You can also watch this interview on my Youtube Channel
*PS. Below you will find an auto-generated transcript of this episode.
Arek Dvornechuck: Hey, what's up branding experts are like here and welcome to on branding podcast. And today my guest is Matthew Hughes. And Matthew is the founder and CEO of King of Video, which is a company that helps business owners create, launch, and monetize their YouTube channels. So he's also a speaker, author, and podcast host, and he shares his expertise and insights on video marketing, content creation, and personal branding.
Hello, Matthew. Thanks for joining us today.
Matt Hughes: No, we're as delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.
Arek Dvornechuck: Thank you so much. So today we are going to talk about how to launch a YouTube channel, the importance of video marketing. So can we actually start with a simple question? What's the importance of video marketing? How do you see it, playing a role in today's ability to market yourself and brand your business.
Matt Hughes: It's funny because I attended a marketing conference yesterday and one of the things they said, which was news to me because I don't keep up to date with Google's SEO stuff, but they said, Google have got a new update coming out for search and it's going to be a generative update or something like that. I'm sure I've got that wrong. And they said that video is going to be prioritized even more in the search results than it was before. And what I often tell people is, if they're getting started with their business and they want to be at the top of Google, yes, of course you can pay for it. Using some SEO service or that kind of thing. Or you can create video content and it's more likely to be at the top anyway. So if you've got a YouTube channel, most people when they search for the answer for something, you will probably see that video is prioritized at the top. So why would you not be creating video content if you know you can get in front of people in that way?
Arek Dvornechuck: I totally agree. And I signed up for this Google's new update. I forgot what it's called either, but there is like a big snippet on the first page of the search results. And also I noticed that they actually do prioritize YouTube videos. And so I run a blog and I've been running this blog for a couple of years and I started my YouTube channel just like a year ago but I'm really bigger when it comes to blogging than YouTube, but what I realized recently is that yes, they do actually prioritize and, it's easier to actually create video content and get on top of search results than write long-form articles these days, at least when it comes to my business and my niche. So yeah, video is extremely important. YouTube is like another search engine on its own. So it's extremely important to produce video content as well. Can you talk to us about some of the biggest problems? Because you have businesses and entrepreneurs start their own channel and manage their content creation.
So can you talk to us about some of the biggest problems they come across when it comes to starting a new channel, maybe, planning the recording, setting up the studio or, planning the content creation and stuff like that.
Matt Hughes: You've listed them very well there, kind of the common things. I think, like what I tried to do with people from the start is help them to be strategic. And, a lot of people will focus on the gear and they'll focus on their studio and all that kind of stuff. And actually, the main problem they have usually is that they're not creators. They don't understand how the creative process works. They don't know how to come up with ideas. And so part of it is, Coaching them to understand idea generation the same as you talked about your blog like it's the same thing, right? You just could be creating some kind of content So I think the biggest problem first is understanding the type of content that you want to create and then it's just actually going and doing it and I saw a thing with Famous guy who did a big zoom call the other day. I can't remember his name now. It's a bit of an escapement, but he talked about how It was a TubeBuddy video and it was like 10 tips on getting started on YouTube or whatever. And he said, the first thing you've got to do is create a video and forget everything else. If you don't create the video, no one will see it.
That's a fact. So getting people to create content fast without worrying about everything else is my biggest priority. And we're just changing. I've got a coaching program that's eight weeks long. We're changing that now. So rather than focusing on teaching them how to plan, prepare , create ideas, set up the channel, that stuff, I'm literally taking them step by step and giving them actions straight away.
And one of those actions is go and create your intro video now and then come back to me when you're done. Don't talk to me about gear. Don't talk to me about all the other things that are in your brain or why this might not work. Just go and create the video. Because when you create content. It starts something in your brain, the creative process starts and then all of a sudden you start to get more ideas. You change the way you feel about the content. All that kind of stuff. Creating video content in the first place is the biggest challenge for anyone. I think,
Arek Dvornechuck: So just getting started, of course you need to be strategic as you mentioned before, but just getting started, just getting the ball rolling. And then improving upon that, and then implementing maybe some editing, maybe some effects, sound effects, maybe some editing tricks, stuff like that.
