Utilizing YouTube for business and personal growth

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are starting a new interview. We're going to be speaking with Andrew Murdoch and we're going to be talking about YouTube and utilizing it, leveraging it. We're actually going to get not just as a leverage for your business or your advertising, but also talk about his backstory, essentially, his origin story and how he used it to get through some pretty rough times and step up to a whole new career, a whole new life in a sense. I don't want to take all of that away. I want you to enjoy it straight from the horse's mouth, as it were, as Andrew sort of works us through his journey to realize where he could leverage the value of YouTube. And of course, then we'll get into how we can use that and some of the things we want to do to make that a great tool for us. I don't want to hold off anymore though, so let's get started on our conversation with Andrew. Okay, today we've got a new conversation. We're speaking with Andrew Murdoch and we're not talking to a YouTube influencer. It's almost like a YouTube influencer influencer. It's somebody that's going to talk to us about how do we use this thing that everybody's using, but we're not selling lingerie or women's products or beer or whatever it is. We're not, clothing, whatever it is that it happens to be that an influencer is selling. We're selling software and solutions. And so what we want to do is talk to Andrew about how do we use that? How do we leverage this? So I want to welcome to our show and why don't you give us a little bit of the background about yourself. Yeah, Rob, thanks so much for having me. I will gnaw your ear off on this subject. So I'm very passionate about this stuff, but my humble beginnings, I guess, would say the most important aspects just to set the stage would be about, it started about five years ago and I was what can only be described as at rock bottom. Five years ago, I found myself in a very toxic relationship and found myself doing something that I never thought I would do. I ended a marriage. I absolutely walked away from a marriage and I never thought I was quote that guy. So it's almost five years ago to the day. Actually I was, I found myself sleeping on an air mattress, newly separated, tons and tons of debts, absolutely convinced to be the world's biggest loser. I was not very happy with myself for all kinds of reasons. I'm sure it's not to any stretch to the imagination there. And I was, I literally had nowhere to go. I didn't have any friends or family that could take me in at the time. But a buddy of a buddy of mine had a spare bedroom with no bed. And I said, it's okay. I have an air mattress in my storage locker. I will be right back. And I think I gave that gentleman $600. It was like the last 600 bucks to my name. And that's where everything, that was my rock bottom. And it's funny, life is so perspective, right? Because well, it is perspective, but you need context. And I knew things were bad at the time, but I didn't know how bad things were. But now I can look back and because now I have better, I can zoom out. I have better perspectives now, don't I? Now I'm like, whoa, things were way worse than I knew at the time, right? But you need that perspective to really set the stage. And so two things helped me completely turn my life around. And one of those things was getting addicted to YouTube. And I can point to any number, I mean this, I can point to specific videos and specific channels to this day. And I can say that video that I found five years ago or that channel that I found five years ago helped me turn my life around. And it's because some very successful, financially savvy people, business savvy people, relationship savvy people decided to hit the record button. And even though I didn't have two pennies to my name, I was able to turn my life around because I got obsessed with this content and I was able to get my mindset right, my fitness, health and fitness, right? My finances, right? But the most important thing I was able to get right was my mindset. And I know it's a little cliche to say that these days, but just because this is cliche doesn't mean it's any less true. I know a lot of people are talking about mindset, but I'm telling you, that's what actually helped me turn my life around. And because I didn't have two pennies to my name, I couldn't become customers of these people. I couldn't buy their programs, but I could binge watch their YouTube videos. And because of how the YouTube platform is designed, that individual, that content creator, that business professional still benefited because their channel got more views, more watch time, which because of the way the platform is designed, the content creator is generating more ad revenue. And because YouTube, YouTube slash Google collects like 5,000 data points on everybody, all of a sudden YouTube was like, hey, there's this guy called Andrew Murdoch who's watching all of these videos. And this is what we know about Andrew Murdoch. So let's go find other viewer profiles that are similar to Andrew Murdoch. And we're going to serve that person's content to these people as well. So that individual's thought leadership, their authority, their reach, their influence was increasing, even though I didn't give them a penny. Now, in some cases, maybe I did become their customer and other cases I didn't become their customer. But it's true what they say. You said this Bill Gates, like you can many people overestimate what they can achieve in a year, but underestimate what they can achieve in 10 years. And I got to tell you, five years just flew by like that. And now I'm the founder of a company and I'm rubbing shoulders with all these amazing people and blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, that's that's my origin story. And honestly, I can bet it sounds cheesy, but I don't care. YouTube helped me change my entire life and I owe everything that I have today to YouTube. Wow. That's a little bit of a, that's a pretty good sales