Читать книгу The YouTube Formula - Derral Eves - Страница 13

But website design was one‐off work. I only got paid once by each client, which meant that I was always hustling and trying to make a sale. There were a lot of ups and downs, and it was starting to wear on me. It was time to visit Dad again. I told my dad of my predicament, and he smiled as he said, “Remember the advice I gave you?” Of course, I did. I had gone from one client to hundreds of clients, even getting other designers to help me so I could save time while bringing in more money. Dear old Dad smiled and said, “Well, I only gave you half of the advice. You needed to learn that first part before you were ready to learn the next. You've been banging your head for some months now, right? There are a lot of ups and downs?” It was like he was reading my mind. “You've been losing sleep, too, haven't you?” How did he know? “Now you are ready to understand the second part: Success is all about acquisition and retention of clients and having them come back wanting more. You got the acquisition down. But how is your retention? How many clients pay you monthly?” I explained the one‐and‐done nature of website design. Every single client paid me once. Dad said, “You'll always have ups and downs and sleeplessness without retention. Figure out retention—how you can keep them wanting more, and you can figure out success.” If you haven't realized it yet, my dad is a genius.

So I analyzed my problems again. What could I do differently? I came to the conclusion that there were two ways I could get recurring monthly payments from clients: hosting and ranking, that is, Internet marketing. All websites needed a host, which required monthly fees. So I started a hosting company called FatBoy Hosting. The name referred to the size of the hosting packages, not my personal weight (or did it …?). We had everything from small to XXXL to Blimpie‐sized packages. I also knew that companies paid monthly for Internet marketing. They needed to have websites get ranked in directories and other services. So I started doing website ranking for companies that paid me monthly. My business soon stabilized and started producing residual income. And I got more sleep. Thanks, Dad.

I continued to build websites for clients, hosted their website, and helped them get ranked on the relatively new Internet, or the World Wide Web as it was more commonly called then. I used search directories like Yahoo, Excite, Ask Jeeves, and AltaVista. “Google” wasn't yet a household name. I did this for several years, trying to expand my company. In 2005, I had hired a few new employees and needed to purchase some inexpensive office furniture, so I went to Craigslist to look for a good bargain. When you're fresh out of college and excited about a glowing future in entrepreneurship, you buy your office desk brand new at Staples, but when you've been around the block a few times and the shine has worn down, you save money and buy secondhand goods (or even better, get them for free) that work just the same!

While I was on Craigslist, I saw a listing for a contest to win a free new iPod Nano for anyone who could get people to join a new website called YouTube. The previous iPod on the market was the size of a brick and held a weighty 1,000 songs! Plus, if you threw it at someone you might kill them because it was heavy like a brick. Steve Jobs had just announced this new iPod Nano, which was the size of a pack of gum (much lighter than a brick) and held even more songs. I wanted that iPod! I signed up for YouTube, spammed all my contacts and clients to do the same, and even created new emails for myself personally to increase my chances. I became one of the lucky winners of the latest and greatest iPod on the market.

But then I started watching videos on YouTube and was blown away by the quality of the videos and the lack of the dreaded “buffering” load time so common then. I was hooked! I learned that you could embed videos from YouTube to any website, and people could play them wherever they were in the world. BAM, an idea came to me: I could upsell my 865 clients to embed a video on their website. It would be so easy, it would be like printing my own money. No one was doing this. I could be the first to put videos on my clients' websites.

In November 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion. Naturally, the platform's videos started to gain ranking traction on Google searches—now that they owned it, of course they wanted to help it get noticed. At this time, my job was to keep my clients' websites ranked as #1 on the front page of Google. But there was an anti‐spam czar at Google named Matt Cutts who made my life a living hell. Matt Cutts was my nemesis. My whole day was spent trying to figure out hacks to game the system and get my clients' websites highly ranked, and Matt and his team would find exploits to the system and shut them down every time. I felt like I was stuck on a roller coaster with no end in sight.

I was sick of fighting with Matt Cutts, and I was sick of getting the dreaded phone calls from my unsatisfied clients every time their ranking dropped. This was driving me insane. So I focused on the problem again. I looked at my business and asked myself what would be the easiest way to accomplish what I needed to do. I had an epiphany: if I stayed in line with Google's goals, I would get ranked every time. I didn't have to fight the system (or Matt Cutts) anymore. It sounds so simple now, but it was a big aha moment for me at the time. I looked at everything that Google was trying to accomplish. I read every blog post and watched every talk by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. I started to listen to what they really wanted. They talked a lot about organic ranking and tracking. They also talked about the future of Google, with artificial intelligence that would look for patterns to predict what people would want. I made sure I met all of the requirements when it came to what Google wanted.

It was then that I noticed some patterns from my clients' data. Remember the 865 videos I made and embedded on their websites? Most of them were on the front page of Google without any hack or help. WOW! You mean, I didn't have to fight Matt Cutts? And I didn't have to get frantic calls from clients? Sign me up! All I needed to do was make videos that were search‐friendly. So I created a plan of attack. I made a series of videos for a few select businesses and focused on generating a lead. My brother‐in‐law is an optometrist, and I asked him to let me market his practice with videos. I was able to rank for some hard key terms that would have taken a lot of effort for a website but showed up easily in the results in a matter of hours when I used videos. Crazy! To make sure this wasn't a fluke, I tried it with a second business, a personal injury attorney. We got the same results: a high Google ranking and the phone ringing with leads.

I had done it; I had solved one of the biggest problems for my company, and I wanted to go all in on video and YouTube. I needed to become the expert helping businesses by generating leads and sales with video. I kept my big clients who were paying thousands of dollars a month, but I sold everything else. It was my point of no return. Like when Spanish commander Cortés sank his ships and conquered the Aztecs. In sinking the ships, he gave himself one option: succeed or die. There would be no means to turn back. Likewise, I sold all my website and Internet marketing clients to an SEO company in Salt Lake City, with the clause that I could keep all the video marketing work. They agreed because they didn't know what I knew, that videos ranked in Google without any blackhat hack or strategy. They were being promoted because YouTube was owned by Google. Google wanted videos to be found, so they moved more users to YouTube. So I shifted my focus from website creation and marketing to video creation and marketing … and I watched my clients' rankings and revenue skyrocket because these videos were ranking on page one of Google.

By this time, I was itching with excitement for what I was witnessing in the evolution of marketing: online video was going to be a big deal, and I wanted to be a part of it. Video power outweighed word power by an overwhelming margin. Viewers were much more likely to do what advertisers wanted them to do—pick up the phone and call, make a purchase, or sign up for a service—after watching a video. And these videos could be made by regular people who were getting incredible distribution to millions of viewers … using inexpensive camera equipment. This had never been done outside the realm of television studios and movie sets.

In my videos, I hyperfocused to dial in messaging with the goal of getting the phone to ring. It was so important to know everything about the person making the phone call. I would grill my brother‐in‐law and his office staff on all the things people would ask and what they needed help with. Then I would take those questions and turn them into talking points for the video with clear solutions on how we could help. I asked a ton of questions to get a good handle on the niche and what would work. Then I would make 10 solid videos that would show up in search. Once the messaging was working—the video was ranking and the phone was ringing—I would go to another city and do it all over again. (I only worked with one business per niche in each city.)

I had started with my optometrist brother‐in‐law, but I replicated my work in that niche hundreds of times in hundreds of locations. When I got a system down for one niche, I could rinse and repeat for any client in that niche. Why re‐create the wheel when I could slap a new logo on what was already working? I had my systems dialed in so well. The clients were happy, which meant that I was happy. Matt Cutts was no longer the enemy; he was my best buddy! Talk about a win‐win.