BOOK MARKETING: How to Use YouTube to Get Noticed as an Expert Interview with Dale Roberts Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas and tips from the masters. Every week I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today my special guest is a self-publishing expert. Besides being a certified personal trainer, Dale Roberts is a best-selling self-published author of over 40 books. He teaches his clients how to produce profitable quality work on Amazon, Kindle, Direct Publishing, CreateSpace, ACX, Smashwords, Draft2Digital and Beyond. He's a no BS guy who tells you what works and what doesn't work, and it's all learned from his own personal trials and tribulations. Since we love talking about mistakes and how to avoid them of course, I knew that Dale would be a good match for this program. What an honor it is to welcome you to the show. Dale, thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor. Hey, thank you. The honor is all mine. I'm really, really excited to talk to you. I tell you, there's so many other opportunities I have obviously and other podcasts, but yours is specifically special, and I felt I resonated most with your message, and man... All right, anybody that's listening to this, isn't her voice impeccable? I mean, good Lord, Susan, you have the best reading voice I've ever heard. It took me years to master, so keep working on it Dale. I'll be with you one day. Excellent. Dale, I know you've been highly successful using YouTube and I'd love to tap into some of your expertise in this social media platform. Talk to us about the power of YouTube and why it offers such a huge opportunity to our authors. Page 1
Well, I'm going to give you just some anecdotal type evidence here, so I'm going to leave it up to the listeners to kind of research some of this. Alphabet, otherwise associated with Google, is one of the biggest companies in the world, and of course you know who Google owns, YouTube. And YouTube, of course, is part of that Google ethos. This just tells you what the reach is internationally that you have available to you, and here is the best part. It is absolutely free to upload content. Let me repeat that for emphasis. It is free. It doesn't cost you a dime. You don't need to go out and get fancy equipment. You don't need to have a great editing software to put the best videos up there. Heck, there's even people on YouTube right now that are having millions upon millions of subscribers watching thousands of views per minute, and all they're doing is shooting it directly from this phone, so this tells you how ludicrous of a opportunity YouTube is. There are going to be some people who are thinking in the back of their mind well, I'm a writer. I don't really... Here's the thing, is meet your audience in the middle. Yeah, they're going to read your books, but here's... One of the really cool things is they still go over to YouTube. I know for me, I don't watch cable television. I watch YouTube. That's just how I work. So I actually get to meet and discover a lot of people through YouTube. That's why it is just an incredible opportunity. And one of the things I see people getting caught up on when it comes to YouTube, like someday I'll do it, or I got to make sure that this and this and this... No. Get out of your own way and just start doing it now. That's a great segue, Dale, into how do you actually get started with YouTube, with the channel, branding yourself? I mean that's a huge question I know, but how do you get started? Outside of the actual technical elements... I'm just going to kind of skip over just the technical elements. Obviously, you're going to want to go to YouTube. You're probably going to have to have like an email to sign in or what not. It's going to be a couple little hoops that you're going to have to jump through. But the very first thing you need to do first... First and foremost is much like when we're writing, Susan. You and I, when we write we know who our audience is. We know who we're communicating to. So know who Page 2
your end user is. Who are you communicating to? What is their problem and how do you have that solution to their problem? A lot of people are going to kind of go, "But blogs. Somebody has like a problem and my blog is the solution." People have a problem, they want to be entertained, you have the solution to give to them. With that in mind, know your audience and know the message that you're going to want to deliver. The next thing that I would really recommend is dial in your visual elements, your visual branding. This is where, you know you said we're going to talk about mistakes. One of the mistakes I see quite a bit on YouTube, and I've learned from some of the biggest names in the industry, and that's where I was able to dial into my stuff, is your profile picture needs to be that pretty mug, all right? Your pretty face. Put it on there. I know some people are like, "I don't want to be in front of the camera," and things like that. You got to get over it. Put your face on the profile picture. The next thing is your channel art. The channel art is that little banner that goes across on your YouTube channel. Super simple to put together. But on that channel art, you of course want to have your pretty mug if you can, but you need to state exactly what people can expect on your YouTube channel. If you go over to mine, you'd see it says Self=Publishing with Dale L. Roberts. It's got me smiling on it, and it says tips and strategies for publishing your own books. It might have been something a little bit different, but either way people know what to expect by those two specific elements. There's my face, it's my brand, and then we got the channel art and it's got it set. Now here's the very next step, is just upload a video. Don't worry about it being perfect. I know that my first video was horrible. There's a good reason why it's unlisted now. It was terrible. But I'm super proud of myself in that two years ago I just took that first step, even if it was imperfect, because within that imperfection it was just perfect as it was, and it got me started. Then I was able to learn and tweak as I went along. Some of the elements, I said this could be better. The lighting could be better. The camera angle could be better. My message could be dialed in a little bit better. But I didn't worry about trying to be perfect. If you get those Page 3