pitch for YouTube right there. I want to start with, start back at the start. So you, you're having a, we'll say, well, undersell a little bit. You're having a rough time. You go through a rough patch and you start binge watching YouTube. Was it, and you really talk about the mindset. So was this one of these things, was, was your focus really on like mindset related content or was it how to be better at business, how to be better at finance, how to be better relationship? Cause there's, there's a lot of places you can go on YouTube. Was it sort of that, that smorgasbord basically of content that you were consuming that all added up to really telling you, Hey, change the mindset. Yeah. Okay. Really great question. I, um, I was, yeah. You, and you put it mildly there too. Things were bad, but you put it super mildly. I, um, there's, there's a, there's a, I want to word this carefully because what I'm about to say is profound. I, there is a positive aspect of YouTube and there's a negative aspect of YouTube. And I want to start with a negative. I like the positive aspect is clear and obvious. And I think I've already hit that message home. The negative aspect is it's passive. It's extremely passive. Uh, there's a reason why Tony Robbins and so, so many of these people out there, like they get you jumping around like an idiot and moving around and using your body because when you're consuming new ideas, new concepts, uh, answers to difficult questions, when you're more active learning, you're, you're going to internalize it much, much better. Okay. Uh, YouTube is very, very passive. So you're just sitting there. Now I was in such a dark time in my life. Passive learning was the only way I could learn. I had no energy. I was an empty shell of a man. I had nothing left. I was on fumes. Um, sorry. I like, uh, when, you know, when you start talking about these things and you put yourself back there, it can get a little dark sometimes, but it's, it's, it's passive learning because that's all I had. I had no energy. So it was up to me to consume this content and to decide to be better. And this is why, uh, it doesn't work for everybody because you can't just sit on your ass and watch, pardon the language, but you can't just like expect things to land in your lap, right? People, uh, see my lifestyle now and I get these, you know, comments and posts or people DM me or whatever, because maybe they're going through a hard time or whatever, I, things didn't just land in my lab. I had to take action and force myself to become a better version of myself. I had to do things in that moment that were uncomfortable so that my future self would thank the old Andrew. You know what I mean? Like I, I think everyone at some point in their life would love to jump into DeLorean, go back in time, tap yourself on the shoulder and say, make better decisions, but I couldn't do that. Right. What's the old Chinese proverb? You know, like, um, the, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. And I had to own up to the mistakes that I made and it all comes down to mindset. But yeah, I was absolutely binge watching content about business and finances and you name it. I was, I was consuming it like crazy. And you know what? Funny enough, YouTube was recommending me content from YouTube educators, YouTube, YouTube experts, YouTube marketers. And one thing led to another. And I got into at first social media marketing and then, and I found myself working remotely, this is way before COVID way before remote work, like when I was a remote worker, people, you know, and I would tell people what I did. I worked from home, you know, you know, the kinds of reactions that I was getting in those days, or is there, is there something wrong with you? Like, you know, like it was kind of faux pas. It was, it was kind of like, Oh, you work from home. Like it was weird, right. But then, you know, I, I, uh, I became a digital nomad and it was, it was a growing term in those days and then it just became explosive in the recent years. But it was still a little bit faux pas in those days. And one thing led to another. And I got into social media marketing and then, because I was reporting these, these, uh, I was constantly meeting with my higher ups, the people that I report to. And if I'm being brutally honest, I was working for an American tech startup, startup company at the time. I'm not a developer, but I was working with alongside some developers. And, uh, and honestly, the kinds of results we were getting from social media were kind of like, womp, womp, you know, kind of lackluster. No, not, not great, not great, but I always started salivating when it came time for me to share the results that we were generating from YouTube. I was cutting my teeth on YouTube marketing for the very first time. And I didn't know what was happening at the time, but I could read between the lines even back then. And I realized, you know what? The future for business in my view, it's YouTube, YouTube marketing. When done correctly, you businesses, professionals, entrepreneurs, they can generate so much more in my humble of you. I apologize for any social media marketing experts that I'm offending right now, but, uh, but YouTube does have the unfair advantage. It's the number two website on the planet. It's the number two search engine on the planet. Right. And the data shows us that in marketing 101, you got to fish where the fish are. Everybody's on YouTube. I don't care what audience or what business, what industry, what niche you're in, your audience is on YouTube. And when people are trying to learn a new skill or solve a problem, they go to YouTube. That's the beautiful thing about being a marketer, right? I always come back to the numbers. I always come back to the data. And I like to think that there's a synergy there with developers, software experts, because the numbers just don't lie, you know, like, I mean, you can pay for a big billboard and I don't know how many we can guess how many people see the billboard, we can guess how many people saw the