My Embarrassing YouTube Failure

I want to talk about social media.

So, first helpful tip: If you want to get some coaching clients quickly, social media is the wrong path to take. 

I’ll be talking about this A LOT more this month, but rather than just tell you, I thought I’d show you.

So, welcome to the behind-the-scenes of Coach Pony’s YouTube channel! I want to share strategy, tactics, and some key lessons to help you, including one of our first big failures. If you want to be on social or start a YouTube channel, this blog is for you!

WARNING: It’s a dark and scary place, full of twists and turns and some VERY bad makeup and lighting decisions.

Are you ready?

AWESOME!

(Note, there is way too much to share for one email, so part two of this story will happen next Sunday).

YOUTUBE BACKGROUND

Okay, any company the size of mine has a presence almost everywhere.

But if you dig in, you’ll find that most are only really active in a *few* places.

They might be heavily on Instagram and Tiktok, but their YouTube has like 3 videos, and their LinkedIn is…nothing.

The reason for this: You can only do so much, and not everything will work well for your business. So you grab your company name or your own name on every platform, just because it’s a good idea to have that, but you can’t legitimately be everywhere.

Case in point: We’ve “had” a YouTube channel for several years for the reason I listed above. And, after several nice folks in this community asked us to put our podcast on YouTube Music for their ease of listening, we did. It was audio only, so not awesome for that format, but it was there.

So, after a few years of this, the channel looked weird. We had over 100 “videos” published, but very few subscribers or engagement. Again, for the reasons  I listed above. We had a channel, but we didn’t really HAVE a channel. I was putting in no effort into it.

YOUTUBE STRATEGY: HALF-ASSERY BEGINS!

Last summer, we decided to start taking YouTube more seriously, and begin to put some effort into it. It was time to start a Youtube Channel (dun dun dun DUN).

Why did I want to start a YouTube and explore it more seriously, you ask?

A few reasons: Blogging and writing are my favorite forms of communication and marketing, and one of the reasons I loved them is the long-tail and how people find you.

People searching for help get served your blog. That means that one blog can help people and drive traffic to your business for weeks, months or even, in the glory days, years.

Most social media is the opposite. The shelf life of an Instagram post is really just a few hours, usually less than a day.

YouTube however, is different. It’s search platform, so long form video content produced there has a much longer life than other forms of social. Days or weeks for sure, with some videos really popping and driving traffic a year later (this is happening to us right now).

And, it’s a teaching platform that caters to long-form teaching content. And if you know anything about it me, it’s that I’m long-winded and I love to teach.

I’ve held back from starting a YouTube channel though because I don’t love being on camera. I’m a bathrobe and couch kind of broad 95% of the time. Being under lights, being on video, wearing a shirt with lady undercrackers and makeup that holds up under harsh lighting? Sigh. Not my cup of tea.

Not to mention the tech involved with great YouTube production also seemed like a pain in the a**.

But last summer after years of my team asking and being like: “We need to be here” ….I grumpily agreed to experiment.

So, we hired a production and strategy team that specialized in YouTube to help us get going. I was working on some BARB upgrades and a new program launch, and I needed outside support to make this happen.

The deal was this: White glove service. They created the topics based on SEO research and wrote the hook and outline for each video. Once we recorded it, they were also responsible for the editing, title, thumbnail and publication.

We shoot complex teaching videos for our programs like Build a REAL Business, but for YouTube, we wanted a different look and feel from a training video. Something much more casual and in keeping with that platform. How hard could it be, we (foolishly) thought, we aren’t new to video, and surely we can come up with something new that fits the vibe? (Narrator: They could not).

They wanted us to produce one video a week to get things rolling. I agreed, because I thought it wouldn’t be overwhelming, given the white gloves of it all. My team was managing everything with the YouTube production team, and it was supposed to be relatively seamless.

And that, friends, was my first big mistake.

