Every time they go live, it brings them five figures in revenue. Literally five figures in revenue. (soft music) [Narrator] Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel. And if you’re on YouTube, click the alert notification. – Hello everybody and welcome to our very special edition of Restream live show with Neil Patel. Today, we’re going to talk about why live streaming should be your focus in 2021, and you will learn the best tips about this from the top world marketer, Neil Patel. Without further notice, Neil, welcome to the show.
It is so great to have you here. – Thank you for having me. – Absolutely. It’s a pleasure. So today we are going to talk about marketing and live video, and we have a lot of questions lined up. We also will be taking questions from our community, so please bring them up in the chat. But we’ll take a couple of questions from the chat, as well as take a couple of questions as video with some of our community members
who submitted questions in advance. All right, so let’s go ahead and get started with just the general kind of overview from your perspective, Neil. What are the major video marketing trends of 2020 that you’re seeing and believe will stay relevant in 2021 since we’re approaching the end of the year? – Sure, so,what’s funny is it we’re here live. Live is actually one of the biggest trends we’re seeing and not for the reason most people think. So here’s why live is big. If you look at most social media platforms, one thing that they’ve done over the years is they’ve crushed the reach, right? Unless you pay, you don’t tend to get much of a reach.But here’s the thing, what’s different with their algorithms is they’re trying to be live television, like the normal television that you watch on TV, through cable providers, whatever it may be, right? When you’re watching your
ABC, NBC, whatever the TV channel may be. So their whole thing right now is if you go live, they’re trying to spread it not to just your network, but your network’s network. And whoever else is willing to watch because they want more people to stay on YouTube or Facebook or any of their platforms because they make more ad revenue versus if you go there out there and go watch TV. So that’s one big trend that we’re seeing right now in which you should go live more often. And the more live you go, the better off you are because it’s actually causing higher engagement. So then when you create content, whether it’s videos or text-based posts or whatever it may be, that content is doing better because you had more engagement from your audience during the live session,
from comments and stuff like that. So they’re more likely to see it when you’re not “going live”. So that’s the first big trend that we’re seeing. – Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. So when you work with different corporations and entrepreneurs, in that little video preview, we saw that you have a very wide spectrum of clients that you’re helping with their marketing needs, do you feel like those organizations and business owners underestimate the power of live video today? – They do. What’s funny is I was with a large corporation,
without naming their name, and they have quite a big social presence because they’ve spent a lot of money to get that presence. And right now they’re in the process of finding people within their space to interview on all these channels and create content. And my pitch to them was, you shouldn’t actually just go create content
and do interviews. What you should do is, because the people that they’re trying to interview are really well known and also have massive social followings, my pitch to them was you should go live
together and do interviews. So for example, let’s take the example of Instagram. If I go live on Instagram at the same time
that they’re going live, and we’re both on the interview, my followers will get to know them and their followers will get to know me. So in essence, it’s kind of like a win-win, but on top of that, you’ll notice that the content spreads way faster than if you were just going live on your own channel to your own audience. – Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And, yeah, interview is also one of the easiest way to create live content for those people who are just thinking, how do I get started with this, is just connect with experts in your industry. Start with interviews and conversations, because it’s very easy and natural to have a dialogue, right, versus preparing a presentation and keeping your audience engaged. So, for those who are thinking about live video, and also think about search engine optimization, which is one of your major areas of expertise, what are some SEO tips for live videos for both beginners, streamers and creators, as well as advanced ones? –
Sure, so, first off, when you’re creating video content, keeping in mind, the most popular search engine out there is Google. If you had to guess on the second most popular search engine, what would you guess it would be? – After Google? Oh, that’s a good one. I would say, it will be another, like something like Yahoo maybe. – It’s actually YouTube. Technically that is Google as well, so trick question. But Google is number one. Number two is Yahoo. I mean YouTube. Sorry about that. And when you think about YouTube, very few people are thinking about YouTube optimization. So when you’re creating the live content, if I mentioned the word SEO, and you mentioned the word SEO, YouTube now knows that this video is on SEO. So it’s going to rank higher for the word SEO. Also, when you’re going live, there’s titles, there are descriptions, having the right keywords in there helps as well.
The next thing you want to do to increase your SEO
and your traffic, even if you don’t have any audience
and you’re now starting off,
you can then take that video after it’s done being live
and then promote it within the first 24 hours.
The reason I say first 24 hours,
that’s the most important part of YouTube’s algorithm
to rank.
So in Google’s algorithm, if you want to rank it,
slow and steady wins the race.
YouTube is the opposite.
Whatever videos do the best in the first 24 hours,
they tend to rank really quickly.
And you get your rankings in the next day, two days,
sometimes even same day.
So I do email blast,
I’ll do push notifications, messenger bots.
But if you don’t have an audience,
what you would do is you’d go
to your other social profiles, spread it.
You would tell all your friends, “Hey, go comment,
“go share it, go like it, leave a comment.”