billboard and then became a client, a customer, but they're educated guesses or radio ads or TV or have you, but when it comes to digital marketing and YouTube marketing, there's an immediate feedback loop. I can tell you, I can show you, I can take screenshots. This is how many views this is how many, how much watch time. This is how many new subscribers. This is how many people clicked on the links and then they enter your sales funnel. Now we know how many of those leads, those viewers became leads and we know how many of those leads became paying customers slash clients. It's tangible. It's it's evidence. Right. So I'm probably answer jumping all over the place when it comes to your question right now, but there there there is my evolution was YouTube marketer or sorry, excuse me, social media marketer, YouTube consultant slash freelancer, you know, coach. And then after a couple of years, two, two, three and a half, three, maybe three years of doing that, I decided to launch YTR, which offers done for your services. So that was probably the most concise way I can answer that question. And I hope I address everything there. If I miss anything, throw it at me again. I think I want to start with there's a there's a volume information just right there to dig into. I think the first one is what is it that you see now that you've lived in both worlds in a sense, what is it that that you see that makes YouTube different from social media marketing? I mean, besides like, OK, it's popular, but take that away from the effectiveness because you said you were the social media. And I agree. It's a you look at it. It's not what people hope or I think sometimes envision it to be. The numbers are not they're not astounding or anything like that. YouTube, you know, you're saying, hey, YouTube is very different. I've got different numbers. I'm excited about it. What is it you think that makes it different or maybe what is it that you did that made that that leveraged that platform over what was what you can do on the social networking world? Yeah, I want to kick things off with an example, like a case study. And then and then I'll then I'll zoom in for you. So a friend of mine, you mentioned not too long ago that, you know, you guys aren't selling Blanchard, blah, blah, blah. It's not you're not in a controversial space. You're not in trendy space. You're not in, you know, the kind of space that is going to get clicks. Right. And I thought that was pretty profound that you said that. And I want to share an amazing example with you. A friend of mine has very successful YouTube channel. He he's in a sexy business, let me tell you. Very sexy. He sells office furniture. Super, super sexy and controversial. Just for everybody listening, this may get a little bit adult oriented, so. They're more sexy than office furniture. If there if there are children around, get them out of the room. Yeah, so we forgot to warn you. So he and he recently did an interview with a mentor of mine, and they were talking about this publicly. So I know I can talk about this publicly. I'm not sharing, you know, confidential information. They they have a they have a sizable operation. They were originally paying $30,000 a month in ad spend. He didn't specify what platforms, but I think we can assume Facebook ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, blah, blah, blah. The normal ads, right. Thirty thousand dollars a month. Fast forward to today with an aggressive, evergreen YouTube content strategy that is killing it. You know what that $30,000 monthly ad spend is now? Zero. And YouTube, because of YouTube ads, because YouTube is putting ads on his content and sharing the revenue with him. YouTube is now paying him give or take because months go up and down. YouTube is now paying him $30,000 a month. How many professionals and businesses out there do you know would love to eliminate an expense and turn that expense into an additional revenue stream for their business? Yeah, about everybody, I think. I like I and I'm happy to go into more detail and zoom in for you in the audience. But that's the easiest way I can highlight the difference. No one goes to Facebook or TikTok or LinkedIn or I don't care the platform. Nobody goes to the platform, goes to the search bar and types in. Name the problem. How do I launch an online course? How do I fix my dishwasher? How do I code this particular problem in my business? How do I become a software developer? Nobody does that. But people are doing that countless times on YouTube every single day, every single day. And I don't care what business you're in. I don't care if you're B2C. I don't care if you're B2B. It does not matter. Every single day, people are typing in questions to their pain points, their problems that they're looking for solutions. Here's the thing. Here's another beautiful thing about being a marketer, about being in my shoes. It's very difficult to predict what an individual does, unless you really unless you know that individual. Right. And maybe you're a family member or close friend. Then maybe you could predict. But if I'm a complete stranger with you, I do not. I really can't with any great degree of certainty predict what this individual is going to say or do on a daily basis. But when you zoom out and look at a wide demographic audience, I know with an absolute high degree of certainty, 99 percent of those people when they're searching for content, they're going to go to Google and another 99 percent. Maybe it's not the same 99 percent, but 99 percent of that group of people, when they want to learn about something, when they want to learn a new skill or answer a specific question, they're going to go to YouTube and they're going to type in that question. So they might answer. My question to you is as a business professional, do you want your videos popping up when your ideal demographic, your ideal customer, your ideal client is typing in those search queries in the YouTube search bar? Do you want your audience watching your competitors' videos or your videos? I would