Matt Hughes: You're always evolving, like your content is always evolving. I bet when you first started the blog and you started writing your blog content, if you went back a year afterwards and looked at it, you were like, Oh, my copywriting was really bad
Arek Dvornechuck: that was really bad
Matt Hughes: I didn't structure it very well, and you can understand why maybe those blog posts didn't get as much traction as the new ones do as your processes evolve, so it's the same with video. And rather than thinking, going in with it and thinking, I need to be viral. I need to do these really professional, amazing videos, actually just go into it with an open mind and start creating content, everything else will improve as you move forward.
Arek Dvornechuck: Right. And another thing with getting viral, it's really hard to get viral, but if you, even if you get lucky and if you go viral. And you don't have a system and you don't have a plan, you're just going to go viral once, and then you disappear, like your channel is basically because you don't have any, you don't have a plan on how to create content. So it actually can hurt you long term if you go viral at the beginning of your YouTube career. I would say.
Matt Hughes: I saw somebody on TikTok actually that they went viral with a product and because they were not strategic about it, you can do TikTok shop now. And it says buy it and there's a hashtag TikTok that made me buy it. They went viral with something and somebody worked out if they'd have put in the link to the product with an affiliate code, how much money this person would have made and they didn't do it. And it was, tens of thousands of dollars that they lost by not doing it. So that's the kind of strategy where you've got to be thinking about. When I'm creating this, is it just for love and I don't care about the money or actually do, I really want the money? Because with affiliate stuff, they don't lose anything. You don't lose anything by doing it, but it just means that you do get paid if you do happen to go viral. Yeah, strategy is important.
Arek Dvornechuck: No, that's a good example. Definitely. So yeah, so be strategic. So the basics would probably be to figure out what performs well in your niche or your category, try to figure out what are some of the most important keywords you would like to cover, and then create content around those keywords, and then grow from there, right?
And then you can focus more on thumbnails, the own intros, and maybe adding some music, sound effects, maybe hiring a better editor and stuff like that. And then getting a better camera and stuff like that. Yeah these days we have these, really powerful phones that, you can just start with your iPhone basically, it's really good. Get some, maybe some light, because it's important. Maybe some microphone, but you can use just a basic iPhone.
Yeah, and that's why I encourage people to use it when they're getting started. A lot of people will say to me, what's the best webcam? And I always say all webcams are bad. Because mainly because your mobile phone is probably a better camera than the webcam that you've got. As long as it's relatively new in the last couple of years. You're going to have a 4k camera on your mobile phone so, why would you need to upgrade or do anything else right now? I know people that have got a hundred thousand subscribers and they only use their mobile phone. They don't use any other fancy equipment. So there's nothing stopping you from an equipment point of view.
And it's also fast because you have the recordings here. You don't have to like messing around with SD cards and things like that. And all this equipment, if you want to use a DSLR, then you need to perhaps install the OBS and stuff like that. Yeah, there are so many things that go into that, but that can come later once you get some traction and once you start figuring this stuff out. Yeah that's extremely important. So that's about starting and then can we talk about some of the tools or resources that you use or you recommend your clients to use for video production and then editing and stuff like that
Matt Hughes: So you're talking about software when you say tools. Yeah. I commented as we came into this because you're using SquadCast there. I always think about the easiest and quickest way to do things. So I use a Mac. Easiest and quickest way to do it for me on a Mac is using Ecamm. I love Ecamm. It's like a professional studio. You can use it to do professional recording just as much as you can. A really simple recording. You can do interviews, you can do multicasting, all that kind of stuff. If you've not got a Mac and you want to do it in the browser, then I use Restream. Restream for me, I know there's other alternatives like StreamYard, but Restream I find has the best quality and it's a really simple studio to use in the browser. Has a nice integration with Descript as well, which again, SquadCast being bought by Descript. Really great for your workflow to be able to film something in Restream, send it to Descript, or film it in squad cast and send it to Descript and then just continue the editing process because it's all cloud based the way you go, yeah, they're probably the key things, and then in terms of YouTube management, things like vidIQ and TubeBuddy, great applications to get started when you're thinking about your analytics, your SEO, your keywords, all that kind of good stuff. A and B testing for thumbnails.
