Then we realized while we were creating tons of content along with a loyal community of viewers, we learned valuable skills we could use to build a business.
Shelley and Toby have a strategic conversation about the basics of content marketing and how to implement them consistently to expand your brand and business.
Watch the conversation on YouTube then subscribe for more great content!Shelley: In 2017, we were running a YouTube channel called Gypsy’s Kiss. If you want to know more about why we called the channel A Gypsy’s Kiss, we have a book that we wrote about that.
On our YouTube channel, we talked about the Forrest Fenn treasure. There were many people who were interested in interpreting the clues and finding the treasure. They also enjoyed getting together to talk and hang out with each other.
We tapped into that community. We started a YouTube channel, and when we hit a thousand subscribers, we started livestreaming our shows every week.
We would get an audience of 30 to 300 people showing up to have a good time in the chatroom, keeping everything active and supporting us in our content creation. It was a loyal community.
Toby: There were many wonderful things about creating videos for the Forrest Fenn treasure community.
I think it’s important to go back and look at the history and what made A Gypsy’s Kiss so rewarding and valuable to us.
We enjoyed going out in the field and documenting our adventures.
We learned about live streaming on YouTube.
Our evolution with the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt coincided with YouTube’s pursuit of live streaming as a product line.
In addition to uploading videos, live streaming became very important to them. They started investing both manpower and money into it.
It gave us the opportunity to explore livestreaming on YouTube right at the beginning and learn all the lessons and mistakes that we needed to learn to become the livestreamers that we are today.
I would call us amongst the top 10% of skilled livestreamers on YouTube or any other platform.
Until we went with A Gypsy’s Kiss, I had made money only one way. That was by providing a service to my clients.
My entire career after leaving the NSA was all about serving clients and providing unique services that only I could provide.
When I retired back to New Mexico, I became more active in Albuquerque and started providing services and getting paid for them.
One service I was getting paid for was livestreaming. That led us to our business in 2014, Streaming New Mexico, which we sold in 2016.
When we established a YouTube channel in 2017, I wasn’t even thinking about a YouTube channel.
I was thinking about the next service I could provide.
I knew there was money to be made by running a YouTube channel.
But I knew it was people with millions of subscribers who were making money from YouTube.
I was enthusiastic about it because it gave me a reason to refocus on the treasure hunt and see if we could have fun and make money as a result, and it worked out.
But there was a transition in the way I made money.
It went from providing services to people that required the unique combination of skills that I can bring to the table to producing content in a way that generated revenue through views and advertising.
That was a completely different model based on uploading videos.
At first, we pre-recorded and uploaded our videos.
When we started livestreaming, our audience liked it so much that we thought let’s just do this.
The benefit that I saw was no more editing. I didn’t have to spend time in the dark editing footage so I could get a product out for YouTube.
This was easy because you just do a livestream and produce content.
It was rewarding, and we collected almost 7,000 subscribers. We were getting views, and watch time, and YouTube was rewarding us with impressions and money.
It became addictive.
All I have to do is livestream once a week and I can get views, advertising, and money.
It meant minimum work and making money at it.
But we had moved away from the services production model.
Shelley: There was a community out there that wanted to get together online. We provided a service to them, but it was a service they didn’t request or pay for.
We provided them a place and a time to come together and talk about their favorite hobby, in which they were all interested. They could share their ideas and their views.
We even offered open phone lines so they could call in and talk to us. People in the chat room could make comments about those phone calls.
It was a service in that it was a weekly event that they could attend online and they looked forward to it. We gave them the ability to form a community.
I think that was a valuable service.
I enjoyed bringing people together who had never met or talked to each other before. We got to meet some of those wonderful, smart, engaging, lovely people.
Toby: I agree we were providing a service, but it was in views and watch time that we made our money. The service was a way to establish what was necessary to produce revenue.
But to me, when you provide a service, you have to tie it to the return on your investment in time and money.
Shelley: We had a paid membership that we offered our viewers.
But also, we were in the middle.
We were servicing YouTube by providing content to draw people in to watch YouTube. So they paid us with advertising money.
Then we provided a service to the community by giving them a time and a place to gather and the ability to talk to each other in the chat room, to talk to us, to listen to us, and to have a good time.
It was entertainment.
There were no fees for the viewers.
We tried different things to make money. But nothing really clicked because the service itself was free.
Toby: The thing that makes any product or service grow in status and stature is how much it costs.
If it’s free to our audience, then it’s going to grow in status and service only if the audience is large enough.
PewDiePie has tens of millions of subscribers, and his service is providing an audience the ability to watch him play games.
If your service is producing content for YouTube, you better learn how to grow.
If you don’t create digital products, you can still make money from YouTube if your audience is large enough.
I think a lot of YouTubers, especially the new ones, envision making money by producing content and benefiting from the evergreen value of that content.