like to think the answer is obvious. So is there anything that you want me to dive in deeper? I'm more than happy to, but I'll leave it right there because that was kind of zoomed out. I can zoom in on anything that you want right now. I think there's a yeah, I think it's probably worth it. Yeah, thinking here, you know, sitting here with the audience behind me all, you know, pensive right now, thinking through all this. And one of the things to say, what is it that so now, this sort of now begs the question, you've got all of these people out there. You got YouTube's huge. You've got all it just like websites and everything else. You've got tons of people out there. You've got all of these voices. So what is it that that what is it that makes office furniture sexy, basically? What is it that how do you approach this platform? And is it I mean, is it the same as any other brand or marketing? Or is there is there a different approach? There's a different way that you use this so that you can leverage it and be that, you know, that organization that flips your ad spend to add revenue. Great question. OK, so there and there's we could do the entire episode on this topic alone, just so you know. So I'm going to I'm going to give this my best effort. Too many people, too many people wrongfully assume that it's all about SEO. OK. Whenever I'll say this to whenever someone starts talking to you about the YouTube algorithm, especially if they they've they brand themselves as a YouTube expert, I would I would I would question how much they know about YouTube if they say YouTube algorithm. OK, for a number of reasons, there's a number of reasons behind this. The truth is, there is no YouTube algorithm. There's YouTube algorithms. It's multiple. Right. So YouTube switched to an AI model back in 2013. Everybody's talking about AI right now. It's the hot topic, the trendy topic, AI, this, AI, that machine learning, this machine learning that I've been using AI for years. All of a sudden, it's called YouTube. OK, and there are multiple algorithms. There's an algorithm for search. There's an algorithm for browse traffic. There's an algorithm for suggested. There's an algorithm for playlists. It goes on and on and on and on. And then the AI oversees that measures data, measures everything a viewer does and everything a viewer doesn't do. Does the viewer click on this and watch all the way to the end? Does the viewer click on this and watch seven seconds and then bounce? Does the viewer leave a comment? Does the viewer hit the thumbs up button? Does the viewer hit a subscribe button or not? Does the viewer click on any links in the description or not? Does the viewer spend a lot of time and binge watch multiple videos or not? It's measuring all of that, measuring everything a viewer does and measure everything a video doesn't do. And a lot of people wrongfully want to optimize all of the content for search. Now, I'm not saying ignore search, but here's what the data shows us. Only 10 percent of views generated from the search algorithm globally. Only 10 percent of the views globally are due to the search algorithm. OK, only 10 percent. So if you're putting all your eggs in one basket, trying to optimize your entire content strategy around search, you are shooting yourself in the foot and you don't even realize it. Seventy five percent of the views generated globally are a direct result of two algorithms, both referred to as recommendation. OK, suggested. And when you're watching a YouTube video on desktop, it's all of those videos being recommended to you on the right hand column. And if you're on mobile device, it's all those videos that are being recommended to beneath the video. And everybody does this. You're still listening to the video. You're not really watching. You're still listening to the video and you're scrolling through that list, trying to see what else is available for you. You're looking for that reason to click away as soon as that video becomes boring, because maybe something is more interesting. It's got a really great thumbnail, a really great title, and it resonates with you on some levels. You want to click on that and watch that next before the video you're currently watching is even over. Now, browse, browse is a couple of different things, but it's primarily home screen, meaning as soon as you open up your YouTube app on any device, those videos that are being recommended to you right away on the home screen, that's that's a direct result from browse. You know, trending is another algorithm, right? All of these things are different algorithms. Now, when you're kicking things off from the very start, the very beginning, let's say you're launching a brand new YouTube channel, maybe you ignored it for a long time, or maybe you plateaued. You can certainly look at some SEO optimized content to kind of jumpstart things. But honestly, I just helped a business partner launch a brand new YouTube channel recently. We have two videos on the channel. The first video is a little over 500 views right now. The second video is blowing up. It's it's on its way to 2000 views right now. Brand new channel, zero data. You know how getting 2000 views for a brand new channel recommended. So the suggested traffic right now, last I checked, is somewhere between like 68 to 70 percent. And browse is another like 12 to 17 percent. Like it fluctuates day to day. But we're talking 90 percent of those views are coming in from recommendation. Really great topic idea, video idea, really great thumbnail, really great title. And because the YouTube when you when you say when someone says the algorithm hates me, YouTube hates me. No, no. YouTube is just a machine measuring human engagement signals. If you say the algorithm hates me, I'm going to push it back on you. And I'm going to say, no, the audience hates you. I'm sorry. Sorry to be the barrier. Bad news. You don't make good videos. If you made good videos, if you package them with the human user in mind, the ideal viewer you're trying to serve, then people would click. People