Arek Dvornechuck: And that was my next question. Actually, how do you go about measuring the video performance? Do you use anything like what's it called? There's a TubeBuddy and software like that.
Matt Hughes: Yeah, I think a lot of people talk about metrics being vanity metrics, right? And they say, especially when you get started, don't be disheartened by the vanity metrics being your subscribers and your viewers. Actually there are some really key metrics, your average view duration, click through rate, some of these metrics that YouTube Studio, not any other tools, just YouTube Studio in the background of your channel. These are the things that will tell you whether what you're doing now is working. So pay attention to that stuff. Like YouTube It gives you all of the information you need to understand your audience, understand how the algorithm is working with or against you as it may be and what you need to improve. If you see a click through rate is really low, then you know that you need to improve the title or the thumbnail, most likely the thumbnail. In which case, maybe the next video that you do get two alternative thumbnails. Use TubeBuddy, I think it's in the pro version. And you can have an AB test and it will swap that thumbnail every day. To tell you which one is the best and, paying attention to these metrics, understanding what they mean and knowing how to change them iteratively means you're going to get positive gains over time. I did this with one of my clients who was a math tutor and he was getting about a hundred views. He said between 80 to a 100 views to his videos, this particular video he had per day. And I said to him I looked at it and we did a channel review and everything And I looked at the thumbnail and I said look this thumbnail is really busy it's a little bit confusing. I said, when we search for it, what we do is we search in the search results and see what it's up against, which one you're more likely to click.
So I got him to change that and he changed a couple of his other channels from nails and he got a 25 percent increase. And he came to me the next day and he said, next week. He said, Matt, I went from 80 to a sort of 120 views. It's not a very good increase. And I was like, look, mate we've just done it by 25%. This is huge. If you can get a 25 percent increase every time, the compounding impact of that is huge. So really pay attention to percentage increases. Think about that over ”Oh, I'm only getting 50 views right now.” Cause of course, Mr. Beast only got 50 views on his first videos. That's how it works. He just kept changing, improving over time. There are tools like TubeBuddy and VidIQ as well.
Arek Dvornechuck: Yeah, there are many tools and for example, we are using SquadCast before that I've been using Riverside. I started on zoom, but zoom is not really good for that. The difference for you guys who don't know is that zoom like records the video how to explain that right now,
Matt Hughes: It just compresses the crap out of the video, It's horrendous what it does to the quality of your video. Yeah.
Arek Dvornechuck: Exactly. So whatever connection you have there might be some glitches, you may lose some quality and stuff like that, but Riverside and Squadcast and other tools can record video and audio locally, and then they send it to the cloud. So now this video and audio is being recorded locally. So it's not dependent on the internet connection. So that's the difference. And there are so many tools out there, but these are the tools that I'm using now. And I know you are using, we've talked about that
Matt Hughes: Yeah. And just think about the purpose of Zoom as well. Like Zoom is a conferencing tool and a corporate conferencing tool fast. And so, when you think about a tool like that, the purpose of that tool is to maintain a good audio or visual connection. It's not to give you the best quality. It's just to maintain a connection because they don't want you to drop out of the call. With things like Riverside, Squadcast, Restream, the purpose of that is to broadcast. So they don't want to just maintain the connection. They want to give you the best quality at the time of recording. And Squadcast and Riverside, having that local recording just means that you get the best possible quality because the internet connection, the call we're having now, it's just an addition to the local recording that's happening. So that's the beauty of these tools. I think they're amazing.
Arek Dvornechuck: Yeah, they are. There definitely are. And what do you think are some of the future trends and opportunities for video marketing? We all know that. YouTube shorts are big these days, Instagram reels, you can repurpose them as Instagram reels, right? Or as TikToks and stuff like that. So some of the creators go shorts first, right? So they create very short form content. And rather than focusing on long term landscape video they focus on portrait mode, short form content. And now we also have AI, and we can deep fake ourselves. What do you think about all of that? Where is it going?