BIG MISTAKE: HOLY SHIRTBALLS YOUTUBE IS A LOT

Starting a Youtube channel is hard. There is no such thing as full white glove with YouTube unless you’ve also hired a talented scriptwriter, videographer, makeup artist etc, in addition to everything I listed.

We had to flesh out each script from an outline, edit it, shoot it, then review every video to approve it, and so on and so forth.

The amount of time I was spending on it was waaaaay more than I thought, and the worst part?

I hated how the videos looked, and I thought that something was also off with how they were edited.

But the relentless cycle left me little chance to dig in, there was always something else due for the next video and I didn’t have the space to step back and reflect on top of all of my other work.

But let me show you a screengrab to prove my point: Here is one of our older videos from last summer….

I mean, what is happening? The video is…grey?

I’m weirdly shiny.

The background is tilted, which is weird as it’s a real wall that I promise is level, and the background separation isn’t great. I’m shoved right up against that wall.

And oh my gosh, could I be wearing more makeup? I’m basically 3/4 of the way to clown status.

And if you watch it, while the content is good and helpful *overall,* I do not think it’s presented in the best possible way to help you make progress. Too many things are happening on screen, and the structure could better. These videos are weirdly dense which is not the best way to retain info.

Bottom line: YouTube is a VISUAL medium, which means how you present yourself is critical. And you’ve got to be happy with it.

YOUTUBE FIRINGS AND RECALIBRATION

To say I was unhappy was an understatement. After about 8 videos I got even grumpier. Our subscriber count wasn’t really growing, we weren’t getting traffic or views or new leads, I thought the videos were not up to standard in terms of how we were shooting them and how they looked, and I thought the content could be organized even better. They weren’t as good at teaching as I know I can be.

We had a big come-to-Jesus meeting with our YouTube team, and I was like: “We are now several months into our work together, I’m unhappy for these 7 reasons, we are underperforming every metric we both agreed to, so what are your suggestions?” And their suggestions were to double down and change nothing.

My face was: 

So anyway, I fired them right after that call.

Then I said we needed to stop production and re-think everything.

So we set a plan for ourselves. First, we needed to solve how the videos looked and how they were structured and edited. That was going to be our next phase, and was something we could do ourselves. Then, we obviously needed to get them much more visible on the platform. That was going to be phase 3 and would probably require more outside help.

To start: I was like: “I need a couple months just to think about what I don’t like, what I do, and *then* we can redesign how the videos look.”

So we took time, watched more YouTube videos to get an idea of what we could create, and then we changed a few technical things (we moved from panel lights to soft boxes and oh my gosh, what a difference), and set up a new, more polished scene.

Here is what our videos look like now:  

YAY TO LOOKING NORMAL AND HAVING BETTER CONTENT, ALSO HELP FOR YOU.

TIPS TO HELP YOU:

1) Lighting is everything. I’m wearing a similar amount of makeup in both video examples, but the lighting is better in the 2nd and that is amazing. When you set up your lights go through the different levels and take photos of how you look. You will find that at some levels of light you look like you are wearing nothing on your face and you look washed out and ill, and at others you look like you are about to audition for a strip club or are in witness protection because of your association with the mob. Find that middle ground.

2) Separate yourself from your background. Having depth behind you gives the video visual interest and more polish. So, shoot in a bigger room and not against a wall, if you can.

3) Add in a fun light behind you. Again, this makes the video look more polished and interesting, and any light will do. Behind me in the 2nd image is just a table lamp, but it adds so much!

4) Use a voice activated teleprompter. I’ve always done this, as they are so incredible. The prompter will speed up and slow down with your speech cadence, which makes the videos much more conversational. I also still ad-lib and go off script in every video, but doing this without a script or teleprompter shooting would take days, instead of hours.

5) Really think about how your video will impact someone’s life. What key insight or advice will they get that will be game-changing for them?  

And if you want to see everything I’ve just described in action, go watch our YouTube channel and take a closer look. (And if you like it, hit subscribe!).