now it's extremely predictable to have success when something connects with us either on a positive level or a negative level innate in us in humans we have to share and ultimately that's where a lot of brands businesses and creators fail is it like this is my baby it's the best video i've ever made my whole life well it might be but that people are not responding to it they're not connecting with it there's some disconnect there the reason why tv and cable and all that other stuff is failing is because someone's making the decision to
show you what content to see [Music] i know one of the biggest mysteries out there among a lot of youtube creators is like well how do you actually grow a youtube channel how do you actually make money at this how do you get more views how do you get more subscribers and you will find honestly i hope this doesn't sound arrogant or anything but you will find a lot of bad advice out there i define an expert as someone who can who can predictably and consistently reproduce results for a wide variety of creators i'm not
talking about someone who had a one-hit wonder someone who got lucky i'm talking about someone who can guide someone through a process that leads to a destination and that process been proven repeatedly over and over and over again to actually generate good results for the creator i think we fall into that category honestly video creators we've worked with 650 clients last year 2020 and i'm not here to just taunt us but like we've seen that consistent proven results over and over and over again but we are not the only person who has a proven predictable
reproducible process for youtube growth my friend daryl eaves has been one of the pioneers in this space and he has taken his vast knowledge and years and years of experience and put it into a new book that he is soon launching called the youtube formula and today i wanted to introduce him to you in case you haven't heard of him before i think of this man not only as a colleague but as a friend and as a mentor and he was helpful in my own business here video creators back in the early days when we
were first getting started and so i'm excited to dive into you not dive into you that's awkward let me do that so i'm excited to dive into the youtube formula with you here today with mr daryl eaves so i would love it for you to walk us through the youtube formula in a way that helps us as youtube creators like understand what process should we be evaluating when it comes to using our youtube channel to grow our business to reach more people change spend more lives with the messages that we're spreading uh the products and
services that we're offering where does it start what is step number one in this formula and kind of walk us through all that so the book starts with uh a very strong position of what you need to do to have success and so for me i'm a student of history i love history i think the way that we elevate our current standing is understanding the things that history did well and the things that we didn't do so well and we learned from that and we we we take it into our lives to improve our day
in the present and then also think about things in the future you know because i think understanding the past really helps connect us with the future and and really moving it in a positive way so for me the first chapter was a history lesson uh it's a history lesson of youtube and youtube was actually founded february 14 2005. and it started out as a dating website and when you watched the first video that was uploaded to youtube knowing that it's a dating website it becomes a different video and it's me at the zoo and he's
talking about uh elephants and the elephants but that was in april and in may uh they did everything they do they were even paying 20 to people to have them upload content and they just weren't doing it and when they were looking at the data they realized that oh my goodness people are posting uh snowboarding activities uh people of their their cats or their animals some funny videos that they found that's how it was just yeah literally not anything at all of what they anticipated so they had a very very hard thought okay do we
actually push the data aside and become a dating website and force it down the throats of everything or do we analyze this and adjust now in may they made a very big decision to pivot their company and this one decision to pivot based off of the data led to youtube where they're at today and let me tell you how they analyzed realizing hey people are using this to express themselves with video so what if we empowered the creator of those videos to have the tools to do it easier and then also make it easier for
them to spread the word to broadcast themselves to the world so they changed their um kind of their focus to uh from a dating website to broadcasting yourself that was their first tagline outside of the the dating realm and then they gave the tools to like embed videos on your website that was really groundbreaking at the time and they basically did that from may to june and immediately they started having people pick up youtube from their history uses the the formula of actually how to get content out to the world okay because they had a
plan they executed on that plan they got results they had to analyze those results and make a decision how to improve or how to course correct and then they adjusted their plan that right there will lead any company any business any any creator to the level of success if you're willing to follow those principles and ultimately that's where a lot of brands businesses and creators fail is it like this is my baby it's the best video i've ever made in my whole life well it might be but that people are not responding to it they're
not connecting with it there's some disconnect there and so that's kind of the essence of of the theme of the book it's a data-driven decision but it's a data-driven decision decision of understanding humans so i thought part one of the book would be more important to talk about the history of youtube the ecosystem of youtube because that's part of the history you know why they started the partner program why you know they were paying creators to create content what that actually looked like well then it brought in new dynamics of an advertiser and the advertiser
