forward listening, where you're really paying close attention, you're not really doing something else.

And so the formats are really different.

And in radio, we're constantly trying to hold people back from being foreground to.

From being background to being foreground.

Right?

All these little jingles and attention grabbers to get people to start paying attention again so that they'll listen to our advertisers.

And so that same sort of thing is happening in terms of the difference between YouTube and.

And podcasting.

And it's a lot easier for a podcast to work on YouTube when there's faces.

And that's what we started experimenting with about a year ago, because we were already recording in tools like this one that we're using with Descript or Riverside or Squadcast or streamyard.

There's a lot of really good ones, or zoom, if you're desperate.

I don't like zoom.

Quality is kind of low unless you're really good at setting the settings.

Listen to Dave Jackson's advice on how to set your zoom settings if you're gonna do zoo.

But we were recording the video and I was using descript to edit the episodes.

And so I'm like, we might as well put these videos on YouTube.

And so it was still really low effort, but just that slight change going from the audiogram to the faces made a huge difference.

And we started seeing 2x3x, the number of views per video.

Still small numbers, but it was a lot more than what we were getting with just the audiogram.

And it started growing from there.

And so are you adding like lower thirds or anything?

Or is this just a single camera shot of you talking into a camera?

So at first it was just side by side.

Descript, really low effort.

I was still doing the audio edit, but I was only editing with audio in mind.

And then about six months ago, we started experimenting with kind of doing this on purpose.

I brought on a video editor to start adding some B roll and to help with the transitions.

And descript's got some really cool features where it can do automatic multicam with its underlord feature.

And so it can go full screen to full screen.

But if you want to, like, switch in side by side and hide edits with a scene change, that's still kind of manual.

And that's the sort of thing, if you're editing for audio, you don't worry about.

So for an audio edit, you often cut really close to the bone.

At least that's how our approach was.

We'd cut out every um we could get to because you can cut those ums out and it will sound really natural, but it doesn't look natural.

People's faces are jumping all over depending on how many filler words they have.

And now we're actually editing slightly differently.

We kind of fork the content earlier.

And so I have one person who does the audio and a different person who's doing the video.

But what really made the difference in what basically 10x'd our views on YouTube was realizing that some things that matter a lot for YouTube don't matter @ all.

For podcasting, it was that discovery of like, oh, these things that aren't very important are actually everything on YouTube.

And the two biggest ones are titles and thumbnails.

A lot of podcasts just have episode 1, 2, 3, episode 1, 2, 4.

You don't recommend that.

It's not a best practice.

But it doesn't really matter.

Like, if somebody's committed to the school of podcasting, they're committed to Dave Jackson.

They're gonna listen to the next episode because they're subscribed.

But on YouTube, you have to earn every view.

Cause subscribers don't matter.

Yeah, that I have found.

Cause I.

I don't know, I'm over 3,000.

Which is weird.

Cause you feel like.

It feels like a ton when you're used to talking downloads and then you see other people's channels and you're like, oh, I'm just a.

I'm just a little itty bitty thing.

And then when you put out an episode and you've got thousands of subscribers, and after the first day, you're like, wow, I had 78 views.

You're like, wow, that's depressing.

So, yeah, definitely don't.

Don't get too enamored when you see, wow, somebody has 10,000 subscribers.

It's like, yeah, let's go look at the view count.

Yeah.

There's a trend on all of social media right now called death of the Subscriber.

And it was really spearheaded by TikTok, where the TikTok algorithm doesn't really look at subscribers as a big part of the algorithm.

It looks at many, many factors and subscribers as a tiny piece of it.

YouTube puts a little bit more stock in subscribers than TikTok does.

But none of them put any kind of weight on subscribers the way Apple Podcast does or Spotify or Overcast.

I mean, some of those podcast apps, they give you a little red number to make you stressed out.

It's like a to do list item.

To listen to this podcast, it's a lot of pressure to keep up with your subscribed episodes, where there's not that pressure on YouTube.

And the other thing that's even more important than the title, and this is what we were completely abandoning because it doesn't matter in podcasting at all, is the thumbnail.

So I don't know if you create custom thumbnails for your audio episodes.

Some more advanced podcasts do do that, and it's kind of a nice to have feature, right?

Buzzsprout's got a little place to upload.

You have your special episode, but, like, some of the players don't even display it.

And it's a complicated.

You know, there's half a dozen different standards, like, are you gonna do it the Spotify way, or the Apple way, or the podcasting 2.0 way for the individual episode artwork?

And nobody's really using that art to make their decision about whether to listen to an episode or not, but they are on YouTube.

So the YouTube experience, you've got this wall of episodes that you're scrolling past on your phone or on your.

And you're primarily seeing the thumbnails for those episodes.

And it was when we started actually custom designing thumbnail images and putting text on the thumbnails because we were taking previously our blog post images.

So we take the transcript from every episode and we turn it into a blog post because we have a big chunk of our audience that just reads the blog versions of the episodes.

And so we would have a blog image, like a stock photo, and we were just using that as a thumbnail, and that was garbage.

It did not work.

But once we started actually making thumbnails, following actual best practices and learning what those best practices are, which is text, faces, arrows, things like that, it started making a huge difference in terms of our downloads.