three elements in order, being the profile picture, your channel art, and uploading your first video, those are the hardest steps. After that, it's smooth sailing baby. That also begs the question about the video. You said people don't like getting in front of the camera. I've often felt that way myself. Is there a way to get videos done quickly and easily? What would you suggest, without having to invest large amounts of money in lighting and expensive cameras? How can we do it easily and simply? The easiest way to go, and I think everyone... Most everyone that's probably listening to this has some type of a mobile device, some type of a phone that has a camera on it. It doesn't need to be perfect. Heck, you can even have a flip phone and you can start your first video. Now let's address this. There are some people that just don't want to be on camera. Let's meet in the middle here. This is something actually I've covered in one of my video series based on marketing and promotion. I talk about videos and how you can produce videos a few different ways. Okay, there is the one way. We get in front of the camera and we do it ourselves. Let's just say you are so self-conscious you don't want to get in front of the camera. That's okay. I'm not asking you to sacrifice your comfort yet. I would say if you can get a little bit uncomfortable, at least in launching your first video. One of the easiest ways to do it... You ready for this? This is great, Susan. You're going to love this. It's so simple. I don't think too many people realize this, but there's technology out there that will do a screen share on your computer and it will capture your audio at the same time. So if you're doing, say for instance, a tutorial of some sort, or maybe you have a collage of videos. You can probably talk over top of that and do lessons over top of that. You don't have to be in front of the camera if you aren't comfortable. Then the next thing would be is... This is going to be a little bit more expense, and I apologize. This kind of breaks the... I'm not spending too much money, but you can actually maybe write out what you're going to talk about and hire a professional. There are actually professional actors out there as well as voice-over talent that are willing to deliver your message. Once again, you're probably going to have to invest a little bit on something like that, but I've actually seen quite a few narrators, as well Page 4
as actors, that over on the site called Fiverr, that's F-I-V-E-R-R,.com. Believe it or not, Fiverr doesn't just have scam freelancers. There are actually good, honest workers on there, quite a few of them, and there is actually some paid actors. And you ready for this one? This is a first. I've never said this on a podcast before, Susan. I actually was one of the professional actors on there at one point or another, and I actually did get some... A little bit of extra change. Actually, helped me bootstrap some of my selfpublishing projects that I had in the works. All I had to do was go on and I was pretty much a professional actor. All I had to do was read specific lines, I sent it to a company, and they used it for advertising and what not. That's a great suggestion. I live Fiverr and I've found some really amazing people on that, so I can definitely vouch for them. We've got our YouTube channel, we've got the video, we've got a few episodes out there. How about getting the traffic to see what we've actually produced? How do you go about that? This one is going to be... I'm going to try to be as succinct as possible, because there's so many avenues that we can do to deliver more traffic. This is awesome. Some of your people that are listening here, quite a few of your listeners are writers I'm assuming, right? Am I correct? Correct. Okay. They probably... If you can draw a parallel between writing and publishing and video publishing, this is going to help out a little bit. We know that key words are critical in the longterm success of our books. We want to say what our audience is looking for. The same thing is going to work here for YouTube. You want to make sure that you have key words that your viewing audience, your potential viewing audience, is going to be able to find you through. Now we can refine it down to, you know, there are certain plugins and tools. Just figure out what your audience is saying and then you'll want to title it appropriately for your video, and you also want to go into that video description... Something I see highly underutilized by a lot of newbies is the video description. Go in there and tell people what they can expect, and if you can organically work in key words, it'll help out with discoverability. Page 5