pressure that's there but the big pivot in part one was understanding what happened in 2012 and i can honestly say this is when everything changed for me because it changed in the dynamic of how we approach content in 2012 january they decided hey for us there's so many people gaming the system and gaming with clickbait and things that are non-related if we're going to actually have people want to come back to youtube we have to be able to predict what they want and they had a hard decision and they do thousands of experiments on youtube
every every year and these thousands experiments are are really getting the goal of youtube which is getting people to come to the platform and stay on longer because if they come to the platform then they're going to watch videos and if they watch videos then the ads are going to fire if the ads fire youtube makes money and if they stay on longer more ads fire and that's where youtube makes their money and it's very costly to have all the free uploading that you do like it's just mind-boggling even to think about that so they
introduced artificial intelligence to try to make decisions and predict what would happen if an ai would look for patterns and recommend content out to viewers and from january 2012 to about april it was just horrible it was really bad like the people that that were in charge of the ai project for youtube they're like uh we're not gonna have a job if this doesn't turn around quick and then may of 2020 20 uh 2012 hit and it was 10x with their best month ever it just took off so they spent all of 2012 trying to
get that all ready for 2013 and 2013 hit and tim that's the moment that the youtube formula was created and i want to tell you why is because now it's extremely predictable to have success and so part one of the book is uh basically my process um you know which is how to analyze uh your your business your youtube channel it doesn't matter your personal life you have a plan you execute on the plan you have to take the data points really learn from it what worked what didn't work and then adjust it right and
so that's that's that and then i i go in depth on the algorithm like you never can understand but i do it in a simple way because at the end of the day the ai controls algorithms with an s and each algorithm has a specific objective and once you understand the objective then it's really easy to know hey here's some things that we should look for and then i move into part two now part two is the opportunity one thing that i try to do immediately whether we're starting a brand new youtube channel we're working
with a brand new company is going through the process of how do we actually make money outside of ad revenue because ad revenue is going to fluctuate and that's not predictability in business that's relying upon another business for your business and that doesn't feel very good especially if they come and take away all your monetization because they can and then the biggest mistake that i found is creators just focus in on ad revenue and merch and to be honest with you those two things are some of the worst things that you can actually focus in
on what you need to focus in on is understanding your audience to do it and so that's part two of the book is the opportunity and all the different ways to leverage money and i'm telling you there's a lot and i give very specific case studies i i believe that um if you have uh knowledge and you don't have case studies it's just hypothetical knowledge so the youtube formula in short is pretty much the formula of humans like how humans respond to content online innate in us as humans we feel like when something when something
connects with us either on a positive level or a negative level innate in us in humans we have to share so the youtube formula is more about humans how they respond to content content being title thumbnail video and then also content strategy because you have to have a strategy from it uh you can't just go here there whatever there needs to be a strategy of gathering uh where that that that value is per you know that unique value propositions there every single video where people are like man i gotta i gotta get closer engaged with
this creator or brand or business in our language or video creators it's like optimized for for humans for people not for robots right yeah uh and and you're you're saying like how do we create content that connects with people that creates an emotional connection that uh resonates with them and prompts a response in them of some kind not just like you know how to get all the keywords crammed into the right place the right number of times in the right order and uh yes but tim uh i heard that it's like nope not just just
optimize for people like a good title thumbnail that opens with a really good story he's gonna win all day long over a video that's just like hears information with all the right hashtags crammed in yeah but but two people respond to keywords too like well yes and those are the next part like keywords matter but because words still represent things and so if we want to consume a specific value like youtube formula then the youtube formula keyword means something to us and that's what prompts us to click right there was a common theme that i
saw immediately there's creators that like no this is the best creation i've ever made of all mankind and this is like the best video he can't get any better yes you know and and they're not thinking about um the the person that is watching it on the other side you know it's about them and their creation not about bringing value to someone i think a common misconception among creators is that youtube is a video-centric system but it's actually not it's a viewer-centric system people creators think that like the goal the algorithm is to go out