We still make a little money on A Gypsy’s Kiss, because people are still viewing and engaging. The channel holds 800 videos on a topic that, for us, is dormant.
Shelley: Since we’re talking about how people make money on YouTube, I’ll share this from Tim Schmoyer who built a business on and about YouTube that was purchased by vidIQ.
We’ve discovered that many smaller creators make more money than some bigger creators. This is because there is more personal connection and the conversion rate to their personal businesses is higher. Our advice to you is: do not depend on YouTube for income. It’s a huge platform and they aren’t looking out for you, the individual creator. Building a business off the platform is what leads to success.
Let’s talk about how you felt when the treasure was found and what made you decide to build a business teaching live streaming and offering production services.
Toby: It was the discouragement of not having a reason to get up every morning and do a livestream.
It’s over.
I don’t have any reason to continue pursuing something that is effectively dormant.
I have a limited amount of time.
I’m retired, and I get checks every month, so I don’t need to work.
I produce video content for a variety of reasons, including I enjoy spending time with my business partner and I enjoy keeping active.
If I didn’t do this, there wouldn’t be much else going on for me other than taking care of my yard and riding a bike as far as I can.
It is energizing to have something to do every week that makes me happy because it produces something.
When we stopped producing revenue from A Gypsy’s Kiss, we tried several alternatives and new ideas for channels.
But none of that is the provision of unique services.
If you want to make money in a capitalist way, as Adam Smith suggested, you provide a unique product or service in a timely manner.
It’s ready when people are looking for it.
Once you make the decision that you’re either going to provide a timely product or service, you’ve just committed to more hours doing that, because that requires time and money.
You can get onto YouTube with very little investment, but it’s a YouTube-based model where the investment in time and money is building your audience.
Fewer than 10% of the people that have YouTube channels are actually making a living wage from it.
There are moments of magic when somebody starts a YouTube or TikTok channel and gets mentioned on television.
I’m reminded of Taylor Blake on TikTok and Emmanuel the Emu. She went from 52 subscribers to 2.5 million subscribers in less than a month.
Jimmy Kimmel invited her to be on the show, and suddenly she was a TikTok phenomenon.
I don’t think she expected her life was going to change in that way.
Shelley: You have to understand what it means to be a content creator, to get monetized, to get brand deals, and all the things that come with being an influencer.
It’s a totally new career. If you’re not prepared for it, and you don’t understand what it involves, then it can be overwhelming.
You might need to get some coaching to get you through to the other side, where you’re a professional at it.
Toby: We’ve had those conversations because we got some of that. We learned what to do with that.
Shelley: You have to ignore some things and take a stand on others. You’ve got to learn the difference.
Toby: We built a channel because we felt like we could produce credible content, and I think that’s what the community appreciated. We always had something to say.
Shelley: You find a hole and you fill it. There was this community that didn’t have a way to come together and talk to each other except for the online forums.
We provided a more fun, upbeat, and positive place to come together. We didn’t allow mean negativity and attacking behaviors. People who were afraid of harsh behavior in the forums could come to our community and find respect and kindness.
They came to know that it was a safe place to talk to and meet other people.
Toby: It was the right thing to do at the right time.
But then on June 6th, 2020, it all ended.
I took it a little harder than Shelley.
She looked at me and said, What are we going to do next?
I hadn’t even considered that.
I, like everybody else, thought this thing was going to go on forever, that the treasure hunt would outlive me.
It threw the community into a tailspin.
I was glad we did other things, including writing a book that I should have written a long time before.
Shelley: I feel like it was a catharsis. It was a catalyst for change and it was a relief.
To me, it was like, Oh, we finally have an out. We don’t have to do this anymore. Now we get to choose something new.
We chose to write a book and have our own treasure hunt.
People got behind that and they got excited about it.
When that was over, we concluded that treasure hunts were over for us. By December 2020, we knew it wasn’t our cup of tea anymore. We wanted something different.
Toby: The treasure hunt had a limited life. So you go on to the next thing.
The services that we provide require that we establish credibility by doing ourselves what we help other people do.
To me, providing livestreaming and podcasting production services is a much better model. I would rather invest time and money in that model than just produce content.
Shelley: Encore entrepreneurs are people in their retirement years who start a home-based business.
You bring your years of work experience, knowledge, and wisdom that you’ve gained. You start another business out of your home based on what you’ve learned is a service that people want.
They come to me, and they ask me these questions, and I help them.
Why not turn that into a business?
That’s very often what encore entrepreneurs are doing.
My friend Peter has been a financial planner for many years, but he wanted to niche down to work with affluent people who want to leave a legacy. He’s working with them on philanthropic projects. That’s a passion of his.
People can either niche down what they were already doing, or they can begin a business that serves the needs of people who come to them asking the same kinds of questions.