And you just do manual grassroots stuff.
And when you do that, you’ll notice that it increases,
or another thing that you can do that’s quite easy
is you can just go out there
and spend a little bit of ad money
and drive some clicks and views and that helps as well too.
– Awesome.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
And also the beautiful thing about YouTube
is that content is kind of evergreen
and people can keep discovering you
as long as the topic is kind of universal, right?
And it’s not very, it doesn’t expire immediately.
You do have that opportunity to get more and more views.
And also repurposing is another,
another way to approach your live videos,
which we’ll cover a little bit later on today.
So one of the things that I remember you were mentioning
in one of your courses is you get a lot of questions
about landing pages and how to drive engagement.
So one of the suggestions that you made
was ask questions on landing pages,
ask people something about themselves
and make that part of the landing.
What kind of questions do you think
will help boost engagement during a live show?
What kind of things should we ask the community
in order to kind of galvanize them?
– Sure, so when you’re in a live show, like,
let’s say if I’m talking about marketing
and we’re talking about marketing here,
I could have a question right now
is what kind of business are you?
Are you a small business?
Are you startup? Are you a large corporation?
Or I can even get more specific. Are you a local business?
Are you a E-commerce business? And there’s things like that.
And then I can adjust the content based on what they select
because I can pre-create the content, right?
And then on top of that,
when people start giving you responses,
you can then adjust and tailor your responses,
even in the live interviews, based on what the majority is.
So if everyone said here,
“Hey, I own an E-commerce company.”
I’m just making it up. And we’re talking about live.
I would then adjust what I’m talking about
and I would say, “Hey, do you know
“there’s an interesting technique
“that most people don’t know about?
“Did you know you can actually go live on Facebook
“and YouTube and start to create
“your own home shopping network, style of video,
“where you showcase products?”
Like I’m going to showcase this MacBook and I’d be like,
“Look, I only got 10 MacBooks left.
“Leave a comment if you want to buy one and just,
“respond with the word five or one or buy.”
And then, I can start following up with people
who said that they want them into buying, right?
So you can end up doing really creative stuff like that
once you get to know the type of people
who are listening in.
– Awesome. Awesome. Yeah.
That’s wonderful.
It’s, for our community who is watching us today,
we do encourage you to submit your questions.
So please go ahead and submit them
and we will be highlighting them in the end.
And, we will also bring in a couple of people
to ask questions with video.
So, to kind of keep engagement a little bit.
On top of that, you do create a lot of video content.
You have a very robust YouTube channel.
You have all kinds of courses, tutorial, videos,
different things.
I guess my more or less personal question to you is like,
what kind of videos do you enjoy creating most
just yourself,
aside from that being bringing value to your business?
– My favorite types of videos are how to tutorials.
Anytime I show someone how to do something,
I love it because I feel if you watch a video
and you can get action out of it,
I feel that I’ve taught you something,
help get you, achieve your goals in life
or in your business or in your marketing.
So I feel that it wasn’t a waste of your time.
Those are some of my favorite videos to create.
Funny enough, some of my favorite videos to watch
aren’t necessarily how to related.
It’s more trend based, like what’s happening in the future,
what’s changing.
I love watching those kinds of videos as well.
– Awesome. Amazing.
So when it comes to videos,
what is your approach to measuring return on investment?
Because for a lot of people,
if you don’t have a team of producers
and professional videographers, editors,
it is quite an endeavor to create video content, right?
It’s a lot more—
– Not really. Everyone believes that.
You don’t need professionals.
Look at my background.
Straight up, look.
I’ve got a reflection from the coffee table.
Like, I don’t have a professional background right now.
You know what the best way to create a phone is, or video?
You just bust out your phone and you go and create a video
and you upload it and it’s okay and it works.
People don’t care that much about the quality.
But here’s an interesting stat for you.
We have a software called Ubersuggest, okay?
And Ubersuggest is an SEO tool that a lot of people use,
hopefully more in the future.
And we have a free version and we have a paid version.
We ran a survey at the end when people started purchasing
saying, “Hey, how’d you find out about us?”
Did you know a little bit more than 20%,
we only ran the survey for a few days.
But during those few days,
literally a little bit more than 20% of the people said,
“We learned about you from YouTube.
“We learned about you from watching videos.”
Now, when we look at our tracking from YouTube
and we look at our tracking from Facebook and LinkedIn,
because we’re uploading a lot of the live videos
and even the recorded prerecorded videos
to all these social networks, we can’t track the ROI.
We didn’t see it.
The asking people showed us that there’s a massive ROI.
The problem that people end up having
is when they’re trying to generate revenue
from these channels.
They expect to generate revenue, they spend some money,
they spend a few dollars and they expect to generate revenue
right then and there.
Remember, it’s still the long tail.
If you optimize for these keywords, with these videos,
you continue to get traffic.
Even if I don’t release content on YouTube,
I can generate 800 to a million views a month
just because I’m getting a lot of traffic
from all those search queries.