In fact, the first few videos I did with text, we were getting like a few hundred views.

The next ones got thousands of views.

It was just like a massive jump overnight.

And that was what I was realizing.

I was like, okay, some of the things, this is a different platform.

It needs to be respected differently.

And the rules are different, and titles and thumbnails are everything.

Now do I always have to make some sort of goofy face?

Because it always seems like everyone's either surprised or super sad.

It's very extreme in the facial expressions.

That seems to be something that just everybody's doing.

It helps.

Big eyes help.

So strong emotions really matter.

Another big difference that we learned, and this was where I had to start changing the show, was the opening really matters.

So when somebody taps a video, they're not committed to listening to the whole thing.

Which, again, is very different from podcasting.

Once somebody starts listening to a podcast episode, they're committed.

In fact, for me listening to podcasts, I have playlists in overcast.

And so when I go to my news playlist in the morning and I start listening to the first episode, I'm often not just committed to that first episode, but all of the news.

Because I have a lot of short news shows that I listen to.

Bang, bang, bang, right after each other, and I listen to them straight through.

That's not how YouTube is.

So people listen to the first 30 seconds of YouTube very much on an experimental basis.

And I don't think YouTube even counts the view until they stuck around for 30 seconds.

I forget exactly where the threshold is, but I think they have to be watching for at least 30 seconds for the view to count.

And so a lot of podcasts open really slow.

You know, I have some podcasts I listen to where I just skip the first five minutes and overcast automatically because they never say anything interesting in the first five minutes.

Not your show, by the way.

You do a good job opening strong.

But even like best practices in podcast world, you're not providing value in the first 30 seconds.

And I wasn't.

I would often open with this, like two or three minute intro story that kind of provided context and got people interested in the topic, which worked really well for a podcast.

Did not work well on YouTube.

I was listening to a Mr.

Beast interview.

He's the number one YouTuber right now.

And he was talking about how you have to start delivering on the promise that you make with your thumbnail within the first 30 seconds.

And I was like, whoa.

Delivering on the promise.

So he'll have a video where there's like, I did seven dangerous things and it's like, and we're going to do the first dangerous thing right now.

And you're like, you're 10 seconds into the video and he's in the water and there's sharks swimming around him.

And within 30 seconds he survived the shark attack.

Right.

Like, the need to Open Strong on YouTube is so high.

And it's just really was a big adjustment for me coming from Podcast world.

And another technique is you can add the show intro, but you add it in later on in the episode.

So you're kind of front loading.

In podcasting world, it's all about getting the subscriber.

It's all about getting somebody committed to the show.

And so you introduce them to the show.

Overall, it's like, hey, this is the school of podcasting.

And we talk about all things podcasting.

And today we're going to be talking about adapting your podcast for YouTube.

And so you kind of sell the big show and then you sell the individual topic on YouTube.

It's inverted.

You sell them on the individual.

So today we're talking about adapting your podcast for YouTube.

And then later on you're like, and this is the school of podcasting.

It's everything podcasting.

And it seems like a really minor change, but again, you're having to sell that individual episode.

And somebody might listen to one episode and then the algorithm feeds them another episode a few weeks later, and they might have listened to three, four or five of your episodes before they ever click subscribe or like or ring the bell for notifications, which all of you should do on Dave's channel, by the way.

Well, so you gave us some tips on thumbnails.

How do you come up with good titles?

So we use AI for this.

We've been experimenting with different AIs for brainstorming.

Often what we'll do is we'll have GROK or GPT or Anthropics Claude generate dozens and dozens of titles.

So we'll feed it the goal of the episode, the topic of the episode.

If I have an outline, sometimes I'll feed it the outline of the episode.

And the goal is to get just lots and lots of ideas, not that we're going to use any of the ones that AI gives us.

Sometimes it'll give us a good one, but it's more of getting it to get us out of the rut.

Because my initial episode idea is always garbage, it will often just be the topic and it's no good.

And I'm starting to learn sometimes I can't do the episode until I have a good title for it.

So there's an episode I've been wanting to do for about a year called and my internal title for this episode is Statistics for Authors, where I explain the Pareto distribution, the 80:20 principle, and the standard distribution and why you don't understand this.

You're going to lose money as an author, and that will not work on YouTube.

Statistics for authors is Maybe the worst possible episode title.

There's some people, there's the loyal listeners who watch every episode.

They'll hang with me through my intro about why it's so important.

But I finally have come up with a better framing device for this topic that'll get people angry, that will then cause them to listen to a whole episode about statistics.

So it's not that I have to change the content necessarily.

I have to change how it's presented up front.

And I've got to add that sizzle because one of the things I've learned, anything with controversy, anything with politics does really well.

Like, the episodes I was sure were gonna get me canceled would get thousands and thousands of more views.

Not a little bit more views, but like, way more views.

And not even just political in terms of Democrats and Republicans, but like political, where you're taking any kind of controversial stance, you're challenging the prevailing wisdom.

One of my most popular episodes of all time is about why authors shouldn't write books in a series, which everybody gives the opposite advice.

And that episode actually has a really good intro.

It's like, you shouldn't write your book in a series.

And I can prove it using math.

It's like the first 10 seconds, and I jump straight into the math.