Matt Hughes: For me, so one change that's happened quite recently, I went to VidSummit last year in October and they said it was coming. I've noticed it's there here now, is that you can create a YouTube short and then you can link to a longer form piece of content. From that YouTube short. So I think represents a huge opportunity. So at the time in October last year, they just started to monetize shorts. So you actually got a revenue share, which was great. They moved from having a fund to an actual revenue share, which is good. And then that move to being able to link to your long form content means that you can clip a short part of your longer form content and then the audience should naturally organically move over as you link to that longer form piece of content Like that's a huge opportunity because if you're a shorts creator now if you're a short form creator on any of the platforms and you really want to maximize the income that you get from this being able to link to a longer form piece of content where there's a lot of money in that long form piece of content. This is going to change the game really and I think if you look at it when you get paid on YouTube you get paid for every thousand views that you get and on shorts, it's like tens of thousands, like you need to get like 10 million views before you get a good amount of money from it. So the opportunity again, financially is much better on the longer form piece of content. And that integration between the two is going to be a huge difference to a lot of creators, I think.
Arek Dvornechuck: So in general, that's a good strategy for example, like this podcast or podcasting in general, like we see like Andrew Tate, for example, his strategy is to go on as many podcasts as he can talk a lot of controversy, a lot of controversial stuff, so they can clip him because that performs well and then, and then you can watch the long form video, right? The full interview. So that's a strategy. So that's about podcasting, doing interviews, but, you can apply the same to content creation. So if you want to create a long form content about any subject, like some evergreen keywords, for example, this is how I started and videos from two years ago or three years ago, people still watch them, right? And then you can clip these videos and you can create shorts out of these videos and then you can link back to that long form video. So that's a good strategy as well.
Matt Hughes: Yeah, you don't know when it's going to take off, like I spoke to the math tutor I was speaking to on my program at the moment and he said he had this video that he did of a calculator and it got no views for the first six months and then suddenly just took off. And if you look at a short form strategy, although you short form, you get quick hits and you get the dopamine hit quite quickly because you're getting more views. Actually, the longevity of the short form content is generally not as long form content. So to find a video on short form, if it didn't do very well, you're unlikely to discover it six months later. But with long form, it can be discovered six months later and take off. And that's the beauty of it really. My most popular video on my channel only took off during lockdown and it was like a year and a half old by that point, I think.
Arek Dvornechuck: Yeah. I've seen that with my videos as well. So that's a good point as well. That's a great distinction. What is the difference between short form and long form? Long form, if you target evergreen keywords that people will always search for. You can create a video now, maybe it doesn't take off now, but it will in the future, but it may not apply to short form content because either it takes off now or probably, gets buried. Do you have any other tips or anything else you want people to know? We're going to link to your website, which is kingofvideo.co.uk. Are you active on other social media?
Matt Hughes: Yeah. So if you type in links.kingofvideo.co.uk, there's a bunch of links on there. I've got a free YouTube community. So if you're interested in getting started in YouTube, that YouTube community is a great place to, to come and hang out with a load of other creators or people that are thinking about creating. It's definitely not just people that are already creating. We're doing in -person events. We're starting to do those next month. But yeah they're the main links. I think what I would say to anybody listening is you've just got to start creating, being creative is the thing that's going to change you from being stuck where you are right now to being successful with whatever it is that you're trying to be successful. That practice of creating is a thing that will make the difference. And if you're looking at people that are getting millions of views, it's because they started creating three years ago. And you're seeing the three year result of that effort and all those disappointing 50 view videos or on TikTok 200 view videos.
Arek Dvornechuck: They all went through that and it doesn't happen overnight. That's a great tip. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We're gonna link to your website. We're gonna link to the community, so for you guys to check it out and Matthew shares a lot of tips there for you guys, you can find more tips there.
Thank you again.
Matt Hughes: Thanks so much. Bye bye.