So what I tell people is if you do it
for six months to a year, and then you’re patient,
you’ll see a huge ROI.
But if you expect to in the short run, you won’t.
And if you’re looking to find a direct ROI through tracking,
it’s really hard,
but when you start surveying and asking people,
you’ll be shocked on how much volume social channels
can actually drive you.
– That’s a great advice because a lot of people
get stuck on this return on investment
because yeah, you’re right.
You don’t have to have a lot of equipment
and a lot of effort put into video, but it is still effort.
And you kind of want that instant gratification, right?
Like with pay-per-click, for example,
you’ve uploaded that ad, you’ve put that picture
and oh my God, this many people clicked,
this many people bought.
With live video, it doesn’t necessarily work that way.
You kind of have to play a longer game a little bit.
But what are your thoughts on repurposing content?
Because live videos are great
because they’re faster to create, right?
Like right now we’re just going live,
we didn’t have to take a bunch of takes,
we didn’t have to prepare, we didn’t have to write a script,
but then after we’re done here,
there’s so much we can do with this video.
So what are your recommendations on how to,
how to approach what you have after you went live?
– So my recommendation is, okay, so even if you
go live and you didn’t,
you don’t have much of a setup or anything like this,
my recommendation is like, look,
you go live, and if you’re going to go live,
offer some sort of thing in your videos.
That’s the first thing I don’t know why people don’t do.
Offer something.
Whether it’s a product, a bonus, a promo,
whatever it may end up being, right?
Then the next thing that you mentioned in your question,
when you’re talking about live,
it’s how do you end up leveraging it?
And my whole big thing is optimize it for keywords,
take that content, repurpose it into audio.
So like I would strip out this video,
like literally remove the video,
strip it out into audio and turn it into a podcast.
And then what I would end up doing
is taking that video or audio and then I would figure out
how to send it to someone on Upwork
and tell them to repurpose it into a blog post.
They can’t transcribe it directly into a blog post,
but they can modify it so it works into blog posts.
And it’s just like, you’re taking that one piece of content,
and you now have from video
that you upload to all the social sites,
you publish it on your own website.
Then you end up creating an audio version,
which could just turn into a podcast.
You put that on Google, you put it on Spotify,
you put it on the iTunes store.
And then from there,
you also repurpose it into a blog post.
And then as I mentioned from that, within your live video,
hopefully you have some sort of offer.
So then now when you’re repurposing it,
not only are you getting more views, more impressions,
but you’re also generating sales and it’s indirect.
And here’s what I mean by indirect.
The moment you tell people in a video,
“Hey, click the link below and go to my website,”
the social networks will ding you.
Their algorithms are based on
the longer you stick around on that social platform,
the more views we’re going to give you,
because that helps them generate more ad revenue.
The moment you send them off,
you’re not going to do as well.
And that’s what makes it harder to track ROI.
But the moment you’re repurposing and putting it out there,
your brand is getting out there.
You’re going to get more sales
and you’re going to start seeing indirect ROI from it.
– Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
It is easy to forget how many different ways
you can creatively repurpose content.
And what is your take on the difference between live video
versus prerecorded?
What do you think is easier?
Because in my opinion, going live is easier
to create perfectly edited video,
but I’m curious, what’s your opinion on that.
– I’m the same.
And what’s funny is if you have a prerecorded video,
more people want the higher quality production.
I still recommend people just bust out their phone
and take it and majority of people will be okay with it.
But when you go live, no one expects perfection or editing.
So one you save money,
because you don’t have to have all this stuff.
And then two, you’re getting more views than prerecorded
because our algorithms are trying to encourage live
at this moment.
And then three, you can engage more with your audience
while they’re in there,
which then helps boost up the power of your social profile.
So then when you post a non “live content”,
it tends to do better because you’ve engaged
with a lot more people through the comments.
– Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaking of comments,
just to acknowledge a couple of people here.
Felicia is saying, “When you go live, offer something.
“Product, offer.
“After going live, strip audio and create podcasts.
Absolutely.
Definitely something that we do with Restream
and we always recommend our community to do.
Make an offer, repurpose content.
Randy from Facebook is saying, “Great idea.
“I’ve been binge-watching podcasts recently.”
It is really funny to think about how many people
are consuming or experiencing your live video
as a podcast to begin with because as we speak right now,
just imagine how many people
are watching us on the background
while they’re doing something else.
So technically they’re not necessarily watching,
they’re just listening.
So why not to bring it on a podcast platform
where people just originally,
intentionally come for audio only.
So that’s a good one.
I see Felicia sharing the link to Ubersuggest.
And Lawson is saying,
“The best tools are the ones you have on you.”
That’s regarding your idea that you do not have
to have a professional camera in order to get started.
Thanks guys. Keep bringing your comments.
Keep bringing it up. – Not just that.
The camera on these phones
are better than most of the cameras out there
that people have.
– That’s very true.