So we're like going through mathematical formulas.

And by the end of the first 30 seconds, I've made my first argument in what's probably seven or eight arguments for this point.

Interesting.

It's just a completely different platform.

You know what I mean?

Different platform, different rules.

So everything we've been talking about is about me adapting novel marketing for the YouTube channel.

Just in the last couple of months, we've launched a new show called Author Update, where we record it live on YouTube.

And often this live show that's unedited, just like what you're describing beats the evergreen episode from novel marketing.

In fact, right now, our top five most viewed videos for the last month, I think four of them are Author Update episodes.

And this is a totally different kind of show.

So novel marketing, the goal is for very evergreen episodes.

People go back and re listen to episodes from years before that.

Teach some prison right, that you've been.

Doing for 12 years.

I'll occasionally go and rerecord and revisit a topic and update it, but people go back and binge like they do with your show.

And the downside of that is that because the goal is evergreen, I don't cover a lot of breaking news.

And I have to feel like this news story is like make the yearbook for the encyclopedia level news.

Right.

This is a big summary of what's going on in the world for this year.

And it meant that people weren't getting my perspective on the news.

And there was.

Turns out there's a real dearth of publishing news.

There's not a lot of people covering it.

It's kind of hard to gather news for authors.

And so I think that's part of the reason why this new show is doing so well, is that there's not nearly as much competition, whereas giving writing advice and marketing advice is a much more saturated market.

Yeah.

That's got to be weird, though, to have the show that you've been working on and honing for years and then this new thing comes along.

How long have you been doing that now?

We've been doing it, yeah, about two months.

And it's only doing better on YouTube.

So we did turn it into a podcast.

We take the audio from it.

And I created a new podcast with buzzsprout.

And I just take the.

I don't put nearly as much effort.

Right.

I'm not dealing with ID3 tags.

I'm not dealing with compression.

I'm just trusting Buzzsprout to take the MP3 that I get from Riverside and turn it into a podcast.

And that's done surprisingly well, actually.

But it's not doing nearly as well as novel marketing.

So novel marketing still has a core base of listeners.

And this was the other interesting thing.

The YouTube audience is basically entirely new.

There's very little overlap.

There's very few people who are trying to decide if they want to watch the video version or listen to the podcast version.

There's a lot of folks like my mom.

She has in her heart room for about four or five apps, and YouTube is one of those apps.

And the podcast apps are not those apps.

Despite the fact that her son is a professional podcaster whose podcast she likes, and her other son is a professional podcast editor.

Like, my mom would like to listen to podcasts, but she just doesn't have room in her life for apps.

But now that I'm on YouTube, she watches every episode.

I mean, that's gotta be a.

It's nice to finally get, you know, mom watching.

But it only took 13 years.

But.

But now mom can also see how many viewers you have, which you can't see in the audio world.

Did that take a little getting used to?

That was the biggest reason I didn't start doing YouTube sooner was the transparent popularity was very scary.

Cause when you start on a New platform, you start at zero.

Now, I had an unfair advantage in that we have 12,000 plus people on our email newsletter.

And so I was able to, when we do a new episode, I'd be able to email out to all of our subscribers, hey, there's a new episode.

And that really juices the algorithm.

So we weren't really starting from scratch, but still we were starting from scratch as far as the YouTube algorithm was concerned.

And the YouTube algorithm doesn't really start feeding you new subscribers until you get to the monetization threshold.

So once you can be monetized, which I think you need 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers, once YouTube starts putting ads on your content, YouTube is much more motivated to bring you a new audience.

I think they put ads on your content before that, but they don't share the money with you.

Right.

I'm not sure how that works.

But part of it all is also, by the time you've learned how to grow to a thousand subscribers and learned how to get 5,000, 4,000 watch hours, you've gotten better at YouTube because it's its own language, it has its own rules of what works and what doesn't work in its own way of opening things.

We've talked about all of that stuff.

Took practice to kind of figure it out.

And most of those changes didn't need to be edited again for the podcast, the podcast people, nobody's complained that I'm starting episodes faster now.

People are like, no, I want you to go back to the more context, slow or open.

Please don't get to the content any quicker.

I was, yeah, well, have you done the thing where in the audio podcast you go, you'll see here up in the right hand corner.

Because that's the only time when I kind of go, oh, I'm listening to a video.

Yeah.

So I don't do a lot of that, but I have done a few videos that are like that.

But we've always had a blog version companion for our show for years and years.

And so my listeners are used to going to the blog version to see whatever it is that we're talking about.

Because we've covered visual topics before.

We got one negative comment that I thought was one of our most well deserved comments.

I did a whole episode on book covers.

This was back when we were an audio only podcast.

And then we faithfully converted that episode about book covers into a blog post.

But at no point did we add any book covers to the blog post.

This is 2,500 words, 3,000 words.

Where me, I'm interviewing one of the top cover designers about what makes for a good cover.

But at no point is there an actual cover where like, look, here's an example of what we're talking about.

And so if you go to that post now, it has cover.

So it's like, okay, that's fair.

For the blog version, we need to give people something to look at.

Yeah.

