Grow Your Business on YouTube and LinkedIn for Content Creators and Startups [YouTube Marketing with Finn McKenty, Part 3]

Transcript

[00:00.078] John Bertino: There’s this idea that people’s attention spans are shorter than ever, which I think is insane. People are binge watching entire Netflix seasons in a day. Three-hour podcasts that get millions of views. MrBeast hyperactive edits with explosions every two seconds. That works for him because his audience is nine-year-olds. Going viral is negative value. Number one is to get attention. Number two is to turn that attention into money. The most important thing to remember about it is it is a consumer entertainment app.

There is not an audience for B2B content on there. not exist. can’t find one. If you’re trying to turn a consumer entertainment app into a direct response marketing channel, unless you have a B2C product, it’s not going to work. Search is not a meaningful source of traffic for most channels. The recommendation engine is where all that comes from. There are no rules, but generally I find that 10-to-20-minute spot is a sweet spot. It’s short enough that it’ll get people to click, but long enough that if you do a good job with your content, it’ll keep them watching for a long time, which will get your video recommended, which is how you

And we’re back with another episode of the Niche Marketing Podcast. As always, I’m your host, John Bertino, marketing agency matchmaker, consultant, and founder of The Agency Guide out of Philadelphia. If you’re unhappy with your marketing agency, and many people are, please give us a shout. Represent 300 teams, coast to coast, Europe as well, and undoubtedly have some great resources that we can connect you with that are a good fit for your industry niche, budget, personality, all those things. Today, I’m super excited to be here with Mr. Finn McKenty. Finn, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.

Finn, before I was a fan of your marketing content, I was a fan of your rock and roll content. Thank you. Been watching it literally for years and always really enjoyed it, found it incredibly engaging, which no doubt is super important when you’re trying to push out content. So, I guess, could you give folks a little background on yourself, talk a little bit about the Punk Rock NBA if you could, and in addition to that, what it…

[01:55.02] Finn McKenty: What were some of your tactics and secrets for keeping that content interesting and engaging? Most people know me for YouTube. I had the YouTube channel called the Punk Rock NBA. I also had one under my own name. It’s where most people know me for. I got about 750,000 subscribers between the two of those. Think around 130 million total views between those two channels and then there’s shorts and TikTok and blah, blah. But it’s what most people know me for. To me, that’s sort of like a side quest that ended up getting more popular than I thought it would be.

Unfortunately, I’ve been doing it for about 25 years. Is, I would call it like, product design and marketing. That’s really what I have been doing. And the YouTube channel is something I did, started in 2017, basically just because I saw how important YouTube was as a marketing channel. Basically, I wanna always understand wherever attention is at any given moment. I started out writing fanzines back in like 1993, I think is when I started. Sure, the black and white fanzines.

Selling them up so for anybody who’s not familiar that’s like a Yeah, like photocopy well people still make them, but now they’re more like art projects a little you know it’s like a little handmade like photocopied magazine or sometimes they weren’t photocopied mine. I actually got mine printed and you would sell those through the mail so basically just people You know covering these kind of niche fandoms the same things that people talk about on YouTube now.

[02:56.174] Finn McKenty: A relic of the past.

[03:17.518] John Bertino: You know, there’s some the ones about sci-fi and role-playing games and blah blah blah and mine was about music because that’s what I was into at the time I was 15 I think when I started I ended up selling maybe two or three thousands of those through the mail by the time I was out of high school which actually like in hindsight is like kind of shocking that I did that because like Yes, I know someone challenged you to do that now like could you sell two thousands of those even on the internet? Let alone back then when I was selling them through the mail.

Seriously You know, that’s sort of how I started doing this of like the goal is like always how do I get somebody’s attention? How do I make something that they’re willing to give me money for? Because to me like that’s the creative challenge Some people are happy just making something that is fulfilling to them and like that’s cool. I get that but for me Like that’s not enough like to me I’m only satisfied if I can get somebody else to give me money for it because that must mean it’s good. Mm-hmm Just the way I look at it, you know other people don’t, but times limited.

Exactly and like and if you don’t believe me try going up to anybody in the street and getting it and getting them to give you Literally one dollar for anything. It’s hard like even one dollar. Mm-hmm. So that’s what kind of got me started on this is like You come up with an idea you get people to become aware of it Convince them to give me money for it. See what you can do with it After that; I did some blogs when that sort of became the thing

And then after blogs started being I did eventually print writing and stuff like that in there too and then after blogs sort of wound down I Observed like the thing that really made me understand that how powerful YouTube was I went to work tour in 2014 I think maybe 2015 and The lines for that so I guess for anybody who’s not familiar with work tour It was like a big like alternative music festival every year. They have like There’s like 50 50 shows

[05:09.006] John Bertino: You every summer and I think what like 20 30 40 thousand kids at each one so pretty big thing and so they would have all these like tents where bands would sign their merch and stuff like that and I saw that the lines for the youtubers were longer than any of the bands I was like Whoa, okay. I was like at that time. I still thought of YouTube as like cat videos. I really didn’t pay any attention I mean obviously I watched YouTube sure, but like I didn’t really care about it didn’t pay attention to it and I was like, okay, there’s something going on here.

That’s what really sort of made me pay attention to it. And then I decided I should probably be paying more attention to this. I should understand this as a marketer. I started that channel in 2017, kind of switched directions a little bit. And to make a long story short, maybe about nine months into it or so, I ended up, you know, finding a direction that people liked, got like…

I don’t know, maybe 50,000 views or something on my first kind of big breakthrough video. long? Took about nine months. 60 videos or something like that. I don’t know, I deleted a lot of them, so I don’t remember. Well, I mean, yeah, basically long did it take to get to that point?

[06:16.77] Finn McKenty: I couldn’t stand to look at him. Know I’m close. I’m getting close to deleting my first batch. Go ahead so yeah, it took about nine months, which to me is like, that’s not atypical. YouTube is tough to break through, but once you do break through, then the snowball effect really takes over and you have a built-in audience and anything you put out, as long as it’s halfway decent, it’s gonna get in front of an audience, it’s gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger, blah, blah. And then yeah, I did it for seven years and…

Now I’m kind of focusing more on helping other people use YouTube and like tend to grow their business. Yeah, and we’re gonna talk all about that. And so, you are just sunset the punk rock NBA, right? Did you lead out as punk rock NBA in 2017 or was it called something else?

[07:05.016] John Bertino: called the same thing. At the beginning, I was focused on talking about business. I was sort of focused on the NBA part. But I quickly realized that number one, nobody knows what that is. Nobody knows what an NBA is. There’s not really an audience for that type of content on YouTube. Like even now, there still isn’t. Which is an interesting thing for people who are listening to this to understand about YouTube is that the most important thing to remember about it is it is a consumer entertainment app. That’s it.

So, there is not an audience for B2B content on there. It does not exist. You can’t find one. Anybody that is from the B2B world that is getting views has done what I like to call niching up. And they have taken their B2B content and sort of repackaged it in a way that would be accessible to a larger audience, more of what we could call edutainment kind of content. For example, like Y Combinator does well on YouTube, but their videos are very, very broad.

They had one recently called like how to make the most out of your 20s. Mm-hmm, right? Like there’s not like nerdy stuff about term sheets and stuff like that Because that’s just not what people want to watch on YouTube like if you think about the most common use case for YouTube is you are like making lunch or folding laundry and you open up your phone or the TV and you Scroll through the home page, you know open up the YouTube app scroll through the home page. No, you find something you like you’re like, okay

The video is about 15 minutes long. Cool. I’ll watch that while I fold laundry. Right. Or not even watch it. I will have it on in the background while I fold laundry. Yeah, which is totally what I do, by the way. dishes, on the treadmill.

[08:43.106] John Bertino: That’s the most common use case. And so, you think about what content someone is going to want to consume in that scenario. It’s not like a product demo of some new marketing attribution product. Right. And so. It might be, but you’re not gonna get tons of views out of that.

I mean, you’ll get dozens of views or like a hundred views. Like there’s some exceptions, but not really, you know? And so, people will say, but it’s for SEO. Okay, well, how many people are searching for this? Not many. So now it can work if you have a high ticket offer on the other side of that, that converts at a sufficiently high rate to offset those super low views.