Now the success of your video isn't going to live and die on key words alone, because if you're a new person it's kind of like... I'm just going to throw out a for instance. Let's say I'm a new author. I wrote a book on self-help and I throw it out there. Everybody understands that self-help is a very big niche. It's hyper-competitive. It's really tough to be heard above the noise in that particular niche. The same thing is going to hold true over on YouTube. If your brand new and let's go ahead and just say for instance you want to open a channel based on self-help, there are tons of self-help channels on there and it's going to be highly competitive. It's going to take a little bit of time and energy and consistency. That is the next key to how you get more traffic. Believe it or not, YouTube blogs, when you are consistent... Now consistency can be anywhere from say one video per week to as much as three or four videos per week. You just got to know what your audience... Who they are, what they're looking for. As a for instance and as an aside, I tried to do twice daily content one time and I had subscribers leaving in droves. They were like oh, wait, no, no. We don't want that much Dale. But when I went down to about one to four times per week they loved it. I saw the subscriber base increase. It's interesting, you talked about the timing, because in fact that's actually a question that I had for you, is there an optimum time that you should be doing this? Should it be once a week? Should it be twice a week? Can you still survive on maybe twice a month? Can you build a target audience around that? What's been your expertise on that? What I found is that it varies per channel. If you're starting in this, you should just set a goal, much like if you're writing you've got a daily word minimum. It could be like I'm going to write 1,000 words per day, or I'm going to write 3,000 words per day, or I'm going to spend 30 minutes writing per day, either way. The same thing is going to hold true for YouTube, is figure out what you can do consistently. If that is only one video per month, then stick with that and see how the results will come from that over the long-term. Generally speaking, and this is kind of a generic type thing I've always heard, a lot of the larger YouTubers, the ones that are YouTube experts, they always say that it's a good idea to find that sweet spot between one to four times per week. Page 6
But you also need to be very realistic in knowing, okay, what do I need to do outside of YouTube? Because if you're a writer, you probably should be writing. You probably should be honoring those things that are putting food on your table. So, if you've got a full time job over at the local grocery store, you're probably going to need to fulfill, not thinking to yourself I'm going to release three videos per day over the course of the next 30 days. You're going to burn out really quick and you may not see very much results from something like that, so think about what you can realistically accomplish and maintain what you already have on your plate. That also begs the question this is a free service, so it's something that you're offering for free. However, I do know that people monetize their YouTube channel. Have you done that. If so, how have you gone about it? What level do we have to be at before we can even consider that? That's a lot of little questions. I love talking about monetization on YouTube. This is one of my favorite subjects. I'm so glad you asked that. It sounds like one of those generic answers you get from... I'm so glad you asked that. That was a great question. But for YouTube, a lot of people probably still remember YouTube of old, where you would just put up a video and make money. That is no longer happening right now. It's actually something that's called the YouTube Partner Program. Currently right now... Let me backtrack just a little bit. In order to get paid by YouTube, they have something that's called AdSense. You get an AdSense account, it's completely free to have, and what happens is you can monetize your videos, and any time they run an ad in it or beside it or around it you get paid X amount of dollars. It can be like one cent per view, five cent per view, either way. You could just... If you had an account, you can monetize it. But now it's actually... You have to have 1,000 subscribers and you have to had 4,000 streamed hours over the past year. That's within one year of time. Those seem like really, really large numbers. Don't fret. Don't freak out. AdSense doesn't pay very much. Let me repeat that again for emphasis. AdSense doesn't pay very much. Yeah, it gives me a little bit of extra pocket change, maybe it takes care of groceries for a little bit, but for the most part it's not that big of a deal, because up to about I think it was a year ago what was called the [adpocalypses 00:17:19] happened and a lot of major franchises and people that were buying ad space over on YouTube started pulling their money from there because Page 7
their ads were being served on what they felt was inappropriate content. Call me crazy, but McDonald's doesn't want to be advertising their stuff overtop of a white supremacist video. Yes, YouTube had that on there, by the way. You don't need to look, just know it's there. So that's where YouTube said okay, that's it. Everybody out of the pool. Then they started to limit how people were getting paid. So these YouTubers that were making this a full-time job started losing money like crazy. They were making hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, and then it dropped down to nearly 10% of that revenue. It was scary for a lot of people. I want to kind of give that harsh reality and let you know that yes, that's there. Yes, it's going to be tough to get 1,000 subscribers. And yes, it's going to be tough to have 4,000 hours of stream time, that people watch 4,000 hours of your content. But if you're smart about it, if you think about ways... Okay, how can I serve my audience? That is where the real monetization happens. Let's say for instance I'm an author. My next book is coming out and I start to promote it over on my YouTube channel. I'm not driving any ad traffic or anything else to it. I'm like here's my next book. It's about how to do pushups 1,000 ways. In my video description, I can actually put a link to my product. There's one way that you can monetize it. There is another way that you can do it. Let's say, for instance, I see Susan and she's got a book coming out about podcasting with the pros, and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to get on and I'm like, "Hey, here's my review video on Susan's latest book and, by the way, you can pick up a copy of that in the affiliate link in the description below," and then people will click that link. There's the beautiful part about it. Susan, first of all, gets paid, and next, if it's an affiliate link, that means I get a small percentage of all sales. There's where monetization starts to really open up. Then if you've got an expertise of some sort, you can also monetize it in other ways. We could go down this rabbit hole, but it'll take us in so many different ways, like creating courses, offering couching, many, many other ways that you can really monetize it. It's only limited to your imagination. But one thing I would recommend is before you start dropping a bunch of links inside your video description and, oh, I'm going to go ahead and start making sales, try to be 100% transparent Page 8