The other thing you mentioned is you emailed out, when a new video hits, is that something that just barely nudges the needle or is that something, obviously you're still doing it, so it must be worth it a little bit, but how much of a difference does it make to email those people?

Yes, this is another big adjustment from podcast world.

In podcast world, when an episode goes live doesn't really matter.

In fact, I like to have my episodes all go live at 2 in the morning.

Because my thought is, if I post at 2 in the morning, Apple Podcasts and Spotify and all the various RSS catchers will have updated.

And so when people are downloading new episodes on their way to work, our episode will always be there because there's been plenty of time for the feeds to refresh.

And I realize nowadays with Pod, Ping and AI, it's less of an issue, but we go back a long time where sometimes you post an episode and it wouldn't appear on Apple for, you know, hours and hours and hours.

So that's just how we do it, and that's how we still do it.

So Wednesday morning at 2am, the new novel marketing episode posts.

The video does not post at 2 in the morning because the most important hour for YouTube, determining whether to make a video go viral or not, is the first hour after the video is posted.

So if I post a new video while all of my core audience in the United states are asleep, YouTube will determine.

This video is not very popular and there are tools.

And I pay for one called TubeBuddy, which I think if you're going to do YouTube paying for TubeBuddy for one year is a good idea because it will email you every time you post a video and harass you about all these things I've been talking about and give you, like, you need to do this better.

You need to do this better.

And I found it really annoying, but I was like, all right.

I started doing more and more of those things and I was like, dadgummit, these things really do matter.

Yeah.

And it will give you a chart.

It will look at your stats and say the very best time for you to post in the day on a Tuesday is at 2pm and on a Wednesday it's 3pm and if you're going to do live, then here's the data.

Because YouTube collects just an overwhelming amount of data, and TubeBuddy does a good job analyzing that.

And so TubeBuddy told me that on Wednesdays, the best time to publish is noon.

Well, pretty much every podcast that I personally follow posts at noon.

So we do ours at 11am so we're not perfectly following TubeBuddy's advice, but 11am is pretty close to noon.

And so it's 11am when the new YouTube video posts, and I try to send that week's email as close to 11am as I can.

It doesn't always happen because that one piece of it is manual and that one piece of it is me.

It's not my team.

And so I'm the biggest point of failure in the system, which I fully acknowledge.

But when I do send the email closer to 11am I find that the video does dramatically better on the organic new visitors that YouTube brings in.

So the more people that I bring in from my newsletter during that first hour, it's like every person I bring in, YouTube will double or triple that of new users it introduces my show to.

That's interesting because I know in the past I've definitely put out videos at like 1:30 in the morning because I'm going to bed and I just want this to be out when I could have easily scheduled it for a much better time.

Because 11 noon, that makes sense.

People are going to lunch and you know, they're going to grab their phone and go, okay, what I miss while I was doing my job.

And they're going to go right to YouTube.

So that makes sense.

You mentioned getting monetized with the so many hours and that whole nine yards.

Do you remember, like, how long did it take you before that finally took off?

I know you've only been doing it a couple months, but was it, you know.

Yeah.

So we launched the YouTube channel technically with those audiograms years ago.

Oh, there you go.

The same YouTube channel.

But here's the deal.

Those audiograms didn't do any good.

The only one that got any traffic was an episode we had on Goodreads, which is still one of our best performing episodes, partly because just nobody's talking about Goodreads.

And we had a really good episode on goodreads.

And so YouTube smiled upon this otherwise not very good episode.

But it was basically one video.

This is the thing about YouTube, one video can monetize you.

It's not.

So it's another big shift.

Podcasting is about faithfulness, providing consistent value every single week.

And really it's about not having any bad episodes.

Because if you have two or three bad episodes in a row, people start unsubscribing because there's that big pressure from the inbox style apps to listen to every new episode.

And if people just aren't finishing your episode, they start to feel guilty.

Becomes easier to just unsubscribe than to mark them all as completed.

And so for success in podcasting, it's more about avoiding the bad episodes.

Whereas if you have a bad episode on YouTube, YouTube will just not show it to anybody and they'll never know you had this bad episode.

It's like, like they have to dig for it because almost all of the lists of episodes on YouTube are algorithmically generated.

Whereas on YouTube you can have one viral episode that makes all the difference in the world.

And so we did an episode called how to write Novels that men want to read.

And it was about the differences between men and women, which I don't know how it was when you were growing up, but that was not controversial when I was growing up that men and women are different, like logically and spiritually, and they have different tastes and they like different movies.

But wow, this was controversial.

We were taking a bold statement with this episode and we were advocating for fiction specifically written for men because there's this big buzz on X about why are men not reading books?

Men used to read books, now they're not reading books.

And I had a guest on who made a really strong case that the publishing establishment is mostly run by women.

Now.

Most of the editors are women, most of the people on the pub boards are women.

And they're making editorial decisions that are geared around female preferences instead of male preferences.

So, for example, info dumps, which men tend to like.

One of the biggest reasons men read fiction is to learn something.

Women don't like info dumps.

And that's been the prevailing information.

Don't do an info dump in your book.

Readers don't like it, when in reality it's female.

Readers don't like it when Tom Clancy had 30 pages about how to build a nuclear bomb in the middle of clear and present danger.