For example, there’s a guy I talked to who does implementation for this like kind of obscure European CRM product. And he’s one of the only people making content about it on YouTube. And his offer is, I don’t know, five grand or something like that on average. His videos get 150 views, but enough people convert because they watch his tutorial on it and they’re like, no thank you, I’d rather just pay you to do it. So, they convert enough.

that it works out for him. Another example of this that works really well is real estate agents. Like every city has living in blank or moving to blank. And for the most part, unless it’s like Hawaii or Palm Springs or someplace that’s like a destination, like I know a guy that has living in Oklahoma, moving to Oklahoma City. Not that many people wanna move to Oklahoma City, but the ones who do,

[10:20.994] John Bertino: Like it’s very high intent and he does a really good job of it. So again, he could rotate on his videos, get three interviews, but. Well, and that’s an industry where you can really create that edutainment content.

But he doesn’t his videos only get like 300 views. They’re just like here’s the schools in this part of Oklahoma, you know, like Nobody wants to watch other than people who are serious about moving Oklahoma City so their bottom funnel and you’re getting 100 200 300 views and a 1 % convert to leads. That’s not a bad gig Six-figure income I know everybody thinks that this is gonna work for them.

It usually doesn’t the vast majority of people talk to are you know in the situation where they thought this is gonna work it doesn’t and so then they sort of end up in this situation of like how do we make YouTube work for us? And the answer is niching up Well, I mean you can’t really niche down much more than they usually do to break that exactly

[11:07.342] Finn McKenty: We’re necking down.

[11:12.718] Finn McKenty: broad now. tell me if I’m interpreting it correctly but also making it almost less serious. Again, we get to the edutainment component of it. So, a little broader, a little lighter. If you want to get more in depth and technical, then maybe drive them to some other piece of content. Is that right?

Yeah, exactly. you know, if you let’s say that I don’t know, let’s say you do stuff about, you know, let’s say you have a SaaS product for like maritime shipping. I pulled that out of my hat. Let’s say you have that. Like it’s a CRM for like maritime shippers or something like that. probably know a lot about maritime shipping. And so, there’s probably an opportunity for you to make explainer videos, which is very, very, very popular to YouTube is like explaining a thing that everyone is aware of, nobody knows how it works. You know, like how container shipping actually works, and you can explain it. And I know a little bit about it, but not much.

So, I couldn’t tell you what it is, but like that, like you could imagine that video having a million views, right? I would almost guarantee you there’s a video called like how container shipping works. So that’s a million views crux of that though, or the conflict I suppose, is that ownership, and maybe it’s a larger company where the marketing manager thinks this is a great idea, but ownership is like, you kidding me? We’re investing time this is why I don’t work with middle managers because I just I’m not interested in stakeholder management. Right. I can do it like if that’s how you think then continue making shitty bottom of the phone videos that get 50 views and good luck.

[12:42.68] Finn McKenty: Right. Well, and so if we were to attempt to try to connect those dots for them, again, it’s like, look, we’re trying to cast a wider net with more top funnel informational content, but it’s what we drive them to after the video or maybe during the video.

You just you can’t look at it through performance marketing lines. It’s going to lose every time. It’s not how it’s not what it’s for. If you’re trying to turn a consumer entertainment app into a direct response marketing channel, unless you have a B2C product, it’s not going to work for the most part. One of the things I love about you is you always tell it how it is. I’m autistic so I don’t really have a choice.

But you really do and that comes through in the content. The word authenticity is unfortunately overused and yet I don’t know if you can overuse it because it’s so mission critical here. I gather that this comes a bit natural to you as you just alluded to. So, a quote from something you recently said on a LinkedIn post. You can be fun and professional at the same time. Having a personality is good for business. Could you speak to that a little?

[13:35.246] John Bertino: Unfortunately, I sure wish it didn’t.

[13:49.87] John Bertino: Well, I think there’s an unspoken or sometimes even spoken belief that there’s a trade-off between personality and professionalism. That if you’re fun, then that will come at the expense of perceived professionalism. Like if you make a joke, people won’t take you seriously and won’t want to do business with you. That’s what people are afraid of, like if they’re gonna get judged in some way.

And I just don’t think that’s true. mean, have you like, how many times in your career have you come across a situation where you’re like, well, know, John’s really good at his job, but he makes a few too many jokes. I don’t think we want to work with him. It doesn’t happen. Jokes are one thing, mean, but wearing a hat, right? T-shirt, right? All of these things. I more money than most people watching this. But I mean, it’s all of these things, right? Just being your most authentic self.

[14:46.926] John Bertino: And by the way, if you go to, I mean, this is not, like if you go to, I don’t know, go to Amazon right now, there’s probably a thousand people that look like me right now. And you had made a comment to me in an offline conversation we had in the past about like, essentially the way you articulated it was, well, we’re the guys that are running the show now. In other words, our generation, assuming we’re relatively close to the same age, are a lot of the decision makers at this point, and our generation just expects a certain degree of authenticity. And I think to your point, it could actually be hurting you to be too rigid and square.

Yeah, I mean, it’s all dependent on, if, I don’t know, like, maybe, like, hospital administration probably plays by different rules, I don’t know. Or, you know, high finance or something, I don’t know. But even then, like, I’m willing to bet that even if you are a hospital administrator, yeah, maybe don’t show up to a meeting dressed like this. But I’m willing to bet that if you, you know, aren’t a sales role there, that probably being a likable, fun person probably is gonna help you close more deals.

Yes, this has been a recurring theme across the multiple guests I’ve been interviewing about how to have a successful YouTube show is this idea that, I mean, look, information in a sense is commoditized. We can get information about how to grow a YouTube channel anywhere. And so, in a lot of ways, what people are buying is, or investing their time is, I should say, is how to grow a YouTube channel from John and Finn’s unique perspective and personality.

I think this is a really key point. There’s a famous book called The Go Giver. I’m a big fan of this. Has five key laws about essentially how to do more effective sales that are less about salesmanship and more about how you give to the process and add value. And one of the key laws is essentially exactly this. The woman that’s the example in the book is a real estate agent and she comes to this conclusion, and I think it’s all based on real people.

[16:38.158] Finn McKenty: comes this conclusion that anybody could be selling real estate people are buying my personality and my unique approach to things which gets us right back to like if you’re not putting a concerted effort into being your most authentic genuine self, you’re probably Holding yourself back from success. Would you agree with that statement?

For the most part, the exception is, which is a whole other conversation I don’t know if you want to get into, but if you’re neurodivergent, that’s sometimes not an option because, mean, legit, people won’t like you. You have to bask, or people won’t like you, which sucks, but it’s extremely draining and it’s why neurodivergent people are unhappy a lot of times because it’s your world, we just live in it and we have to play by your rules. That’s just how it is with that carve out. If you’re a neurodivergent, that does not entirely apply to you. Although even then there’s a world in which you can be your authentic self. just the way you get there is a little bit different than a neurotypical person.

Speaking to this reminds me of something in your background I wanted to bring up. So currently, based on your LinkedIn profile, you’re with a company called URM Academy, and briefly, tell the viewers what URM Academy is if you don’t. Yeah, we teach people how to record music basically. So if you want to know how to record a band and mix that and distribute it to the world, we’ll teach you how to do all that stuff.

[18:06.254] Finn McKenty: And you’ve been there for some time. Seven years, it looks like. So as long as you’ve been doing, you were doing punk rock NBA. I started literally like the same day after I left my previous job. I bring this up on the heels about the neurodivergent personality types is I was going through some of the content last night and you have a lot to do I gather with the content that goes up on your is that correct? Not necessarily. Tell me more. It depends on a little bit. Okay.

[18:30.926] Finn McKenty: So, the first video that came up and I think it was one of the… Yes, your YouTube content. You’re talking about our YouTube content? I have very little to do with that. Okay. I mean, I run the channel from like a perspective of working with managing the team who does it. But, you know, there’s a team that like they pick all the content, they edit it, it listens to it, all that stuff. noted, well nonetheless, I think you’ll have a really good perspective on this.

So, I’m going through the content and one of the top videos I believe on the channel is this producer talking about how Billie Eilish, you know the video I’m talking about, how Billie Eilish pulled off like album of the year or something like this and was recorded in her bedroom or a bedroom. And the producer was quite the character. yeah.