– It’s simple to use.
And this is like,
they have all these filters and stuff like that.
And there’s apps that you can end up installing
that make your video production better as well
without having an editor.
– Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I agree.
And,
as you go,
this is one of the things that we recommend
is try, get started with whatever you have.
And then if you have a lot of traction,
then you can upgrade, right?
Like you can always get that better camera,
better lights, better mic
after you realize that this is working for you
and you’re getting a lot of traction.
So this is definitely, this is good stuff.
So you’ve worked with so many different people.
Do you have any case studies or any specific examples?
It could be your agency,
or it could be one of your clients
where live video really made a difference
and they can like change their game either in sales
or marketing or exposure?
– Sure, so without mentioning the company name,
they sell hair products, hair extensions.
They go live on Facebook
and they try to go live at least once a month.
And by starting going live,
and they just saw literally right on the live,
remember how I mentioned,
“Hey, do you want to buy this MacBook, right?”
Hey, in essence, you’re demoing the hair extensions,
the hair products and saying,
“Hey, do you want to buy it?”
Every time they go live,
it brings them five figures in revenue,
literally five figures in revenue.
Now, when I was talking to them, I was just like,
“Take what you’re doing
“and don’t go live once a month,
“go live three times a week.”
And little thing, they don’t generate as much per video now,
but their total revenue is much more.
And it’s growing and getting closer
to over six figures a month.
I think this month they’re on track
to hitting six figures just from that.
So they’re not there yet, but they’re getting close
and it looks like there’ll be on track for that.
Although we’re getting close to Thanksgiving. So who knows.
But if it wasn’t for Thanksgiving,
my bet is they would easily hit six figures.
– I think for Black Friday,
they have quite a chance to,
– That’s correct.
– to go off at like, yeah.
– If they decide to do a promo, right?
If they don’t do a promo,
I don’t know how effective it’s going to be.
So they haven’t decided yet.
But if they do, I think it will be super effective.
– Yeah, that’s true. That is so interesting.
We get those questions quite a bit from our community
when people ask, “Does it matter how often do I stream?
“Should I stream once a week or once a month or every day?
“Like, how does that affect
“the,
“the exposure and effectiveness of our stream?”
What do you think is kind of like that golden middle?
Like, you don’t want to go live every hour, right?
Like that’s kind of crazy.
– It’s too much work.
I would say at least once a week
and ideally a few times a week.
If you can do daily, great.
And that’s assuming your content is great.
You don’t want to go live for the sake of going live.
Even though it’s good to, if your content sucks,
people aren’t going to want to keep tuning in.
So make sure that your content is amazing.
And if you can only produce amazing content once a week
when you go live, then go once a week.
If you can only do once a month
where you think you’re going to have great content
and people are going to love, then do once a month.
But if you can have amazing content three times a week,
or even seven days a week,
then go live three to seven times a week.
It all depends on the quality
of the information you’re putting out.
– Yeah. Absolutely.
And again, to acknowledge some of our community members,
Felicia is saying, “I love live streaming
“and engaging with audience.
“Loving the content that you’re providing today.”
Thank you so much. It’s great to have you.
And Anita here is saying, “Fantastic tip
“on not sending people away during live
“and great about doing live more than prerecorded.”
I agree that this is kind of counter intuitive
for people to,
in why their community to leave the live stream,
this conversation that we’re having.
And instead of inviting them into the conversation,
include them into the dialogue, say, “Hey, click this link.
“Go away. Don’t watch me anymore.”
Right? So it’s a very interesting perspective.
I’m glad you brought this up.
It was really interesting.
So another question that I have for you
is in terms of bringing your content to your audience.
Right now, people are kind of spread out
between different social media platforms.
More and more of them are coming out,
especially with the health crisis.
People are staying at home,
they’re spending a lot of time online and live.
Do you believe that it is important
to bring content to your audience
and send it to multiple channels
versus just focusing on one channel?
– Well,
I look at it this way.
If I create a video, right,
like this video, we’re doing this,
why would you only put it on YouTube or only on Facebook?
It doesn’t matter how many followers you have.
You’re going to be seen by more people
the more networks you push it out on.
So whether you like Instagram or whether you like Facebook
or YouTube or Twitter,
who cares?
Do all of them because you’re going to get more views.
More views equals more branding, more customers, more sales,
more evangelists.
So if you’re going to create the content,
it doesn’t take that much more effort
to put on all the networks.
It’s literally an extra few clicks of a button.
So if you don’t do that,
it’s just like you’re spending all this time
to create content and you’re missing out on extra sales.
– Yeah. Absolutely.
And using tools like Restream
and there are several others out there,
it makes it so simple.
Like for example, right now we’re live on YouTube,
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter at the same time.
I am aggregating all the chat.
You can see it as well.
Neil, I’m sure you can see the comments coming in
and you can see which platform they’re coming in
and you can acknowledge them,
you can highlight them at any moment.