The dudes reading that were more excited about the 30 pages on how to make the nuclear bomb than they were about all the adventure story trying to keep the bomb from blowing up.

And very different preferences.

We broke down a lot of different things.

But that episode continues to be one of our best performing episodes.

And it brought in hundreds of new subscribers and brought in thousands of views because it was a long episode.

It was 50 minutes long, something like that.

And so when you have a longer episode, it doesn't take nearly as many viewers who watch through to the end of it to get your watch hours.

And that's one of the misnomers that I had to unlearn about YouTube, because when I started on YouTube, my first YouTube video was in 2005.

It's all about short, short, short.

Right.

You couldn't upload more than 10 minutes to YouTube.

Right.

It was a hard limit.

It's like that's not how YouTube is anymore.

The algorithm now favors long watch time.

So YouTube actually likes longer videos than shorter videos.

In fact, it's really hard to find a five minute YouTube video anymore because those just don't give YouTube the kind of watch time that a 15 or 20 minute video gives.

Yeah.

Now somebody who had a five minute video, we'll cut it down and just make it a short.

Right.

So they can do it on their phone or whatever.

Well, now that you've been monetized, are you going to retire now?

Because I know that sweet, sweet YouTube money comes in when I was, I don't know, I don't want to get in your wallet.

If you don't want to say, that's fine.

But I mean, when I looked at my numbers, I think one month I was making basically $5 cpm.

And is it in that ballpark?

Ish.

No, we're making closer to between 200 and $400.

Again, it depends on if we've had a viral hit that month.

So one popular video can bring in a lot more.

And the topic seems to also have an impact.

So our episodes about AI, they tend to perform a little bit better.

Like it's a popular topic and people are really curious about AI and a lot of people in author world aren't really talking about it, but the advertisers for AI are paying more.

So from what I can tell.

So writing is not a super monetized topic.

If I had a business podcast, I'd be making a lot more per view, But AI is a really highly monetized topic.

And so an episode on AI will actually pay better than an episode on how to write by the seat of your pants as opposed to how to write from an outline.

So that kind of topic doesn't monetize as well.

But yeah, the bigger hits will bring in more money.

But that said, we're currently spending more than that on editing because I staffed up to do the YouTube show for real.

So I have somebody on my team who works freelance who's helping with editing and putting in B roll, which I'm not convinced helps.

I'm actually not.

We're on the fence on B roll.

We don't do it for interview episodes very much anymore.

And we're kind of going back and forth on the solo episodes.

But he also helps with thumbnails and with headings.

So as we hit to new, you know, there's a lot of labor that goes into a good YouTube video.

And so the additional costs and my additional time of, like, because I now have to do spend more time in descript for the video and the costs related to author update, we're still losing money.

So it's not like directly anyway.

We have had an increase in patrons and I cannot find a good way to tease out, I guess, other than surveying my patrons if they're listeners or watchers, because I do know, just anecdotally interacting with patrons, that a lot of them are now talking about watching the podcast.

I've been watching your podcast recently.

I've recently discovered you and almost all of the recent discoveries are YouTube folks who just find out.

In fact, my conference, the Novel Marketing conference, which was in January, we had somebody come to the conference who found us through the podcast, through the YouTube channel.

And, and we'd only started, like, YouTubing for real for only a few months.

So, like the, the.

It was mostly still, you know, our email list and our blog, but there was already folks from the YouTube community showing up, flying across the country to show up in person to our conference.

So when you started, was your goal?

Because I, I hear a lot of people like, oh, I'm going to grow my audio audience by starting a video.

And it doesn't sound like you were like, no, no, I'm going to start.

It's like playing on a separate stage at, I don't know, Coachella.

It's like, no, no, I'm gonna grow an audience over here.

I'm not gonna try to get people to leave the main stage, wherever they are, and come over here.

I'm just gonna build a new audience over here.

Was that pretty much the strategy?

Yeah, it was an audience growth strategy, and it was also a reaching a different kind of person.

So the listeners on my audio podcast and the blog are older and they're more female.

So my kind of core podcast listener is a woman.

In her, like between 50 and 55, the core YouTube watch person is a dude in his 30s.

And so it's not just a new audience, it's like a new audience.

It's like a completely different demographic.

So if you spend any time in writing world, the typical writing world is women in their 50s.

That's like the core.

Like if you go to a writers conference, that's the center of the bell curve.

And that's not what we're reaching on YouTube.

In fact, for a while our YouTube audience was like 80% guys, which probably why men write episodes did so well because for that audience, the like red pill Bros on YouTube audience, that kind of topic is red meat for them.

They really like that sort of topic.

Whereas a lot of the women were very offended.

They're like, I like this kind of fiction too.

It's like, that's fine.

We're not saying that you can't like these kinds of stories.

Right.

In fact, anyway, I'm not going to get into the details of that episode.

There's lots of drama, hundreds of comments.

I find that the best performing videos don't have more than about 92% like rate.

You need people clicking dislike for a video to really do well on YouTube.

The School of podcasting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then the other thing I want to ask about was time because it's like, oh, it's just, you know, throw on some lights and look in the camera.

Like, how has this changed your the the amount of time it takes?

Because how many kids do you have now?

Four.

We have four children six and younger.