[19:16.62] Finn McKenty: My take was, okay, it’s a compelling subject in the first place. She’s able, you could argue to be disrupting the recording industry by recording things in a bedroom, sort of a studio, but it was really his personality that made the video, I felt 10x more engaging. And his credibility. I mean he’s super accomplished producer that’s produced tons and tons of stuff you’ve heard of so Me saying the same things even if I had the same personality as he does wouldn’t mean that much right coming from him You know, there’s credibility piece, but yeah his personality for sure huge personality Tom Lord algae, right?

Right, what’s his name? And so I guess the connecting the dots there, here’s where someone’s unique and in this case, somewhat crass personality can be that multiplier on the video, which just gets us back to, you know, look, it’s not always gonna work for you, but something that makes things a little controversial, a little spicy, a little more interesting. It seems like it’s more likely to help you.

It has to be different. Yes, it will it will help you more than it hurts you almost usually there are some caveats that we’re get into Differentiated is the key like I don’t think people should seek to be controversial In fact, if you can avoid being controversial, that’s a good thing, but you have to be differentiated, right? That’s the key like I would say someone like Tim Ferriss has not ever really been all that controversial. Mm-hmm, but he Was very differentiated

when he came out, he was sort of one of the first people to have this kind of, you know, human optimization sort of lens that lots of people do now, like Andrew Huberman, Crystal Anderson, and these other people. Controversial is one way to do that, and there are times in which your differentiated point of view may also be controversial as sort of a byproduct of it, but I don’t actually think it’s a very good idea for people to be controversial on purpose.

[21:09.078] John Bertino: One of the sort of fundamental things about the content about life in general, but you know in particular the content is that you will get back what you put out so if you are throwing out a bunch of like Hot takes that are really polarizing and you know make people angry you’re gonna get that back. That’s not very pleasant for most people Unless there are some people who just probably have some personality disorders.

There are some people who legitimately don’t care mm-hmm to just do not, and I know some of them, just literally don’t care how mad they make people. Works for them? It would not work for most of us, and I’ve been on the receiving end a lot of that stuff, it’s not fun. was gonna say, you’ve probably received perhaps more than most because for sure. your punk rock MBA. I remember and have seen that you would stand your, you would make firm, you would. Sure, more than almost.

[22:00.206] John Bertino: You even, you’ve seen 10 % of it. I’ll show you some stuff later. Like you’ve seen the 10 % that’s the mildest. You would shout out in some moments people giving you a hard time in real time in the chat. yeah. people are ruthless. On my Twitch clips, Yeah, and you didn’t again, you didn’t even see the bad stuff.

Right, which reminds me of yet another thing I saw in your LinkedIn content recently about a post you had that went viral. And you’ve shared multiple perspectives on this idea of going viral and how valuable that really is. So we talked earlier about views, content that just gets a little bit of views. Talk a little bit, if you could, about content that goes viral and how overrated or underrated that is.

[22:41.962] John Bertino: I would say it’s not desirable at all unless your goal is to be famous. So, you know, anybody listening to this, your goal is to do business. And in that context, I would say being going viral is probably of like negative value because what happens is that, and I’ve had many, many tweets and short videos and stuff like that to get many, many millions of views.

It happens the same way every time. So, you put the thing out, the algorithm decides that this is viral content, you know, because it gets a lot of engagement early or whatever it is. And so then it pushes it out to a larger audience that’s way bigger than your followers who know who you are. So, if your tweets usually get 100,000 views, this one gets 5 million views. 95 % of these people have no idea who you are, don’t care who you are, have no respect for you. Like, they’re just here basically to like dunk on you in most cases.

And so the quality of interaction gets so bad that You’re just like, wish this never happened. At first, you’re like, oh wow, cool, okay, I’m going viral, all right, here we go. But then after a while you’re like, I don’t know about this, it’s like when you’re running downhill and your legs kind of get away from you. It’s kind of like that.

Yeah, you’re like, oh no, can we slow this down? But you don’t want to delete it because it’s like, oh, this has a lot of views. There are probably a few examples of something that went viral that also created business value, but I’d say more often than not, it’s the opposite. It’s exactly what it said. were just like, this sucks. We talked earlier about how there’s a place for niche videos. But let’s say you want to get a little bit bigger than that. But you don’t want to go viral necessarily as we just discussed.

[24:19.448] John Bertino: Well, I mean, sometimes it’s to happen and like you can’t seek it out if it happens. It happens. But just my point is like, don’t seek it out. Like it’s not useful. Let’s stick with the real estate example. What do you want? So you don’t want it to be too small. don’t necessarily strive to be too big. What is the goal for a business professional looking to use social media to gain?

That’s for in the context of anybody watching so it depends on is your business model a creator model? Or you know in the context of anybody watching this you are just using this as a marketing channel to sell something else So in the creator model basically more views is always better Because you’re monetized via ads or by brand deals or whatever those two things probably So your goal is to get as many eyeballs as you can on everything you do. That is the terminal goal. Yep

Right? So that’s the creator model. But if you’re listening to this, watching this, you’re not, that’s not your business model. Correct. So what is the goal? Well, that’s for you to decide. And that will inform everything else that you do. So this is the first question I always ask people when I, when I work with them or to get on a discovery call, it’s like, tell me, you know, if you were to do this and everything went according to plan and say, you know, six or 12 months, what, what would you like to see? Like in terms of business results, what would you like to see?

It could be, and we’ll talk about how this would inform a lot of decisions you make and why this is so important. On one extreme, let’s say you sell t-shirts. You’d like, we want to sell 5,000 t-shirts a month through our content. Cool, that’s possible. You model that out at some reasonable conversion rate, one to 5%. Do the math. That means you’re going to have to get many millions of views a month and be able to convert them, but that’s possible. It will…

[26:03.77] John Bertino: But it will dictate that you make a certain type of content and a volume of that content such that you’re getting I don’t know what the math is, know, depending on you look at a five or 10 million views a month, let’s say that’s going to take you in one direction. the other hand, maybe you sell some sort of, you know, SAS product, you know, with really high ACV and great retention. Sure for one too. I know a business consultancy. They have an &A arm, but they just do general business consulting, some business planning. It’s not an inexpensive service and they’re really looking to grow their YouTube channel. let’s say that’s.

So for them, I don’t know their business, but they probably only need to do a couple deals a year in order to have a good year. And they probably have other ways of getting deal flow. So maybe from this YouTube channel, if they only got one good deal this year, that might be a success for them. And so then that takes you in another direction in terms of the type of content you make and how many views it needs to get.

And in that scenario, like I don’t even know if YouTube would be the right choice for them because what’s the point of like, that’s such a kind of specific audience. Like what’s the, you get 10,000 people watching this. If 9,999 of them are just, you know, random people on the internet that aren’t even business owners, maybe the time and money spent making that video could have gone into something else. The only thing I think about is like marginal return on time invested. That’s like the only thing that matters.

Like, your job as a business owner is you’re a capital allocator or a resource allocator. The resource you’re allocating is time, and the thing you should always be asking yourself is, what can I be doing right now that is greatest marginal return on my time? And so for lot of people, I’m like, yeah, you could do YouTube, and here’s how it would work if you did, but I actually think it’s probably not the best use of your time.

[27:53.304] Finn McKenty: gleaning both from our conversation today as well as a few other conversations we’ve had in the past, as well as your sun setting of Punk Rock MBA, that for business purposes, perhaps, A, YouTube might be a little overrated for more complex sale, more expensive sale. Well, yes, that could be true. It really just depends. The way it would work is what I would call it as a indirect acquisition strategy, meaning that YouTube is a way of building your awareness and authority within your niche, which then increases the effectiveness of the things you’re doing that are further down the funnel. That’s the way I would think about it. for example, imagine, like, let’s say that, I don’t know, like a lot of people I talk to, like,

Financial planners and financial analysts a lot of the business comes from conferences will do either a keynote or a lunch and learn or something like that You know to 50 people but maybe they convert like six of them that day and these people are worth a lot of money Now what if when you went into that room everybody on that room already knew who you are? Already knew your point of view already knew your story already knew that three months ago you hired a new you know, whatever vice president and She came from this background blah blah blah

What would that do to your ability to convert that room? Be in 10x. Yeah, if they convert from watching your videos, awesome. But that’s not really the goal. The goal is that it’s going to be a force multiplier on the other things you do. Is LinkedIn the more obvious place? And does that have something to do, it would seem as though you’ve maybe shifted a lot of your attention to LinkedIn from YouTube. And right along the lines of the type of thing we’re talking about now, I would imagine is the reason. LinkedIn again, I must say, maybe it’s just that I dig your vibe or your personal brand, but your content really stands out in my feed. I gotta say.