and find viewers for my videos but it's not it's the opposite the goal the algorithm is to find the right video for the right person at the right time so when it comes to if someone's listening to this they're like okay youtube formula when i hear the word youtube formula i think of like a step one step two step three step four process is there a one two three four step process that you could boil it down to absolutely and um one of the things that i uh go in detail is in part three it
is all in stages and one of the things that i know is if you'll focus in on the right things at the right time then it will make sense in the long haul because then your your focus and attention will be on where where part of the journey you're at so there's the planning uh journey and there's a lot that's involved with planning is that the first step is the planning yeah yeah the planning's more about uh recon and research like you gotta understand who you're creating content for what type of content is engaging with
them and if we're gonna break it down a little granularly it's like target audience like what who is um that's exactly what we do actually too is like not just demographic info which is what most people think but what is this person's story what are they thinking what are they feeling what problems are they facing what's at stake for them if they don't if they don't overcome this problem like what transformation do they really ultimately want to see in their lives like really getting into this person's story and then figuring out what value that they
really want to consume and and then making sure that we're creating content which might is that step two now how you can content no no no no no no no not not for me it's like um then you've got to go deeper because like i look at how you go hey this story figure out their story but for me i just nerd out it's like okay we want to know their demographics that's basically their age and where they're at and you know and so on and so forth like are they a or general you know
yeah are they are they whatever and then i like to go into the psychographics and the psychographics take time um psychographics is is kind of the the i would equate it to what you just said is what's their story right but that the demographics and psychographics can only take you so far um it's the behavior of the demographics with the psychographics and that's where what they do online what they do offline so i like to imagine hey what is the the the morning like for this person you know what what is their daily routine how
they engage and i can say that i obsess over that that's where we we do it tim is is really deep dive sometimes it takes six months to eight months then stage two is once you have that information is then okay what makes them tick okay and that's where we go into debt what are they responding to online offline um you know what type of channels do they subscribe to what type of places do they shop online what type of places that they congregate off of youtube and knowing where that's at and then doing more
recon and research there to say oh here's some topics that are here then it's like making a list of all the things that you've seen all the patterns that are out there and saying okay i i believe as a hypothesis that these are the type of people that we're going after and this is what their day looks like and here's some problems that they have basically ie story right um here's some things that they're facing here's the things that they're really passionate about here's some movies that we know that they probably like and go from
there it's a big deal for some creators to just think about planning a title and thumbnail before they hit record like that is a lot of planning for them but what you're saying daryl is like that's like the minimum like amount of planning and i don't even know if that player is even enough you can't no no we if you just don't even upload a video if that's all the planning you're but what i tell them people is like when you are doing all this planning up front i know it feels like i just want
to make freaking videos though i just want to be creative and put whatever i want out there and hope like someone else will find it who likes it and what you're saying is well you could try that but that is not a proven process there's a lot of people spend a lot of time uploading content that nobody watches no it's it's like this um and this is what i i want every content creator or anyone that's uploading videos to youtube to to hear the words of my mouth it's really important to hear what i say
um the reason why tv uh and cable and all that other stuff is failing is because someone's making the decision to show you what content to see and so ultimately when you're creating content on youtube you cannot be the person that says no you will like it because i produced it i am the knowledge i am his creator no you're there to bring value and if you can't have that value proposition you're never going to grow an audience i don't care who you are the rest of the process is simple then it's selecting the content
that will resonate and then you know making your best guess making that hypothesis and putting together and then it's weaving storytelling into it you and i understand that and there's a big section on that but then the the real part of it is the analyzing how do you analyze it in a way that you can to know what what's actually going on um not just making hypotheticals but analyzing it in a way and knowing what you need to adjust and so as you adjust it that becomes your new content to release so people want to
buy the book where do they go they go to ytformula.com if you want some added bonuses you know it's it's there at ytformany.com anywhere else that they sell books it's there if you don't want the bonuses i learned this thing yesterday mastery is something you never actually achieve right but that's kind of the point like that's what keeps driving us so anyway go check out his channel and stuff down below daryl thank you for hanging out with me and for the rest of you guys london and delano will be back with me next week for
another video creators podcast episode and we will see you guys then bye