So we're quite busy on the children.

Regards.

Yeah, so that's, you know, time is, you know, that's expensive, you know, when you got four kids to handle.

So that was a concern early on.

And the biggest issue of time was the learning curve.

Because everything we've been talking about in terms of learning curve is unique to the YouTube platform.

Specifically, what we haven't talked about, how to get the lighting right, how to get the video right, how to get the backdrop right.

Like there's this whole language of video that's in addition to the language of audio.

Right.

Like you're spending all this time with audio.

How do you get, you know, the background noise reduced?

I will say bookshelves full of books do two things.

One, it makes for a good backdrop.

Two, books are shockingly sound dampening and sound blocking.

Two things you want for a sound treated room.

A bookshelf will do both of those things.

If it's full of books, it's just the opposite.

If it's empty of books, then it becomes a speaker box and it can do weird things to the echo.

So these books behind me, for those of you watching the video version, are sound treatment, but they're also video treatment for the room.

And so that's a big learning curve.

And I will save you from 90% of the difficult lessons I had to learn with two recommendations.

I wish these products either existed or somebody had told me this, because I spent an entire month trying to get a teleprompter to work, and I just couldn't get it to work in any sort of reproducible way.

The Elgato prompter.

Just buy that.

Don't look at any of the others.

The Elgato prompter is magic, and it fixes the eyesight issue, because one of the problems with our earlier videos, we'd be recording in video, but my eyes would be on my screen rather than on the camera that was above the screen, and I wasn't looking right at the viewer.

And that's disorienting.

People are used to the person on camera looking straight into the camera.

And so having a prompter.

And the reason why the Elgato prompter is so magical is because it can reverse any screen on your computer.

So you can just put up a zoom window or a descript window and still be able to read all the text.

Any teleprompter can do a script, but that's not what we do as podcasters.

Often it's interviews and a script.

Dave, I blew up his script probably 20 seconds into this interview.

You just gotta roll with it.

And so the scripting doesn't work.

And having the Elgato prompter, It's less than 200 bucks.

Great purchase.

The other purchase that changed everything was just using my iPhone, or my old iPhone in this case, as my camera.

So if you're on a Mac, Macs have this amazing feature called feature called Continuity Cam, where an old iPhone, if it's not too old, can become the webcam.

And your old iPhone performs better.

My old one performs better than my $800 mirrorless Sony DSLR camera, shockingly.

And it's way less hassle because it does all of this magic in its image engine.

Your modern phone is mostly camera, actually.

And using an actual phone for a camera makes a huge, huge difference.

And so I don't have to worry about lighting.

I actually keep my lights off most of the time.

I mean, I have soft light.

I have lots of light sources, so I don't have any harsh shadows.

But I have big elgato key lights.

They're off right now.

I could have a window behind me.

It would expose just fine.

Like a lot of the rules of making lighting work for video, you don't have to follow if you're using a phone because the phone has AI that knows that people taking iPhone pictures are terrible at taking pictures.

So it just fixes it automatically.

And so those two things make the video quality piece of it a lot easier.

If you just have an old.

Instead of giving your old iPhone to your kids, don't give them a phone.

Let them enjoy their childhood for a little bit longer.

Take your old iPhone and insert it permanently into your elgato prompter and that will help solve the video piece of it.

But to answer your question, it is absolutely more work, it's becoming worth it and it's really nice to reach these new people and to have all the energy and excitement of a new group of folks in the community.

But it is absolutely more work and also it changes when and where I can record.

So this is a trick I learned from you.

You've got this really cool task cam that you'll just connect to an old XLR mic and you can go to a conference and just record really quick interviews and get good audio.

To do that with video is doable, but it's way more complicated.

It's more gear.

So there's just a lot of complexity pieces that get added.

And oh, the third thing I would say is something like what we're recording right now, something that's double ended recording.

If you do those three things, use your phone, elgato prompter and double ending recording.

The video quality piece will be pretty good if you're already following Dave Jackson's advice on audio quality.

Yeah, it's a lot of work and a lot of fun.

But you know, it sounds like you're starting to get, you know, you're losing money.

But it sounds like things are moving in the right direction.

We're making progress.

The show is getting bigger, the episodes are getting bigger and you all miss that.

But when David and I are done recording one of these episodes, we tend to talk about gear for quite a long time.

We both buy gear just to test it, which is a very expensive hobby, by the way.

You have no idea the amount of money Dave spends to keep this show recommendations interesting.

But yeah, I'm really glad I'm doing the YouTube channel.

I do think that the new patrons are covering it, but I don't have hard data on that.

But it is nice to have another revenue source because YouTube just straight up gives me money in addition to the patrons that give me money.

And I think that's because Patreon, even though podcasters have been using it, I think YouTubers mention it more.

Well, it started off as a.

It was created by a YouTuber.

Patreon was founded by a famous YouTuber music couple.

One of the things speaking of YouTube is I always say when you go to YouTube and you mentioned getting comments and such on different episodes is I always say be careful when you go to YouTube because they're not afraid to let you know when they think you stink.

So is that something that it took a little getting used to or.

Cause it just seems like they're much more vocal.

Yes.