[29:23.288] John Bertino: For most people, yes.

[29:44.696] John Bertino: I’m a mediocre YouTuber. I’m like, yeah, I would say I think I’m better at LinkedIn than I am at YouTube personally. What is it you’re doing on LinkedIn that’s really separating you from the pack? Because I gotta tell you, my feed, which is full of really thoughtful, smart, successful people, that’s who I follow, but then your content just jumps off the page, it’s immediately differentiated, it’s unique, and I’m having a hard time putting my finger on, why is Finn’s content stand out like it does? What do you think?

Well, it’s because I have applied the creator skill set to late in, which not that there are some, there are some people who doing that and they’re very successful. Like Zoe from Apollo, for example, she’s like one of my favorite creators there. She’s awesome. Yeah. The, don’t know what they would call like the data. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know what they actually consider their category. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, she’s awesome. So, we hard sell. she’s great. hollow the…

[30:38.19] Finn McKenty: Yeah,

[30:43.406] John Bertino: But I would say she applies the same kind of creator skill set to her LinkedIn content and look her up; you’ll see the results. She gets hundreds of likes on everything and she’s super credible. She knows her shit backwards and fucking forwards when it comes to sales. And that’s obvious. And she’s like, I did 4,000 calls in a year as an SDR. And they’re like, really? I’m like, yep. Like, okay then. Creator skill set. Could you unpack that a little bit?

Yeah, so what creators are very good at is getting attention. Because like I talked about, the creator business model is entirely about maximizing eyeballs. Now, what a lot of them are not so good at is… With it. Yes, exactly. Either running their own business or something on the other side of it, which is why most of them do stuff like merch or candy bars or something like that.

I do not have that problem because before I ever made a single YouTube video, I’d already spent 15 years doing like product development and stuff. Yep. So, I don’t have that problem. I can talk about a lot of parts of business with pretty high credibility. I mean, in terms of like product design, I’ve worked for tons and tons of like the biggest brands in the world. Like I can talk about that very credibly, but I also understand how to use sort of these. Creator tools. Tactics. Yeah, to get attention in a way that I think most people in LinkedIn don’t yet.

[32:10.358] Finn McKenty: like what creator tactics, what are some of them? And I know they’ve all probably been said before, but I’d love to hear your creator toolkit of tactics that you feel you still utilize that help you.

Think about everything you do, every piece of content you make, and every element in that piece of content. For example, the hook-on LinkedIn, or the image. thumbnail. Yeah, the thumbnail on YouTube, thumbnail and title, even the channel name. Every single thing that you do, your goal is to create some sort of emotional reaction from the audience.

Imagine you have a dial, and you can choose, this is where my autism, I realized actually this is like, because I’ve had to spend my entire life like paying just insanely detailed attention to like how people react to things that I say and do and things that other people say and do like I have the ability to like to predict how people will react to things and like that’s my superpower. seems that yes, like I know if she says that you’ll react in the following way. So, to be because

[33:17.568] John Bertino: you should say this, so he will do that. Yeah, this is what autistic people have to do is like you have to think about like the way I’m holding my hand right now.

Like I have to think about like, well, how is John going to perceive that? What is the audience going to think? And like think three steps ahead, which is exhausting, but like it becomes. Unfortunately, yes, but it becomes good in marketing soap. Well, and that’s a powerful thing for Mark.

[33:35.778] Finn McKenty: That’s natural to you.

[33:40.91] John Bertino: apply that thinking to like every single thing that you do. the specific emotion is sort of up to you to decide what makes sense given your objective. So, the best example of this is sort of in the traditional media, like outrage is the emotion they choose 99 % of the time. And because it works for them, because again, their model is to get as many clicks as possible on things and monetize via ads. Isn’t it the truth?

[34:08.012] Finn McKenty: And you know, you don’t do that. And yet, I still am always like, you have my attention. No, I don’t. I never do.

[34:15.054] John Bertino: Well, would have more, this is getting back to what I was saying before about sort of that you get back what you put out. For sure, I could get more views, more engagement on LinkedIn if I just enraged people all the time. Of course I would. That’s easy. mean, I won’t even say anything specific because I don’t want to upset people. I just don’t want to invite this, but you can think about, imagine all the people you’ve seen on LinkedIn or other social platforms being,

angry at the following person and you can insert whoever you want in there, they’re going to get tons of engagement on that. But is that going to help your business? And is it going to help your business? No, probably not. mean, even, no, it’s not going to, it’s just going to be like people show up to rage in the comments about whatever. Does that mean that they’re going to pick up the phone and do business with you? No. And if they did, you know, is that the kind of person you want? Is that the energy you want?

[35:12.91] John Bertino: you know, if you’re in the services business, you’re to have a relationship with this person. So, is that the kind of person you want to invite into your life? I would say probably not. So, one of the things I pick up from that is that you make a concerted effort to send good vibes, maybe for lack of better phrasing. And yet I think this is not juxtaposed, but in combination with our earlier conversation about being your authentic self. So, tell me if this is fair. You’re making concerted effort to elevate the energy and vibes, but without being fake or phony and doing it through your most authentic.

Yeah, well authentic self is I fucking hate having like Anxious energy around me. I hate it. Yeah, it’s like I have learned recently something called hyper vigilance and it upsets me tremendously to be around people who are upset like it really bothers me a lot, so it is my authentic self that I don’t want anything to do with that at all So like if that’s who you are, no, thank you. Before we put to bed these little creator tactics, just begin, because I think you’re really good at them. Any other little tidbits, little things that you’re really paying attention to? Let’s talk LinkedIn now.

[36:31.834] John Bertino: Well, this is it. This is the one meta thing. And so you think about, so what is the emotion that you want people to feel when they look at the hook in your post? And a very good way to do this is to unpack what people’s existing, again, this is just like an autism thing, unpack what people’s existing beliefs are about this thing. Like, let’s say it’s job interviews, okay? People have lots of feelings about job interviews. One of them, I would say,

And these are not universal because you put, we’ll just pick this one. Candidates feel like the interview process is unfair because they don’t get the attention they deserve. That’s what people believe. you’re not here to, or I am not here to say whether these are valid or invalid. This is what we know people are likely to be feeling.

Yes, exactly and you don’t get to decide this is a very important thing to understand is you don’t get to decide what they feel and believe and it doesn’t matter whether that’s true or not because We can get into the nuances of this you want but for the most part people are not going to change how they feel so you have to meet with them or they are so this is what people believe and You will decide whether to validate that belief or challenge that so you can imagine a LinkedIn post like about job reviews where it’s like the hook is something like, you know, so-and-so posted a job opening that got 700 applications.

They only talked to 42 of them. This is ridiculous. That would be validating the belief that people don’t get the attendance they deserve. The opposite of that would be so-and-so posted a job opening. They got 700 applications for it and they want the extra mile and actually talked to 42 of them.

[38:21.708] John Bertino: shout out to them for putting in the effort. You’re talking about the same thing and both of those could be valid hooks. It just sort of depends on, it would depend on the nature of your business and blah blah blah, sort of which one of those would be the right choice. And when we’re talking about LinkedIn, is it fair to assume that when we’re referring to a hook, we’re thinking both about the first couple seconds of a video, if there’s a video component, as well as the first line of texture to…

Yeah, although I would emphasize the first line of text because that’s what most people are going to see first At least on LinkedIn I would think of them both the primary hook is going to be the text in the post and then the secondary one will be the opening five seconds of the video. What’s your general take on video on LinkedIn, overused, underused, just fine.

The way people think of it now is a lot of people think that it’s a great way to grow. I don’t actually think that’s true, as of now at least. I think you can get a lot of impressions from it, but those impressions typically don’t turn into followers. So, I would look at video as a way to go deeper with the people who already follow you. And if you happen to get some additional followers out of it, awesome. But I would look at it as a way to…

[39:44.79] John Bertino: to build relationship with the people who already follow you. Because you think about what every salesperson is pushing for. They’re always pushing for a call, like in order of preference, an in-person meeting, a video call, a phone call, right? Or email, like that’s sort of an order of preference. Because when you sit in the same room with someone like we are right now, like think about how many more like communication tools we have.