would watch. People would watch all the way to the end. And maybe when they get to the end, they would actually click to watch an additional video of yours, or they would hit the subscribe button. YouTube is measuring all those positive and negative human engagement signals. It's just a machine. So if you replace the word algorithm with audience, then then you're you're working towards a goal that's actually going to serve you. Do not worry about going viral. It's a waste of your time. OK, it's unfortunate that there are so many features, YouTube features that come unlocked to you with the most more subscribers you gain. OK, there's certain things that become unlocked to you at 100 subs. A thousand subs. And there's like status symbols. You get a silver play button that can hang on your wall behind you when you hit 100000 subscribers. A gold play button, a slightly bigger gold play button. You can hang on your wall when you get to a million subscribers. That's really unfortunate because it's not about the subscriber. Don't worry about the most subscribers. Worry about attracting the right viewers, not the most subscribers. Profound. But will is the total game changer when it comes to your dominance, force your ability to dominate your niche, leveraging the YouTube AI. I don't care how big your I'm kind of jumping all over the place now. I don't care how big your operation is. I don't care. Like, let me break it down for you like this. There are two software experts or two companies. All things being equal, same same amount of same. Let's say both companies have 10 team members. You're in the same niche. You're selling the same product or service. You're selling the same everything. But Company A has a YouTube program that is evergreen and strategically executed on. And Company B says, oh, we don't got time for YouTube. Our audience isn't on YouTube. I don't need to worry about YouTube. Well, I guarantee you which company is going to be around a year from now, five years from now and be a lot bigger. Because when you successfully leverage YouTube and all the benefits that come along with it, one of the most obvious benefits that I can touch on people every single time. Here's the truth. Every single business, again, doesn't matter what industry you're in, doesn't matter who your customers are. I don't care. You only have three inputs. You only have three levers that you can pull on people, time and money. If you don't find a way to increase the ROI on all three of those inputs, I promise you, you're not thinking big enough. You're not thinking longevity enough. You're not going to have the longevity. You're not going to be around. And if you are, you are around five years from now, you're going to be a lot smaller than some of your competitors who were focusing on time, people, time and money. How do we improve the ROI on all three of those inputs? Because any company that becomes more efficient in those three inputs are going to gain the unfair advantage. So what I like to call YouTube is YouTube is not a video platform. OK, it is a video platform. And in fact, it's the number one video platform on the planet. But don't think of it that way. Think of it like the world's best cloning machine. Every single time you hit the record button, you were leveraging yourself. Every time you hit the record button and you, let's say, you're the figureheads or you're a solopreneur, I don't care. You are representing that brand. And if you package it in an optimized way, you actually educate yourself or you pay an expert, you take an online course, you do something to make sure that clone has all the tools it needs to outperform the other clones. Then you release that clone into the wild, right? Just like the brand new channel that I just uploaded. And the second clone that I published is going bazonkers. Every single day I look into the platform and look at my YouTube studio. It just looks like a damn mountain. Just get more views, more views, more watch time, more more accolades, more credibility, more authority, more reach, more influence, more, more, more, more, more. That clone is working double time for us right now because we found a way to clone the brand that works for us 24 7 365. I could be speaking with you on this podcast. I could be asleep. I could be eating a meal. I could be playing with the dog. I could be doing anything, but that clone keeps working for me no matter what. So, again, going back to the example of Company A, Company B, Company A, because they're using YouTube, they found a way to clone themselves. They found a way to operate at a scale that in the marketplace, they're perceived to be a lot bigger than they actually are. Whereas Company B goes, ah, YouTube is a waste of time and money. Sorry, Company B, you're way wrong. And we will pause right there. We'll be back next episode. Actually, I guess not next episode, two episodes from now. And we're going to speak, be speaking with him. We're going to wrap this one up and continue digging into the world of basically the world of YouTube and some of the ways that we can use that. Some of the ways that he's used that and some ways to take advantage of this very popular platform to get our word out, to get our product known and to maybe even build up a little bit of a community trust in all those things that are very valuable in growing a business or growing a service or product. That being said, I'm going to let you get back to whatever your work is you have today to grow your product, your service, or just to tread water, depending on how it's going. But go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Please allow me to take 30 seconds of your time to talk about one of the things we're really excited about for 2024. We are going to bring back our masterminds and you can check out Technology Mastermind 2024.com or you can check out our mastermind at Develop-a-Noor.com. We're going to get our groups together. We've got applications open today. There is an early bird discount. 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