So you don’t really have to create multiple videos
and multiple efforts to include all the community
in one place.
There are lots of tools that can help you do it
in a very easy way.
So I see that more questions are coming. That’s awesome.
There’s one more thing that I wanted to cover with you
just before we turn to community questions.
So there is,
something that you mentioned as well on your YouTube channel
about the scalability of marketing agencies.
I believe that’s part of your marketing school
program as well.
So there are so many different services
that marketing agencies are offering right now.
And the consumers, customers are very demanding
in terms of what they are expecting from a marketer
when they contract to hire somebody.
Do you believe that offering something like streaming
as a service is something that marketing agencies
could look into and could it be scalable for them?
So basically run live streams for some businesses
who are thinking about leveraging that tool,
but not yet feeling comfortable
or ready to do it themselves.
– Yeah, I think it’s,
funny enough, I don’t think it’s a hard service to ride.
I think it’s easy.
You can do it quite well
and you can generate quite a bit of revenue for it.
The big thing is whatever service you’re providing
as an agency, focus, niche down, narrow down.
So don’t provide SEO, pay-per-click conversion,
optimization, streaming services,
and the list goes on and on because it’s too hard to scale.
Especially being, I’m not saying, eventually,
you should add in all the services,
but at the beginning, just pick one.
And offering streaming as a service, as an agency,
is it the biggest market?
No, you would make more money doing pay-per-click,
but here’s the thing that most people don’t tell you.
If you do pay-per-click as an agency,
you’re competing with thousands and thousands
of other agencies.
So it’s actually going to be really hard
for you to gobble up market share.
If you do streaming, even though the market cap
for live streaming is much smaller,
your competition is much less.
So you can actually in the short run, make way more money.
And I would actually even say in the next year or two,
you’d probably make more money
just focusing on things like livestream.
Like if you look at Gary Vee, he recently did something
when voice search was blowing up
and he did a voice conference.
And he had a lot of big companies that were coming there
because no one was talking about voice.
His voice is a big market as SEO or paid ads
or social media.
No, but there’s no competition.
So right now, as an agency,
I don’t know of any good agency
that is focusing on live streaming services and just that.
I think that’s a huge opportunity.
Funny enough,
we started getting more and more into video
and we started creating a video division
just to help customers.
And you’ll be shocked at how many companies,
when we talk to them, they’re like,
“Oh, we didn’t even know this is an option.”
And their whole big thing is,
“Oh, internally, we don’t know how to do it.
“We don’t know what content to pitch or present.
“And a lot of our employees are shy.
“So we just want someone to deal with it for us
“cause we don’t want to do any of it.
“And we just want to plug and play pay someone
“and they just go and do it.”
But I think there’s a massive opportunity right now in that.
– Do you remember your first ever live stream
and how did that go?
It’s always,
usually for most people it’s kind of a hilarious
or strange or awkward experience.
Do you remember anything about yours?
– Yeah, so I believe my first live experience
was on Facebook.
And I just went live only on Facebook.
I was at a Starbucks Coffee
and I went live for like two minutes and I quickly ran,
I’m like, “Oh,” and I had a thousand plus people viewing.
And I was like, “Oh, I should have stayed on
“for like 10, 20 minutes.”
And like, I could have just created a recorded video.
Why would I go live for only two minutes?
And I was just giving advice,
but what I should have done and I did it wrong at the time,
was stick around for 20, 30 minutes,
answer people’s questions, engage with them.
And use live for what it’s “meant to be”
versus just doing that standard recorded type of video
and putting it live.
And that’s what I’m big on is because like most people say,
“Oh yeah, I can just do my standard type of video.”
The key with live is to engage with the audience.
When you do recorded videos, you don’t engage as much.
The engagement is what causes your social profile
to have more clout.
So that way, when you post other content,
it has higher likelihood of going viral.
– Yeah. Absolutely.
For those who are experiencing us as a podcast,
speaking of repurposing, let me reintroduce you real quick.
My guest today is Neil Patel.
He is the world’s top marketer,
mega influencer, entrepreneur and blogger.
So before we turn to engagement,
I just came up as another question
that I was really curious about,
kind of in conjunction of what you were saying
about how a lot of people think that they’re shy,
how they’re not comfortable, going live is so daunting.
So you are very charismatic, very seasoned performer.
It is very easy for you to say,
“Hey, just turn on that live button.
“You’ll be fine. You’ll look great.”
What would be your recommendation for people
who have this hundred thousand reasons
like why I don’t look good on camera, I have an accent.
I’m not,
I’m so awkward.
I don’t know. Like I’m, I’m so shy.
Like what would be your advice to them?
– So a few things. First off, I’m an introvert.
So most people are like, “Oh, you’re fine on camera,”
but I’ve done it so often that you get used to it.
The second thing I always tell people is everyone is,
everyone is a little bit awkward,
everyone is very judgemental about themselves.
And you’ll be shocked on how
forgiving and how,
how the audience doesn’t really think about those flaws
that you would.