And I don’t know, there’s just something about being in the same room with someone, there’s… some magical vibes there, I don’t know what it is. There is? There is. But a video call is the next best thing, right? Because you have all these other tools like tone of voice and body language and stuff like that that help you get to know this person better.

And I would say watching a video from somebody is pretty close to that. Because if you watch a couple of somebody’s videos, now you get a sense of how they talk and sort of their inflection and stuff like that, you’re going to read their text posts from then on in their voice.

Yeah, it’s really true. Yeah, it’s absolutely true. And it does get back to not to be a broken record, but back to this idea of one of your most valuable tools is your authentic is yourself is yourself. I almost want to not use the word authenticity, often to just yourself uniquely bring to the table. so, your point is about kind of nurturing What’s funny?

[41:05.762] Finn McKenty: You know to use marketing jargon. Yeah, nurturing perspective opportunities relationships so they get to know you better and that’s the power of video but not necessarily to pick up new followers in the first It can happen, but it’s just empirically from what I have observed that’s just typically not how it works on LinkedIn algorithm right now.

Like you could get a video that gets, I mean I had one recently that had like 600,000 impressions or something. I got like 20 followers from it. Like that’s great, I’ll take them. But the conversion just like isn’t really there feel like we have to have the obligatory discussion about consistency and content fatigue and the amount of effort to put into this stuff. Could you riff on that a little bit? Well, I’ll take sort of, I have two thoughts on it. Number one is.

Okay, I mean, it’s hard. Yeah, well, again, I’ve been doing this for 35 years, 30 years. So, like I can I’m very, very, very fast. People shouldn’t expect to be able to do what I do. And you don’t need to like, I like it as fun, like it’s relaxing to me. So, I like to do it.

[42:02.368] Finn McKenty: You put out a lot of content.

[42:18.008] Finn McKenty: So, you’re in your kind of flow state. Like this is the right discipline school, career for you, right? Yeah, I like it, but you don’t have to do what I do I talked to a lot of people who sort of like they’re like I know I should do this, but I don’t want to like okay fucking don’t I don’t care Well like what do you want me to tell you like do you do you want to pack orders?

No, I don’t either, but somebody’s got to do it I just I don’t like I don’t understand the sort of like I don’t want to who cares mmm like What made you think that? everything that you needed to do to drive your business is gonna be like enjoyable and why are you like applying that here? It’s weird. There’s a type of entrepreneur that’s like a scatter brain that basically unless it’s their pet, I think a lot of them are ADHD, unless it’s like their pet project, like they have two modes.

Their attention span is either infinity or zero. If it’s my pet project, I will allocate all my attention to it. it’s literally anything else; I don’t care. So, for those people, I’m like, you’re just not gonna do it. It’s, and it’s going to hurt your business, but you’re not capable of this. So that’s how it is. Clearly acknowledging there’s a lot of work that goes into this, not just you, but for.

[43:31.266] John Bertino: Yeah, everybody so that’s one side of this is like well deal with it like sure The other side of it is that there’s actually some ways you can do this that are not as much work if we zoom out the goal of Any of this stuff there’s two goals number one is to get attention number two is to turn that attention into money. So let’s think about how we get attention publishing content is one way of doing that which is a very good way of doing it but another way on LinkedIn is commenting in DMS, which is very, very, very effective.

So you could spend 20 minutes a day, 10 minutes a day commenting, thoughtful comments, not the, you know, AI ones of like, fun, you know, yeah, like thoughtful or funny or like just, just a real comment, you know, cause it could just be one line that’s funny or insightful or something like that. And like that, it doesn’t have to be like a novel. They have to be spot on.

[44:29.464] John Bertino: But it has to be real. has to be good. And you could spend 10, 15, 20 minutes a day doing that. You don’t have to like to do it all at once. Like I do it, but I’m in line at the grocery store or something like that, or in between calls.

You know, if I have five minutes before a call, just look on LinkedIn and if something is there to comment on, cool. If not, I don’t force it. And that’s a very, very, effective way of doing it. Like again, you said comments are a very effective way of Getting visibility and accumulating followers. I mean, I’ve seen this in Gary V’s book. Most recent one. I’m aware of the premise but something about it. That’s hard to believe yes.

[45:07.278] John Bertino: I don’t think that works in the way that he talked about it back then like it did work back then but like for Instagram It doesn’t work anymore Nobody’s gonna see her. I mean nobody’s gonna see her Instagram comment and be like, oh what a great comment I’m gonna check out your profile and follow you like doesn’t really work But it does work on LinkedIn because the scale is so much smaller and for most people on LinkedIn You don’t need a large audience, you know Unless there’s some scenarios, but for the most part you don’t again, you know your M &A example, right?

If that person left a comment that was seen by 20 of the right people, that has a lot of value. An Instagram comment being seen by 20 people has zero value. But LinkedIn is a different beast. So, it can work. And I’ll give you an example of this. There’s a guy in the product design or product management role named Shreyas Doshi who has a pretty big following.

And… I left a comment so he was something the original post was something like if talking to customers is You know so important how come most PMS don’t do it and I left comment to the effect of saying Because all that stuff is theater and the actual job of a PM is to build that stakeholders want and Like me saying that and it was literally just that it was like a two sentence comment, but me saying that like that Reveals like okay this guy understands how this world actually works. Everyone else is leaving, well, because blah, blah, this framework,

I guess that’s all bullshit. Like nobody gives a fuck. it’s just, boss just wants you to build what he said to build so you do it. That’s why you don’t talk to customers, because it doesn’t matter. Because the only thing that matters is the fucking VP’s opinion. That’s how it is at most companies. And so, I got, I don’t know, probably 75 likes or something on that, like 50 followers. Dispostering.

[46:58.828] John Bertino: Just for that one comment. Another one, there’s a named Adam Robinson who runs a company called RB2B that is, they have a product that basically if people visit your website, it will do its black magic and spit their contact information out into your Slack channel. Yeah, right.

I assume he’s talked to the appropriate people from a client compliance perspective sure that’s up to him anyway, he has a He’s fantastic at LinkedIn and he made a post say they like our YouTube channel sucks. We should do a better job of it. What should we do, and I left a Pretty long comment on their telling them telling him what I thought he should do with the channel like actually only with the intent of him seeing it because like whether he works with me or not like it legitimately he could have a great YouTube channel, and I want him to just because I want I Just I want the world to be optimal whether I’m the one doing or not.

I don’t care So I just left that comment and I looked like five discovery calls from that in like two hours Wow, and they were with like good people Because again anybody who is following him is not a dummy like these are like LinkedIn is like the top 1 % of people.

These are like very driven, high value, high performers that know their shit. And so, you know, I don’t know, I got 100 likes or something on that comment. And whoever read that was like, okay, this guy knows the thing or two about YouTube. So I booked some discovery calls. I don’t remember if any of them turned into clients or not, but I booked five discovery calls from one comment.

[48:40.778] Finn McKenty: And so, the bottom line is that comment game, I think Gary V called it, can affect your bottom line. It can actually be worth the investment of time and perhaps, and this how we got on the subject in the first place, perhaps a more streamlined approach to trying to create a bunch of original content in the main feed or your own content versus just commenting on other people. Absolutely. Yes.

[49:01.952] John Bertino: Yeah, again, this gets back to the question of marginal return on time invested. Like of all the things that you have to do, is creating original content the best of use your time or is it commenting and that like I’m not saying what it depends. It depends. I don’t know. But that’s the question I would ask. Or if you can do both, like I don’t know. But these are the questions you have to ask yourself.

And then how about sticking with the subject of scaling your time or making this as efficient an endeavor as possible. What does your team look like, if anything, do you have an infrastructure behind you to help you push out more?

Often did on YouTube. So, I had two editors said two channels had one editor for each channel and they both I mean, I’ve been managing creative teams for 25 years. So that’s easy for me to do We just had a very good for workflow setup where I just upload the raw video. They do everything else I found the right people that don’t need any hand holding or Feedback or anything like that. I just trust their decisions implicitly, you know occasionally I might change one little thing in the edit that there’s no way they would have known that this particular picture from 1991 wasn’t the right one for this reason.