And this is a big adjustment because if you're from podcast world, remember a bad podcast episode causes somebody to stop listening and then you've lost a subscriber and so negative feedback.

You really have to take that really seriously because you want to keep your subscribers happy.

It's just the opposite on YouTube.

If somebody leaves a really scathing negative comment on your video, that boosts the video in the algorithm.

And so it actually helps you.

And so you're basically harvesting attention from the trolls.

And I know YouTubers who will purposefully be demonstrating something and they'll do the math wrong.

They'll say, as you know, six plus seven is 18 and doing the math and just to trigger all the people going in the comments to correct their basic mistake.

Because making basic mistakes that trigger and get people angry in the comments or make them feel self righteous by correcting you or.

Or intelligent.

Actually there's a technique for it called engagement farming, which is a big mindset shift.

It's like, oh yay, I'm getting some negative comments.

Because when you get negative comments, other people will then respond to those comments being like, nuh.

And if you can get two trolls fighting each other in your comment section, that draws in a lot more audience.

I've had people say really nasty things about me attacking my appearance and attacking my religion.

Nothing's off bounds.

And I just have to remind myself, this feeds the algorithm.

They're bringing in more people to this YouTube video and nobody reads the comments to help them determine whether or not to watch a video.

And YouTube tends to surface the positive comments at the top.

And you can like comments that also cause those comments to float to the top.

What about.

I know because I listen to your show.

We both talk about how important an email list Is.

Is how does that work on YouTube?

Because I know the one thing that YouTube really wants you to do is get that person that's watching the current video to watch the next video.

So how does that work?

Where.

Because if you send every video with, like, hey, go over there and fill out this form and be on my email list, I could see where YouTube might go.

Yeah, that's not.

That's enough of that.

Stop it.

Actually, YouTube is pretty good about allowing you to put hyperlinks in the description.

And this is one nice thing about YouTube compared to podcasting.

So podcasting, you can add links, but how people interact with those links is very.

It's very different depending on how they're listening to your podcast.

So are they on Amazon Podcast app or Amazon Music app?

Are they on Spotify?

Are they on Apple?

Are they on Overcast?

Each one of these platforms will handle the description and links differently, so it's hard to say.

Check the link in the description below to become a patron.

And I think this is actually one of the reasons why Patreon does really well on YouTube, because you have this description field.

You can put a link to Patreon and people just tap it with their finger, click it with their mouse, takes them straight to Patreon.

Whereas there's a funding tag in the podcasting 2.0 features.

And, like, two apps support it.

Realize I'm preaching to the choir here because you're all in on podcasting 2.0, but I'm like, come on, y' all, support the funding tag.

It's not hard.

It doesn't have to go to Patreon.

You put that link going anywhere you want.

Overcast supports it, which is good.

But YouTube, though, is really good about allowing you to have links.

So we'll always have a link to the blog version.

We'll typically remember to have a link to Patreon.

I found that kind of a please join my newsletter pitch doesn't work particularly well.

What works better is we have the special guide companion for this episode.

Then you can go find the specific guide for this specific episode at this specific place, which is typically the blog version.

Well, the other thing that I wanted to ask you about is you had mentioned something about January and the fact that apparently in January, because you had decided, hey, New Year, I'm going to jump into this YouTube thing.

Yes, that was fortuitous.

I had heard this somewhere.

We started taking video seriously.

We started getting into it in December.

That's when some of our first viral videos started hitting, I think the Writing for Men was a little bit before that, but January, we were like, okay, we're going to hit the ground running.

And I did not appreciate just how big the Dearth of new YouTube content is in January.

It's like the perfect time to start a new show because all of the monetized shows basically take January off because the amount of money in the advertising bucket falls off a cliff.

So advertisers spend, spend, spend in December, ramping up for the Christmas retail season.

And then it's the new year and they're not.

Everyone's in recovery.

Like if you go to a grocery store, like a department store in January, like, half the shelves are empty.

Like, retail world takes January off effectively.

And YouTubers, many of them do as well because they'll make a fraction of the money in it for a January video that they'll make for that exact same video in December.

And you'll see a lot of really good YouTube content in December and November.

It's like sweeps week on the TV because there's just so much money to be made from the YouTube AdSense and the advertising.

And so it worked out great for us because we're like going gung ho.

We're doing lots of new content and a lot of the big channels that we're competing with, even if they're on different topics, but just big channels in general aren't putting out a lot of content, particularly those first couple weeks in January.

And so we got some kind of unearned views.

It was easier to attract new audience in January.

So if you're starting a new YouTube channel, I wouldn't start in January.

I would start sooner because try to get through that learning curve.

But do a big push.

Plan to do lots of new content in January, and I think you'll be glad you did.

Well.

So you would be the guy to ask then.

Brand new person wants to start a podcast.

And I'm sure the answer is going to be, it depends because it's a podcast question, but should they start audio only?

Should they start video?

Should they do both?

The medium is the message.

And I think that's not actually the first question to ask.

I think the first question to ask is, what is the format of my show?

Because there's a lot of different show formats out there, and some show formats lend themselves better to one format or another.

So our live news show works really well as a video first event because we have a really engaged comment section.

And whether we're using Riverside or Streamyard, we can take questions from YouTube comments and put them up on screen, which allows our live audience to comment on the news.