with your audience. You got affiliate links, let them know that those are affiliate links. In other words, you're going to be collecting a certain percentage of all sales. YouTube kind of likes that, and I believe it actually might be in their terms of service. I could be wrong on that one, but I almost... Not almost, in every instance that I have some form of a link that will lead to somewhere that someone is going to purchase a product, if I financially gain from that, I want to make sure that my audience knows that. How about mistakes? Let's transition and talk more about the mistakes that you see first timers make when it comes to using YouTube. First time users? How about I just share my mistakes. I love talking about the things I've done wrong. One of the things that... And I've already kind of shared on this one, was believing that okay, if the little bit of video content being published gets me good results, well doesn't a lot of content equal great results? Not necessarily true. You notice, as I said, it really worked against me. A lot of my subscribers were put off by that and turned off and they started to unsubscribe, and I saw the subscribe rate considerably drop. Being in tune with how your videos are performing is critical to your longterm success. Yes, you should test out ideas. I tested that idea out for two weeks before I decided hey, that's not a good idea. What I see a lot of people doing is they're just posting and praying. They believe that they're going to post a video and it's going to go viral. I got news for you, there are unicorns in the world, okay, there are those people that literally they will take their flip phone, they will video it, and they'll post it up there and they've got millions upon millions of views. Here's the thing, is unicorns are rare. I never consider myself a unicorn, in fact far be it from it. What I would recommend is be realistic. See what's getting you the best results. Pay attention to what's called analytics. When you open up your YouTube account you're actually going to have something that's called the creator dashboard. You're going to open up that dashboard and it says analytics. Analytics will tell you how many subscribers you have, how many views you have, how many minutes you have, how many likes, dislikes. Page 9
Pay attention to those minor small details, because it's going to tell you and paint a much larger picture of what's your audience looking at, what is giving you the victories and where you should go forward. I think that there's a lot of people on YouTube right now that have their expectations set so high, but they forget that they're not going to be successful if they're not paying attention to what they're doing and what is giving them the wins. So long story short, the biggest mistake that I see is people not paying attention to their analytics. You have to be mindful of that. This is something I look at on a daily basis, if not twice daily basis. I look at my analytics and I study those things and I try to figure out what's going to be my next step? How am I going to be deliberate in my movement? What am I going to do next to help my channel grow, and more importantly serve the audience that is currently coming to me? Those are some great points. I'm thrilled that you brought them up. One of the things that I know you said early on is that your first few takes weren't that great, but you still put them out there. I relate to that, because my first few podcasts on this channel, I'm embarrassed by them. But I did them and it got me started. As you say, you learn as you go, so I highly recommend that people take your advice. Dale, if people want to find out more about your services, how can they do that? The best way to get ahold of me and find everything is right here at this hub. It's selfpublishingwithdale.com. Once again, that's selfpublishingwithdale.com. I definitely recommend that they go and check out your YouTube channel, because you've got some great little videos on all different aspects of self-publishing, and they're fun. They're just fun to watch. If you were to leave our listeners with a golden nugget, Dale, what would that be? I feel like I tapped on this just real briefly early on, but I want to highlight this and really focus on this. If you ever say the word someday... Someday I will insert blank, you are limiting yourself. Stop saying some day and do it today. I know it's not going to be perfect. I know you're uncomfortable. I know you're nervous. I know you're afraid of judgment. Man, everybody is that way. Page 10
If you can just wipe that out of your language, some day, and just know that today is the day that you take life by the horns and you wrestle it right down to the ground and you make today your day. You're so inspirational, it's wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing and thank you all for taking time out of your precious day to listen to this interview. I sincerely hope that it sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books. Here's wishing you much book marketing success. Page 11