Mm-hmm. They couldn’t have possibly known that so yeah but yeah, so I was able to work very seamlessly with them and on late in I don’t have a team because I Don’t need one. I also don’t want one like I want to do it all myself because it’s fun and I like it There are I mean I ghostwrite for other people so there’s lots of times in which There’s lots of times in which it makes sense to do that obviously But for me, I like it and it’s fun and I also think it keeps me really sharp So that’s why I choose not to do it and also like I was a graphic designer for like 10 years So I mean I’m a good writer. I’m a good designer I’ve also made videos. So, like I have the whole stack of skills. So, there’s really,

[51:00.834] John Bertino: finding three people to do those things and then manage, I would rather just like, no thank you. For other people that don’t have all those skills, yes, but for me, I don’t need it. Yeah, you mentioned that you had no problem jumping into an editor and editing something else. Okay, I want to go back to YouTube a little bit because you’ve had so much success there over the years. Let’s talk a little bit about the YouTube algorithm and what the algorithm favors and how you would lean into certain aspects of that algorithm. Yeah, yeah, right.

[51:28.692] John Bertino: As of last time, they talked about it publicly that I’m aware of, and this may change, you know, so who knows, but it is based on what they call expected watch time per impression, meaning that when they show a video to you, so let’s say that you like Formula One racing, and let’s say you like some particular Formula One driver, I don’t know any other names, but whatever. You know, whatever, Mario, so and so.

Let’s say that YouTube knows you like Mario the Formula One driver and there’s a stack of a thousand Mario videos that it could show you. It’s going to pick the one out of all those videos that based on historical performance has the longest watch time for every time it’s shown to you because the longer you spend on YouTube, the more ads they show you and the more money that Google makes for you. Right? So that’s, that’s how it works. So

What that means in practice is that assuming you can get people to keep watching your videos, longer videos are better. You know, there’s this idea that like people’s attention spans are shorter than ever, which I think is insane. If you act like this is just something that people heard somebody else say and then just repeated it. If you look at, again, this is my power of autism is I always go, wait a minute. Does that match the like actual empirical record? So, look at like people are binge watching entire Netflix seasons in a day. Yep. They’re watching three-hour podcasts that get millions of views people are just getting more discerning, and their bar is raised.

[53:06.126] John Bertino: People I would say people are consuming more long like when we were kids was anybody watching a three hour show No, like absolutely not, know There’s Ken Burns was like the only person making that type of stuff and now there’s tons of youtubers that do this There’s like a brief history of Final Fantasy 8 It’s an hour and a half long and has 900,000 views in three days, you know All of that is to say that like probably for a lot of people watching this like they’ve been told Short form video and short attention spans not true. Mm-hmm like that fair.

[53:35.522] John Bertino: like short form video is a thing in it. I generally don’t think it’s very high value. It is a thing, but like long form content is more like, is more popular than ever. I mean, I don’t think, I know where people say, just make it good. But it’s hard to do anything with that advice. So, if we were to attempt to try to dissect what it means to be good, let’s try it.

Well, go back to what I said earlier that like meta insight about the creator thing is like what emotional reaction are you creating in any given time? I think the sweet spot for YouTube videos for most people is between 10 and 20 minutes because it’s long enough to fill like that use case I mentioned earlier of like folding laundry or making lunch is long enough to fill that time. You’re not gonna pick a three-minute video. He’s like, well, I’m just gonna have to pick another one in three minutes. No, thank you.

Anything over 20 minutes or so starts to get into like appointment viewing where you’re like, and that looks cool, but I don’t know if I want to commit to that right now. So, there’s no rules, but generally I find that 10 to 20 minutes spot is a sweet spot. It’s short enough that it’ll get people to click, but long enough that if you do a good job with your content, it’ll keep them watching for long time, which will get your video recommended, which is how you grow your channel.

So, to answer your question, like what does make it good mean? Well, at any given moment, you have to ask yourself like what emotional reaction, Am I creating in the viewer at any given moment? And that doesn’t mean that you have to or should have like Mr. Beast like hyperactive edits with like explosions every two seconds. That works for him because his audience is nine-year-olds. And that’s what nine-year-olds like. You know, if you’re watching this, audience is probably grownups. They probably don’t want that.

[55:21.422] Finn McKenty: And my background’s in SEO. And in SEO also talks in terms of satisfying search intent. Similar idea in that you want to satisfy the viewer intent and giving them what they want.

Once in two seconds, then Google is like, OK, this was not good content. And my brain goes to, well then, we should do keyword research to understand what the core topics and questions are associated with this topic. So, I’m curious, if you have a business client that wants to do YouTube videos or any type of content that might be of longer form length where they need engagement, do you recommend an SEO exercise to figure out those questions? because search is not a meaningful source of traffic for most channels.

The recommendation engine is where all that comes from. I do think about this in SEO terms though of like volume versus intent. The most important thing on any YouTube video is the topic and the way I think about the likely audience for any given topic is the volume or awareness of the thing times the engagement for the thing.

And these can be very different. So, I’ll use an example of movies. 2000s rom-coms, huge genre, right? I love them. It’s my favorite genre of movie. Yes, love them. So, something like, I don’t know, all those like Catherine Heigl, like wedding movies, right? Yeah, like 27 dresses or whatever. Or whatever, stay sleepless in Seattle. right? Okay. Everybody knows what that movie is, right? Everybody. Like even like, you know, young people have heard of that movie.

[56:31.694] Finn McKenty: Is that right?

[56:37.508] Finn McKenty: I think I know who she is sure, that one.

[56:52.558] John Bertino: So super high awareness, but is anybody that invested in that movie? Yeah, I’d say probably not, know, Sleepless in Seattle maybe but that genre as a whole now like very high awareness, but very low engagement It’s like Hallmark movies that you just put on in the background, know, really it doesn’t command your full invested attention on like maybe an exactly. So, this is the exact opposite of it is horror movies much smaller audience than rom coms but the people who are into horror are really into it. So, the engagement is super high.

So, if There’s a point at which Very high engagement offsets lower kind of awareness this like, you know volume versus intent trade-off that’s exactly the same way as would think about it as SEO, but I’m using that as a metaphor. This is a very common failure pattern for YouTube is like people use a search first strategy and that almost never works. So just use it as a metaphor for, know, I hate to even bring this up, but I will anyway. Like this is why Trump is like the king of the media business, meaning not him personally, but meaning like he gets engagement for better or worse.

[58:08.142] John Bertino: Everybody on the planet knows who he is, and a lot of people have very strong opinions about him one way or the other so if you like this is why everybody talks about him all the time. It’s for that reason so, I actually do want to stay on the SEO component. Because I was actually thinking of it through a different lens. I want to get your take on it. So, rankings, right words, right rankings, that’s one thing. I understand your point. It’s more about the recommendation engine than ranking for a keyword. Yep. And by the way, if you get plugged into the recommendation engine, you will also probably rank for everything in there.

I do the keyword research to understand what the questions are people have in association with this topic in hopes that that might mean bringing up the things that people want to know about are more likely to get engagements. Would you say that’s a fair?

Yes, we do think about it. Yes again that goes back to what I said earlier about unpacking what people already believe about this thing and what they care about mm-hmm right, so if you’re gonna make a video about some athlete and Whatever there is they had a really horrible rookie season But they managed to somehow come out of it like and you know that that’s a thing like this happened to me in my videos all the time It’s like I would know people would demand that I talk about the following thing like I know that if I don’t talk about this thing that happened in this band then everyone’s gonna.

[59:28.728] John Bertino: Tell me about it so I know I have to talk about that. So, let’s take a drier B2B example. I know you had a recent test, you get a ton of glowing testimonials, man. mean, whew. And you had one. I mean, you have a ton. And this woman was a career coach for folks that are aging. niche. I felt so old watching her content. was like, my God, thank goodness I’m self-employed. But anyway, big PDF out of all of them.

[59:48.014] John Bertino: Younger than me, unfortunately. Yeah, and her content is great, the way. have extra age.

[59:59.532] Finn McKenty: I would think with someone with a profession like that, it probably pays to make sure you’re challenging yourself a little bit on, I touching on all the topics and keywords that people are asking about and want to know about and using that almost to kind of not keep you honest, but just make sure you’re touching on all the little things that you might otherwise forget.