And because there's two of us doing it, whoever's not talking is kind of scrolling through the comments and throwing the comments up on screen.

And it's just a really great visual experience.

Okay, so that's kind of on one end of the spectrum.

Now, let's say you're a pastor and you want to do a daily devotional show where you're going to read a couple chapters of the Bible, have some thoughts on it, and then a prayer.

And the idea is that this is going to be a part of somebody's devotional rhythm that absolutely needs to be an audio podcast.

Nobody wants a video version of that.

That in no way is enhanced by being video.

In fact, people may be doing or experiencing your show with their Bible on their lap.

And if they have to be looking at your screen now, it's made it just a worse experience.

So those are kind of the two edges, and there's a lot of room in the middle for shows that work in both formats.

So the kind of classic interview show I don't think is a very interesting YouTube show, right?

Two faces, two people talking.

But I have thousands of viewers on YouTube who disagree with me.

And so I was like.

And they prefer because we have both.

And the YouTube version interrupts them with ads.

The podcast version does not, unless I have a pre roll or a post roll, which only hits at the beginning and the end.

But they prefer to watch the YouTube version.

And this is actually another thing I would mention.

A big advantage of having a podcast over a YouTube show is dynamically inserted content.

And Dave, you do this really good with your, like, where's Dave going to be next week segment.

You can't do that on YouTube.

It's this frozen thing.

You can't dynamically insert content.

For those of you listening in the future, you're like, yes, we can.

But as of this recording, that's all in beta.

We don't know if it's going to be released to mortals or what the rules are going to be.

But like, for authors, for my audience, dynamically inserted content is magic.

So you're an author, you're talking about podcasting, let's say.

And then you've got a book coming out on podcasting, you've got a thousand old episodes.

You can take some dynamic content and insert it at the beginning and end of all thousand of those old episodes.

They're all getting some ads, some views, and suddenly you're sending everybody to Your book launch and book launches are.

It's all about sales all at once.

And it's really helpful.

And then you have a new book.

You swap out those ads, you feature the new book.

That's really nice.

That's a great advantage of podcasting over YouTube.

So it's not all rainbows and butterflies in YouTube land.

It's a lot of hard work.

There are some downsides, and it is nice to have both because you can do live video and put the comments up on screen and say, look here.

But it's also nice to have just an audio podcast where you can edit out the ums and the uhs about people's heads jumping all over the screen.

It's always fun.

Awesome.

Well, thank you.

My friend, Thomas Umstadt Jr.

Novelmarketing.com you can check out his podcast over there.

He's got a bunch of resources.

He's got a conference now.

How cool is that?

We didn't even talk.

We'll have to have you come back sometime and talk about the joy that is having your own conference.

The oldest way to monetize a podcast.

And I would say it should not be the first thing you try.

But I appreciate all the insights and I know I've learned a bunch of stuff that I was like.

And I appreciate all the info, man.

Thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Wow.

There's a lot of stuff to chew in there.

SchoolOfPodcasting.com 986 is where you can find the links to Thomas's website.

Again, novelmarketing.com along with TubeBuddy, I use Vidiq.

I think they're both the same thing in a way, or the same type of thing.

Here's the thing.

Remember, when you say, I'm going to add something, you should take the time to learn the things that Thomas just talked about.

Learn how to come up with good titles.

Learn how to come up with good thumbnails.

Otherwise you're kind of wasting your time.

I have now kind of solidified what I've thought all along, which is the whole static image.

Is it better than nothing?

Barely.

Like just barely.

And then you notice where he moved to Talking Heads.

That helped.

And then they started doing thumbnails and titles.

So it's just more stuff.

And if you've got the time and the budget and the desire, you just got some great tips on how to really start your YouTube channel.

And also, if you thought it was a lot of work, you're kind of like, yeah, it's a lot of work.

And Especially when it comes to gear.

I've heard so many people now say, use your phone.

As much as I would love to have an affiliate commission on a Sony VZ10, you know, DSLR camera, just use your phone.

And then I'll have links to some lighting, some they make these little clip on microphones now that aren't bad if you want to get started in video, but at least now again, you're making an informed decision, which is what we are all about here at the school of podcasting.

My biggest fear is always with video is the fact that I hear people come up to me with a great idea and I go, why aren't you turning that into a podcast?

And they'll say, I don't want to do video.

And I go, you don't have to.

And they go, no.

Everybody says you do.

And I'm here to say, no, you don't.

But if you decide you want to, you just got some great tips from Thomas.

If you know someone who is thinking of diving into YouTube, could you do me a favor and share this episode with them?

They're going to think you're amazing because you share this boots on the Ground report and I get to grow my audience.

Or you could just tell them to go to schoolofpodcasting.com.

either one is fine by me.

In fact, I double dog dare you to tell more than one person, maybe three.

Ooh, that's just crazy talk.

That'd be great fun.

But I am Dave Jackson.

I help podcasters.

It's what I do.

I can't.

I just can't wait to see what we're going to do together.

And until next week, take care.

God bless.

Class is dismissed.

And I'll have links to Thomas's website, to Bubbity, to Ba ba ba ba.

Hey, B.

Big fat Albert, if you like what you hear, then go tell someone.