Why should encore entrepreneurs use content marketing to promote and expand their businesses?
Toby: The implication is content marketing is separate from, but slightly connected to, building your business.
So the first question you have to ask is, what is my business?
My business is helping other people use content marketing to expand their business. That’s the service I provide.
Why content marketing? Because it’s an easy way to do marketing. Learn how to use it as a marketing tool as opposed to a revenue-producing tool.
The clients we have aren’t expecting to make a million dollars from producing videos.
They’re expecting to make a million dollars from providing a service.
The videos are an easy and contemporary way of marketing those services.
Shelley: Often, encore entrepreneurs have a lot of marketing experience, but it’s other ways of marketing, whether that’s direct mail or going to conferences or trade shows. You had different ways you could advertise, but it was very expensive.
But now we’re in a place where we’re cutting back on the expenses of business travel and mail.
It’s become so much easier to do things digitally, and it is cost-effective.
It’s a much quicker turnaround.
It’s become so easy and user-friendly that anybody can do it.
You can put up a YouTube ad inexpensively and have it targeted at only those people who are in the market for your type of service or product.
It’s much more efficient to use video and the internet to share about your products and services.
Encore entrepreneurs should use content marketing to promote and expand their businesses.
We recommend a framework so you can produce content consistently as a little piece of your business that brings in customers.
It should be quick and easy to create your content for marketing and then have it consistently distributed.
We suggest once a week you do a livestream to stay in touch with the people who are interested in what you have to say. Give them advice and connect with them. Give them the opportunity to ask questions in the chat and to engage with you in real-time.
Then take that content and break it up into pieces.
The audio becomes a podcast.
The transcription becomes a blog post.
Send it out on social media as posts and put out a newsletter.
Encourage people to be on your email newsletter list.
This makes up the content marketing framework that takes very little time, effort, and money.
Why should people choose content marketing over any other type of marketing method?
Toby: It boils down to how much time and money you’re willing to use to market your product or service.
The advantage of content marketing is that it is relatively inexpensive, compared to other forms of marketing, and doesn’t require as much time.
The traditional marketing that we knew for years, from producing pamphlets to attending trade shows, to advertising in magazines or advertising on television, all requires an investment in time and money.
If you’re an encore entrepreneur, you have a limited amount of time and money to invest.
You’re trying to make a living by providing a service.
That doesn’t leave you a lot of time or money to invest in promoting your business.
So you do something like our friend Warner, who hired small companies to do things for him.
He had a social media person, a graphic arts person, and an advertising person.
For content marketing, you can do one live stream a week, and using the content marketing framework, leverage that into a variety of channels by reusing the same material.
One live stream produces a podcast, blogs, shorts, and all these other marketing products you can use in a variety of ways over a longer time.
You could take content that you produced last year, convert it into a promotional item, whether it’s a short or an Instagram post, and you can continue to use that.
If you produce a pamphlet, that pamphlet has a life of, if you’re lucky, 90 days and then it’s done.
There are many benefits to using digital technologies to produce content and then take that content and expand it.
Producing content is not your business.
Producing content is the realistic way that requires the least amount of time and money investment to produce marketing that enables you to grow your service business.
If you look at it from that perspective, you say to yourself, This hour that I spend every Thursday afternoon producing content, that’s one good hour of time invested in marketing the services I provide.
There might be a big explosion of people who subscribe to our channel and watch our videos for hours at a time. We don’t expect that to happen.
What we do expect to happen is people can see how good we are at what we talk about, and therefore will consider using our services.
That’s the bottom line.
Shelley: What is the quickest way for an encore entrepreneur to get started with content marketing?
Toby: It’s actually a combination of quick and easy.
One day you’re going to retire and you want to make sure you can retire comfortably.
One day you’re going to die and you want the people that you leave behind to benefit from whatever you produce during your life.
Life, work, retirement income, and then leave whatever’s left behind.
Work, retirement, death.
Shelley: No. Not retirement and death.
Retirement and then living life 2.0.
There are so many opportunities between retirement and death that we can’t lump them together like that.
We leave space for life 2.0 and traveling, seeing friends, seeing family, doing the things we’ve always wanted to do, making a difference, and leaving a legacy.
These things come into play for encore entrepreneurs.
Toby: When you consider life 2.0, invest your time as wisely as you’re capable.
The easiest way to market yourself is via digital content marketing.
The easiest way to implement that strategy is to have somebody do it for you.
That way Peter can be an expert at financial management or however you make a living.
You don’t make a living at producing content and distributing that content for promotion.
So the easiest and quickest way, having somebody do it for you, is probably the least expensive way.
If I was in Peter’s position, the last thing that I would want to become is an expert in YouTube livestreaming.
These are the folks who know where to invest their time and money.