So you may be like, “Oh, I don’t look right or I have this.”
Like the other day I was on this live interview
with someone and he mentioned how he got into a car accident
and his nose is a little bit messed up
and how he has a, like a little line on his nose.
And he was telling me how he was lucky and he’s still alive.
And I was telling him on this interview, I was like,
I’m like, “Dude, who cares about your nose?
“You don’t have to feel bad or tell me about it.
“It’s not a big deal.
“Be happy that you’re alive
“and you’re still there for your family.”
And he’s like, “No, no, I totally agree.”
But the thing was when he mentioned his nose,
I didn’t notice it, only he noticed it.
And most people aren’t,
they don’t really care.
They’re just like, “Hey, I’m happy to be here.
“Thank you for your time. Thank you for helping us out.
“Thank you for providing advice.” Whatever it may be.
So don’t stress about these little things.
And I just encourage people to just try going live
for like five minutes.
And you may be awkward,
it may not work out the way you want,
but if you do a few times, you’ll get used to it.
You’ll get encouraging comments.
People are very friendly on the social web
and then you realize, “Oh, this isn’t bad.
“Let me just keep doing this more and more.”
– Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I think this is,
this is very common misconception
because people are so judgmental
and it’s amazing how forgiving the community is.
There are so many ideas
that people are going to be so mean to me,
but actually I personally have never experienced that.
And I think most people are their own worst judges,
so to say, if that makes any sense.
All right, a couple of questions from our community.
There are so many good ones coming in.
Lucy Carter from YouTube is asking,
“Would you going live at different times
“or having a regular time slot?”
So basically a schedule.
We’re live in an on-demand world.
So how would you encourage viewers on lives?
So schedule versus spontaneous showing up.
– So I recommend in the long run,
you have a regular schedule, but here’s what I would do.
So when you’re first starting off live,
use multiple different schedules,
because then you’ll see what times
create the most interaction and engagement
and the most viewers.
Once you have that time slot
and you’ve tested out a few times,
then make that time your regular slot
where you continually go live during that time or that day,
or if it’s multiple days during the week,
that time during the week.
So then you know what’s going to get you the most engagement.
If you don’t test, you’re just going to be like,
“Oh yeah, this is the best time.”
But if you haven’t tested it, you don’t really know.
So then everyone needs to test out a few different times
at the beginning to figure out the ideal time
where majority of their audience is going to be online.
– Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
So another question that I thought is pretty interesting
is here from YouTube, Webvdo.
He’s saying, “I’m a baby boomer nerd.
“The average early baby boomers are my target audience.
“Can you give any insights
“on how to engage and convert them?”
Or just in general, is there any difference in approach
for different generations or do you—
– No.
It really depends if you’re going after teens
to baby boomers, to people in the elder demographics,
they’re all online.
The big thing is, is if that’s your target audience
and you want to figure out insights on how to convert them,
the biggest thing people make a mistake on
is to forget the pitch.
If you forget to include a pitch within your live video
promoting a product, a service,
whatever it is you have to offer,
you’re less likely to generate revenue.
Because my mom always said,
“If you don’t ask, you’ll never receive.”
So ask and you can do that with a pitch.
– Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
That’s a very good, that’s a very wise idea.
I love what your mom said. Yeah, you have to ask.
You have to try. You have to do in order to get somewhere.
Sabir is here checking in saying, “Love Neil Patel.
“He is the CEO, the SEO and content guru.
“Much love brother.”
Thank you so much. Yeah, you are a guru.
That’s really,
that’s really exciting.
Very welcoming community.
– Thank you for the kind words Sabir.
And funny enough, I’ve known Sabir for a bit.
He is actually one of the best E-commerce consultants
that I know.
The guy knows E-commerce like the back of his hand.
– That’s amazing. Yeah. We actually do work with Sabir.
He’s one of our partners, so yeah, it’s good to see you.
And I see Lleane is saying here,
“Great to see Neil advocating for live streaming.”
Yeah, absolutely. Live streaming is the future.
And it should be your focus for marketing in 2021.
This is what we are talking about today.
And I do have a couple of people
who will be joining us with live video.
So let me go ahead and bring in Bruce here
to ask his question.
Right, Bruce let’s can we,
I’m not sure you have your microphone on.
I don’t think we can hear you.
Maybe you’re muted.
– Can you hear me now?
– Yeah, we can.
Go ahead and ask your question.
– Great interview Anya. Really good questions.
And she’s got it down.
She’s got them, she’s laid it out
and she’s not wasting any time.
Awesome.
Hey, so I come from a radio background.
I did radio in LA for about 12 years and,
yeah, I’m like totally used to turn, flip the mic on
and I have no idea what we’re doing for the next hour,
but we’re going to make the phones ring.
So, and those were the days.
But even all of that just went downhill and downhill
and downhill and 30 calls per hour
for what we were marketing and doing on the radio
turned into one call per hour.