Yeah, the fundamental challenge here or not challenge. It’s like this is all about understanding the person on the other side of the content as Deeply as possible like sometimes well not sometimes oftentimes I understand the way they think about this better than they understand it themselves. Mm-hmm and if you understand it’s like anything else in business like You know sales whatever like if you go into that meeting understanding everything about this person probably gonna be a good meeting. If you go in there and get caught with your pants down because you clearly didn’t know who they are and what they’re dealing with, this is probably not gonna be good meeting.

This discussion reminds me of, well frankly, just something I’ve been wanting to ask anyone that really knows their way around YouTube about. And that is taking, if you’re gonna do long form interviews like the one we’re doing right here, and you make the poignant point about, if it’s too long, people might not be able to fold a bin of laundry while they watch it, and 20 minutes being somewhat optimal time. Would it make sense to take an interview like this one, or all the others we’ve done for the Niche Marketing Podcast, and break it up into five, 10-minute videos of maybe the most interesting points and thinking of those as perhaps being more digestible and more likely to spread.

[01:01:35.426] John Bertino: As a tactic in general, yes. Like think of, if you’re thinking about it as a content funnel, the clips from the show are going to be the top of the funnel. The full episode of the show is gonna be the bottom of the funnel. So, you should expect that the full episode will have less views than the clips do. That’s not a bad thing, that’s expected behavior. Yep, and then in between could be the 10-minute pieces. Have you seen that work by any chance? And it’s a very specific question.

Yeah, all the time it worked. Yeah, that’s the playbook like and I’ll just use this interview as an example. We could carve out this discussion about getting engaging YouTube content, throw that title on it five, 10 minutes, and perhaps that has a really good chance of getting lots and lots of good engagement. And then some portion of those people will go through and watch the full episode. You can’t expect that everybody will. like with any of these things, you have to let go of what you would like the audience to do and just embrace that you are here to help them. They’re not here to help you.

[01:02:34.766] Finn McKenty: Well, that’s a good quote right there. So, I’d be remiss not to ask about monetization a little bit. I’m actually gonna come at this from a somewhat unique angle in that you have a background, I gather, in like brand partnerships. I’ve learning and have gleaned from other interviews with other folks that, I mean, those are probably your most lucrative ways to monetize. I mean, if you’re Mr. Yeah.

[01:03:02.145] John Bertino: Not for me, but for that’s true for a lot of people. Right? And brand partnership, let’s just define it. I mean, part of the thing is, is that can take many different shapes and forms, I think. But ultimately, we’re talking about good old fashioned, you reach out to someone unless they reach out to you and you say, I do this thing, here are my metrics, will you sponsor me? Right?

For me, it’s 100 % inbound, but yes. If doing outbound is great, I suggest, like I recommend it, but I fortunately, the great thing about YouTube is like because it’s a very robust, there’s a very robust marketplace for this. And there’s a lot of people that know how to run this playbook that if you’re getting views, they will find you and reach out to you. So, you probably don’t have to do inbound or outbound. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:03:45.038] Finn McKenty: we used Punk Rock MBA, a little bit of your experiences there. So you had some brand partnerships looked like with some pretty sizable company.

Yeah, I probably between my two channels. I was just talking to my manager about this the other day. I think we probably did 400 deals Between three and four deals because I was doing one to four a week for seven years That adds up and it was for all the companies you would think of like, know Squarespace and all the VPNs and factor and Dollar Shave Club and blah blah blah, you know Because the way that works is like they’re not you know right.

[01:04:19.348] John Bertino: Nord VPN is not reaching out to me individually. There are probably three agencies in between us. You know, the brand has whatever 10 million bucks this quarter for influencer. They farm that out to their, you know, biggest agency, which is probably some big WPP company or something, but they don’t really do influencers. So, they farm it out to some influencer marketing agency who then calls a bunch of managers that represent the actual creators. And so, if I got 1200 bucks for it, WPP probably got five grand, but that’s just how it works.

Right, sure. Could you share any lessons you’ve learned about structuring brand partnerships, right, wrong ways, thoughtful, clever ways, bundling some of what you offer to the brands, anything like that?

On YouTube, because this is kind of an unfortunate thing, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I would not recommend, if possible, that if you’re on the other side of this, you’re probably thinking about this more from the buy side than the sell side. I’ve been on both sides of it. I did influence the market. I was an influencer marketing manager at the start of my work out before. I’ve been on both sides of it. The sort of standard YouTube playbook that I just mentioned, I would argue, is not ideal.

because the brand and the creator don’t know each other. Like I’ve never talked to anybody, nor had VPN. I’ve probably done 20 deals with them or something. I don’t know anybody there. They don’t know who I am. You know, there’s all these agencies in between. And so I think I probably could have done a better job for them in terms of the creative, in terms of some other things, but there’s just not a mechanism for that to happen because I don’t have a dialogue with the brand. And they can’t really, that can’t happen because they don’t have…

[01:06:06.712] John Bertino: they don’t want to manage relationships with 500 creators or whatever the number is, right? mean, there are probably some people that do that in house and that could make sense, but this is not how it works for the most part. So I actually think there’s a lot of reasons why that, I mean, it does work, you know, from just like a, you know, a DR perspective, but if you’re on the other side of this, what I would look for is theirs, there’s sort of three criteria that I would look for in a creator. The first one is that they have an audience that is large enough to move the needle, but small enough to be very engaged.

Because like anybody who’s worked with influencers will tell you that when you work with a lot of like really big ones, usually the results aren’t that good. So Creative Live, I mean, we had like actual celebrities and stuff on there all the time, like, you know. This is the Seattle based business you worked for prior to your current.

Yeah, online education company. like Jared Leto and like Richard Branson and Bernie Brown and like, you know, whatever the what’s her name? Amanda Caroon from like Silicon Valley and lots of like actual celebrities and stuff. Grateful that we got the chance to work with those people. But if you look at like the numbers, they didn’t really move the needle as compared to someone like there’s a lot of photographers that nobody listening to this would have ever heard of. Like Jasmine Star, for example, if you’re into like the wedding and portrait photography world,

You know who she is, and she has a few hundred thousand followers, maybe a million now or something at the time. She had a few hundred thousand way less than Jared Leto, but she sold like crazy for us. Like we made tons of money from Jasmine. We didn’t make a dime from Jared Leto or maybe I don’t know, 10 grand or something. Yeah. Give it know there’s still value in, having someone like him on the platform, just like basically for clout. Yeah, But

[01:07:44.482] Finn McKenty: less than you’d expect.

[01:07:52.237] Finn McKenty: social If you want to drive revenue, I will say that that’s of large enough to move the needle for you, which is dependent on your business and your audience, right? Like for some people, audience of 10, some niches, an audience of 10,000 is big for others. It’s nothing. The second criteria is that that person has some sort of like actual product, like fit, right? Not just that you think they’re cool, that there’s like or that you like them, but like that there’s an actual like logical, authentic tie there. So, you know, again, for Jasmine, like we did, like our founder,

Chase, was like a very well known, he’s like one of the most successful commercial photographers in the world at the time. very clear fit between him and her. And then the third thing is that the person actually does what they say they’re going to do, which may sound obvious, but very flaky. And I would say Yeah, it’s a-

[01:08:52.94] John Bertino: The majority of them not very reliable. Okay, so noted from the brand’s perspective, but from the creator’s perspective, is there anything clever or thoughtful or strategic you should know about structuring these deals, or is it more just like, hey look, I’ll mention you at the beginning or middle of the episode?

You execute the brief, and it gets approved and then you get your money. That’s it. Yeah. Okay. And I’ve done, mean, you know, just from my background as a designer and stuff like that, I mean, that’s like all I did for a decade. So that was easier for me to do. I know for a fact that I was like one of the most reliable, like consistent on most of my stuff got approved the first time, which is pretty rare.

I was always at a schedule and my goal was always, I want to be the creator that when they’re looking at a spreadsheet, you know, and looking at who’s on time and all that stuff, I want them to be like, and that guy is just so easy to work with. Of course we’re going to keep giving him money. and somewhat of a newbie question here, but what metrics do most brands wanna see from you?

[01:09:52.718] John Bertino: I don’t know because I never talked to the brand But you know Generally speaking they’re gonna be looking at impressions and revenue So it sort of depends on the brand some of them care a lot about impressions others look at it purely from a performance You know ROI perspective, but one of those two things I’ll clarify, guess when they’re looking at you and a spreadsheet full of other creators, they are looking for more than just subs, right?