Shelley: By the time you get to this age, you understand that time is a finite resource. We can never replace it. It is precious. So you want to spend money rather than time whenever possible.
Toby: Money is a replaceable resource, assuming that how you’re investing it will have a return that is greater than the investment.
So the easiest way is to hire a company like ours. We take care of producing for you.
Shelley: Just show up once a week. We do the behind-the-scenes button pushing and get your livestream and podcast out, and then you can move on with your day.
Toby: We send copies of the video, the podcast, and a transcript.
Shelley: How can we increase watch time on YouTube?
Watch time is the best indicator that you are building a loyal audience because you’re keeping them engaged and interested.
If they’re watching longer, that tells you it is valuable content and you should keep doing that kind of content because people are interested in it.
Having YouTube on Smart TVs has changed things. We can watch YouTube on our televisions now, including shorts as of this week.
YouTube on mobile seems to have a higher abandonment rate because people are more focused on the content they’re viewing.
However, on a big screen, people are more passive in their watching, and the abandonment rate is much lower.
How do you optimize for both types of viewers?
Tell amazing stories that make people feel something because the screen size doesn’t matter if people are engaged in your content.
Talking about the things that your target audience is most interested in, and sharing stories about your experiences and the experiences of your clients, can provide engagement and excitement.
Toby: One of the key things that you mentioned there is the personalization of interaction.
YouTube has learned enough about me now that even after one video is over, they start another one that’s along the same topic line.
They know I like fresh stuff.
Here’s a hint for you. Even if you’re watching YouTube videos on your television, you can still like and dislike that video.
Use that to let YouTube know what you like and dislike.
Shelley: I’ll give you an example of how Google is there to answer people’s questions and give them information that’s valuable for what they are going through at the moment.
Yesterday I went to the eye doctor, had my eyes checked, and got a new prescription. I didn’t purchase glasses because they told me the frames weren’t covered by my insurance until the new year. I said let me just wait and think about it.
When I got home, I went online and started looking at different options for buying eyeglasses.
First, I went through EyeMed, which is our eyeglasses insurance. I went there to see who was in their network. Maybe I could order glasses online.
I asked my daughter where she ordered her glasses online.
I started looking online for glasses and picking out the frames I liked.
I bought nothing, but I thought about it and entered my email address into glasses.com.
Then this morning I opened up YouTube, and it offered me a video. An eye doctor had produced it and he was talking about the differences between buying glasses at an eyeglass store or online.
He went through 10 different online services and tested the glasses to see if the prescription was correct and if the frames were of good quality.
It was the perfect video for me. That’s exactly what I needed to know.
He said if you have a progressive prescription; he doesn’t recommend buying glasses online, because they don’t seem to get that right.
That answered my question and using the algorithm of Google and the YouTube platform, that eye doctor has given me helpful advice when I needed it.
Maybe I would say I want to hear more from him. I want to learn what else he’s got to say.
That would be an excellent opportunity for me to develop a relationship with that eye doctor if he had other products that I needed.
That first video is the doorway to a relationship.
YouTube works with your content marketing to create a video doorway for clients to come through to find you and your business.
Being there with the right information at the right time means you are top of mind.
This is how content marketing works. This is how Google and YouTube support you through your content marketing.
Simply put out valuable information for people who need it and Google and YouTube will serve it at the right time.
Toby: The world of social media and search engines is configured at the moment to support these strategies.
If you’re doing other kinds of marketing, you’re not actually fitting into how the world is configured in terms of digital marketing.
If your company doesn’t do digital marketing, you are behind the times, and you’re behind the competition as well.
There’s going to be more and more digital content promotion using people like us to promote products and services.
Shelley: It’s time to ask yourself, what are you trying to achieve?
What challenges are getting in the way of you achieving that?
Can we help you get past those challenges?
If your challenge is consistent content marketing, your next step is to schedule a video chat with us at consulting.agkmedia.studio.
We would love to hear about your vision for your business and your content marketing.
With our content consistency framework, we can take an hour of your week and help you create all the content marketing materials you need to promote your business in the most effective and efficient way.
Are you struggling to create and convert leads? Are you overwhelmed when you think about how you can stand out in the online market?
This show is for you, the encore entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, thought leaders, and speakers – how do you gain visibility and credibility online so your ideal clients hear your message and reach out to connect with you? Expert livestreamers, Shelley Carney and Toby Younis of AGK Media Studio provide tips, tools, and strategies for creative, fun, and effective content marketing through weekly livestreaming, podcasting and blogging.
Visit with us live every Thursday to ask questions and solve problems related to creating consistent quality content to promote your brand and business.
Get our fabulous new short course and learn How to Create, Publish and Distribute Content Consistently. Go to course.agkmedia.studio and use the coupon code AGKSAVER before November 18, 2022 to get it as our gift to you!
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