So we’ve really had to battle back to figure out.
I would spend two hours a week on
content
prep
and just go into the studio for an hour
and do it and not think about marketing
for the rest of the week.
Now, some people say,
“Why don’t you have a podcast because radio’s down.”
I’m like, podcasts and YouTube and live streaming.
And it’s gone from three hours a week to 30 hours a week
to maintain the same traction and it’s daunting.
But in this era of live streaming, which we’re moving into,
similarly,
I do somewhat cerebral content.
I’m a financial advisor. Sometimes there’s a visual.
Sometimes it’s not just like, hi chit-chat today.
Here I am, aren’t I cute. Why don’t you order my products?
It’s a little bit more cerebral.
And when I’m daunted by,
even though you’ve answered the question three times is
production values
because we’ve got people in my field
that are at virtual news desk sets.
They look really good. There’s so much going into this.
And just when I think,
“Hey, everyone’s going to love me being on my phone.”
I’m like, “Oh, I’m so far behind.
“The rest of the field has totally outproduced me.
“And now no one’s going to take me seriously.”
So I know you’ve answered this three or four times.
I probably know what the answer is going to be,
but I just want to state it from the background
that I’m coming from of trying to be,
be accepted as an authority, get people to listen.
Sometimes I need slides.
I’ve got to make things a little,
take something wonky and break it down.
Talk to me about
why I shouldn’t care about production values or should I?
– Production value is,
don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to knock it
and I’m not trying to say there’s no value there
and there’s a time and place for it.
But what you’ll find,
is let’s go back to your original issue.
When you did radio,
your call volume dropped to barely like one an hour, okay?
When you go live,
these social networks are going to push people
to your videos.
You won’t have that issue of only having one an hour.
You’ll get more engagement.
These platforms are more popular than radio.
So why wouldn’t you just go out there and just produce it
and not worry about production value?
And every time we’ve tested a high production
versus no production, right?
Because typically when you release recorded videos,
you have some sort of production.
But when we test recorded videos with production
versus live videos with no production,
almost all the time, not a hundred percent,
but majority of the time,
the live video beats the recorded video in traffic.
And that’s because of the way the social algorithms work.
You can’t, it’s too hard to do fully produce perfect videos
that are live.
If that’s the case, it’s not really that live.
– Awesome. Thank you so much, Bruce, for joining us.
We made it a little bit more interactive
with like bringing people in.
There is another great question here from Jabriel.
He is asking, “What would have to happen
“over the next two to three months for a live streamer
“with marginal experience to build an engaged,
“committed live audience?”
So this is the question about growing your audience
from when you’re starting from a small place.
– You have to do a few things.
One, you need to probably go live three
times minimum a week if not like five or six.
Two, you need to have,
bring on other people have big communities.
The bigger, the better.
If they’re small, that’s okay. It’s better than nothing.
So that way you’re going live at the same time.
So their audience knows about you
and your audience does about them.
The third thing you need to do is do keyword research.
So when you do keyword research,
I’m talking about including the right keywords
in your videos, your descriptions, et cetera.
Fourth is you need to go live on all the platforms,
not just one platform because the more you do,
the more reach you’re going to get.
And then the fifth thing that you need to do
is promote your live videos.
Whether that’s emails, push notifications,
messenger bots.
If you’re going to go live,
letting people know about it in advance,
you’re going to have a much bigger audience
and you’re going to start building in
regularity, which is going to help you.
So then that way you continue to have an audience.
And if you want a bonus tip,
what I would do is I would offer incentives.
If you share the video or if you tell other people about it,
or you do X, Y, and Z, you can win a phone.
You can win a consulting session.
You can win a one-on-one private conversation with me,
whatever it may be.
So things like that will also make it spread faster.
– Awesome. All right. We have another person joining us.
This time, this is Mena from, actually New Zealand.
So she’s joining us from far away.
Mena, go ahead and ask your question.
– Kia ora everybody.
Kia ora is hello in Maori, the original language.
Anyway, I’m got a wee question for you.
Thank you for having me on.
How do you monetize
the live broadcast
if you are hosting
a person or,
you’re having a conversation and you,
it’s just a conversation
they’re not selling a product or anything.
How do you monetize that live stream
if it’s just them talking about their life kind of thing?
– So what kind of product or service do you sell?
– I am not selling any products.
And I’m not selling a service yet.
– Okay, so if I’m having a general conversation,
let’s say we’re talking about kitchen appliances,
I can tell people, “Oh,
“oh, is this what you use to cook?”
“Oh, you can get that at…”
You can put in your own custom URL, your own Bitly URL,
and it can have an affiliate link.
That’s an easy way to monetize.
So whatever your conversation is about,
you can integrate either affiliate offers,
your own products, your own services,
whatever that you have to offer that’s related to video
in a natural way.
If I was having a conversation with you
about live streaming, I wouldn’t say, “Oh, by the way,
“if you want dog food, go here to buy it.”