They don’t care. People know that subs now don’t really mean anything because you can think of channels that have 4 million subs from 10 years ago that are getting 9,000 views on their videos.

[01:10:39.638] John Bertino: that stuff, so they don’t know. They could ask, but they don’t know. So, the influencer discovery and recruiting is sort of like a whole skill set in and of itself, which deserves a two-hour podcast. If you’re interested in it, there’s a guy on LinkedIn named Ryan Pryor who works for a company called Modash, which does basically this. It’s like an influencer discovery platform. He’s super, super, super smart. I’m biased because he was also a client of mine, but he’s incredibly smart. And if you want to know about this stuff, he’s the guy to talk to.

Okay, as we come down the final stretch, I wanted to read you a few quotes that relate to marketing and content creation and get your take on it. So first, Cheryl Sandberg from Facebook famously said, done is better than perfect. yeah, I would say that’s generally true. There are some details that matter and those need to be perfect. The rest of them just need to be done and those details that need to be perfect, I’m gonna guess go back to putting yourself in the emotional mind state of the potential viewer. That’s the one. Other than that, mostly just get it out there, right?

[01:11:50.67] John Bertino: So, if I’m on any given piece of content, I’m putting 80 % of my energy into the hook. like if it’s a YouTube video, the title, the thumbnail and the first 30 to 60 seconds of my video. And then once that’s done, okay, cool. The rest of this is going to fall into place. Okay, Jay Bear, a prominent marker in the field, once said, make your marketing so useful that people will pay you for it.

Yes. However, the place where that can go wrong, like if it becomes like homework, right? Like you can put a lot of stuff that’s really useful. Lots of people do. This is very common thing is that that that’s what I would call like middle of funnel content is if there’s a lot of people who are subject matter experts who are very, very, very good at that middle of funnel content, but they struggle with getting anybody to pay attention to it because they don’t have the ability to like attract.

Attention creator skill set yeah exactly and that again comes back to the emotional thing take someone like like Seth Godin who everybody you know looks at as You know an authority on marketing when’s the last time you heard about him actually talk about the like nitty-gritty execution of details of anything marketing related I’d never have I’ve read like many of his books. I’ve followed him for probably 20 years. I can’t think of us more Yeah in storytelling you know with a lot of emotional hooks theoretical.

[01:13:13.908] John Bertino: Right now. I’m sure he can talk about that stuff. He’s a brilliant guy but he never does you know same things as Gary Vaynerchuk He does occasionally talk about that stuff like on the 40s episodes, which are really good but for the most part it’s storytelling. Mmm, you know, and that’s not because he lacks the ability to talk about it You do that all day long but it’s just that’s not generally speaking going to get him where he wants to go

I have one or two more quotes, but since you bring up storytelling, this is an area, I don’t know that I struggle with it, but I feel like again, it’s one of these terms that’s thrown out a lot, everybody agrees it’s important, but getting to the nitty gritty, the brass tacks of how does one tell an effective story in a marketing context that makes sense, I find to be really difficult to put words behind. Maybe you can help.

Sure, essence of any story is like literally just think of the parts of a movie. There’s the exposition, there’s the conflict, there’s the resolution, there’s the climax. That’s like a good framework, but the part I would focus on in particular is the conflict. So in any piece of like content you’re doing, what is the conflict here? It could be between like a proven idea and an unproven idea that maybe replacing the old one.

We don’t know. It could be between two schools of thought on a thing. It could be, you know, a product that is trying to succeed, but it’s challenged by the following thing, right? Like whatever it is, just conflict, I think. And I don’t mean that as again, getting back to it doesn’t mean like controversy or something like that. It just means there has to be some sort of debate.

Yeah, conflict tooth. just there has to be some sort of two two things or more things that are in opposition in some way, right? And that’s the essence of a story and then the rest of it is sort of just the craft of like keeping their attention But it’s got to have that conflict like it would be a very boring movie. It was like John grew up in the following town and everybody liked him and Everything he did was successful

[01:15:26.15] John Bertino: And then he passed away in his sleep and everyone thought he was great. The end. Like nobody would watch that movie. Yeah, yeah. Right. So what’s John’s challenge? Yeah, you know, can, there’s a lot of, you know, the hero’s journey is a great way to look at this, right? You know, but ultimately it all comes down to conflict.

Yeah, the Donald Miller’s The Hero’s Journey reference, right? We could talk about that, I feel like, for quite some time. One final quote. When you make something for everyone, you make something for Seth Godin, by the way no one. Yes, that’s coincidentally. Yeah. mean, Purple Cow was one of the first books I read that really made me think about like differentiation.

Yeah. I mean, it’s true. And so, you have to, you have to commit. I mean, this is one of the things that entrepreneurs struggle with a lot. It’s not just a marketing is like, you know, committing to one segment, you know, or for high school teachers, but also whatever, like swim coaches and, you know, construction workers and they’re like,

[01:16:21.826] John Bertino: You had to pick one. We have three ICPs. No, you can only have one ICP. Yes, exactly. Right. Now doesn’t mean that those other people can’t do business with you. It doesn’t mean that they you can’t pursue them another time, but like focus in business in general is a thing a lot of people struggle with. I understand, but it’s got to be done. Hence the eye.

[01:16:47.032] Finn McKenty: So how do you square focus towards a specific ICP with broadening out your YouTube strategies so that you’re not going to niche?

That’s where you get into the details of it. for example, and this is the reason why I might oftentimes say that like YouTube is actually not the best place for this exact reason. For example, like one of my clients does tax efficient investing. He’s a financial planner and he does, he focuses on tax efficient investment vehicles for high net worth people basically. Is there a way that, you know, that you could reach a million people and four of them are, and he sells to other financial advisors.

Yes, you could get those people on YouTube, but you could just go to LinkedIn and instead of having to reach a million people to get four of them on YouTube, you could just go find four of them on LinkedIn right now because I can start, I can go with sales navigator and just search for them. Like sales navigator is such an underrated thing. Like they should charge a thousand bucks a month for that. It’s crazy. I was just talking to one of my clients earlier.

He’s a, he does like basically like structured settlements for like personal injury lawsuits. And so like, and those are like other attorneys are his clients. He’s from the South, blah, blah, blah. So like, like, okay, well let’s look up personal injury attorneys in Arkansas that have posted on LinkedIn recently. So another active, okay, boom. There they are. Like it’s amazing. Yep. There they are.

[01:18:14.572] Finn McKenty: You support outreach strategy as well because the next step of course is to message some of these folks. It depends on a lot of things. would think of it as like, number one is how excited or annoyed would these people be to hear from you?

Yeah. And it depends because some people get solicited constantly and generally speaking for them, outreach is not going to be welcome. So, for there, would tread lightly. Still could be depending on what you are, like, are they getting messaged by 20 other people like you this week? If so, probably don’t do it directly.

[01:18:47.182] John Bertino: Could be exceptions but probably don’t or are you the person where if you message them, I’m like, thank God. Yes, like yes, I need help. Yeah, it’s uncommon, it’s so niche, and you’re providing a valuable solution that’s not generic and can be found in.

Yeah, exactly. it just depends. The question is like; how do I get on their radar is the question. DMing them a cold DM is one way of doing it. Another way is you could follow them and then comment on their content, nurture that relationship a little bit, and then send a connection request or wait for them to send you one. All options that just sort of depend on the and thinking through that funnel and that mindset. That kind of brings it all together,

[01:19:35.02] John Bertino: Yeah, like how do I get if I want this high value financial advisor who I know, you know works with five family offices that each have a hundred million dollars in assets like Let’s tread lightly here right, know, marketing really.

Yes, yes, let’s tread lightly here and let’s make sure that when we do make contact, we only get one chance at a first impression. So, let’s do it, right clearly a very thoughtful approach, Finn. I’d love to knock out some bonus content for the Instagram followers, but before we get to that, for the end of our episode here, if folks want to learn more about your offering and your content production practices, what’s the best way to get in touch or follow along? FinnMckenty.com or you can just go look me up on LinkedIn and send me a DM and I love talking to people so don’t be shy.

[01:20:24.59] Finn McKenty: Thanks so much for all the time you’ve given to the show, the insights you provided. It was awesome. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Great, and so head over to Instagram if you wanna see the bonus content. Thanks everyone.