But let’s say we’re talking about live streaming,
I would say, “Hey, and by the way,
“if you’re going to test this out and you haven’t done it,
“check out Restream.”
You can end up going live on all these networks,
you’ll get a bigger audience
and it’s really easy and it’s a few clicks of a button.
Right. It’s related.
That’s a pitch without, with being soft and it’s relevant
and it provides value.
And the value part is a key
because most people don’t do well from their pitch
because they’re selling something
that doesn’t benefit the end user.
If we’re talking about streaming, I’m talking about Restream
and it ends up giving you the results, a bigger audience
and all in just a few clicks, that’s a win-win.
You’re getting the benefit of ease,
a bigger audience,
and they’re getting the benefit of more sign-ups.
So it’s working on both ends.
And if there isn’t a benefit on both ends,
it doesn’t work out well.
– Awesome. Thank you so much.
Yeah. Great question Mena. Appreciate it.
So to wrap this up,
we are going to come to our little pitch right here
with Restream and with Neil.
I know I asked of that kind of last minute,
before we went live.
You have used Restream in the past, right?
Can you share a little bit about your experience?
What was your,
were you just exploring for the first time,
or did you quickly realize the power of multi streaming
and kind of like spreading and broadcasting your content
all over the place and kind of like ran with it?
– Sure, so funny enough, even if you weren’t here,
I would still say this.
I’ve only been live a few times without Restream.
And then eventually I ended up learning about you guys
from a buddy named Eric Sue.
And he’s like, “Dude, we can go live
“on all the networks at once.”
And then since then, I’ve only used you guys
because why would I go live
and not reach as many people as possible
and generate as much brand awareness
or even revenue from that aspect?
But I’ve only had a good experience.
And if I didn’t, no offense,
I wouldn’t be using you guys’s this product.
– Awesome. Well, thank you so much for saying that.
I appreciate it. Yeah.
It is definitely an opportunity to reach more people
just because mathematically, it makes sense.
Right? You go to more platforms.
It also helps you to go to bring content
to where people already are,
instead of telling your Facebook folks
to go join your YouTube
and people who usually hang out on LinkedIn,
go and find you on Facebook, right?
So it makes sense.
It’s logical, but yeah, I’m really glad to hear.
And especially this product like Studio,
it really makes it very easy for you to start
and you don’t have to have a lot of equipment.
You don’t have to be a professional video producer
and editor.
As long as you are like Neil
and have a great message to deliver, have expertise,
have knowledge that you are willing and comfortable sharing,
there are lots of tools out there
and Restream is one of them that can empower you.
I guess— – What,
curious is when I first tried to go live
on multiple channels,
when Eric was telling me about you guys,
I was literally trying to buy multiple laptops
and get laptops for my team members
to try to go live on all of them at once.
And then when I learned about you guys,
I was like, “Oh, this is way simpler.”
– Yeah. Yeah. It is definitely complicated.
Especially when you think about a lot of times,
people think about Restream going to multiple platforms,
meaning different platform every time, right?
But you can also think about multiple destinations
or channels within one platform.
For example, if you have a Facebook page
and a Facebook group and a Facebook profile,
Restream can help you solve that problem
and that put you everywhere
without necessarily going to 30 different platforms
at the same time.
So this was,
yeah, this was really, really exciting conversation.
I really appreciate you joining us today, Neil.
Thank you so very much for your time.
I guess, to wrap it up and to close it,
any last piece of advice for people
who are still undecided somehow about live streaming?
– Look whether you use Restream or any other tool out there,
I just recommend you go live.
You’ll see good results.
And instead of me saying,
“Hey, this is why you need to do it.”
Like I’ve already mentioned that a lot.
Just try it out for five to 10 minutes.
Literally bust out your phone,
pick any social platform you want to do, go live.
You’ll realize the value.
Once you’ve seen the engagement,
then go live on all your platforms at once.
Like, it’s that simple.
Or if you want to just go live on your,
all your platforms at once at the same time
as the first start off,
because you’ll even see more engagement,
but either way, don’t take my word for it.
Don’t take everyone else’s word for it.
because there’s a lot of stats that show
that it works really well,
just go and try it out.
Go with five minutes of your time.
You don’t have to plan for anything.
Literally just bust out your phone and start talking.
– Yeah, absolutely.
Well, thank you so much, Neil.
And for those who are watching us today,
there’s a quick kind of reveal party here
that we are also going to be working with Neil
on a blog post about why live streaming
should be your focus in 2021.
So there will be more information and more knowledge bombs
and wisdom tips from Neil coming in,
in the direction of live streaming
for those of you who are interested
in leveling up your game next year,
maybe even in the end of this year
in terms of your video and digital presence.
Well thank you very much once again everyone
for watching us today.
Thank you for the community, for the questions,
for people who showed up and joined us live.
And thank you so much, Neil for every second of your time
and all those great advice and insights.
Appreciate you.
