We will show you how to get to tens of thousands of customers via YouTube without running ads, creating a single video, or even creating your own channel. In this article, we will cover:
- Basics of YouTube + How to leverage YouTube easily
- The Science behind the strategy
- A Step-by-step guide to collaborating with YouTubers + how to pay them
- How to optimize the videos for maximum juice
- What to expect and team configurations required
- How does the strategy decay
Basics of YouTube + How to Leverage YouTube Easily
We all know that creating a YouTube channel is a lot of work, not to mention the outrageous expenses incurred in running ads.
During this quest to leverage YouTube, we found a new hack ‘THAT JUST WORKS’. People usually want to leverage YouTube by running ads or creating their own channels and getting subscribers.
But well, there is a third and a fourth way too. You can leverage YouTube via the subscribers of other creators in your niche and by ranking on YouTube for particular keywords – just like what you do on Google via content marketing or landing pages. Let us run you through a few examples:
At InVideo, we want to work with YouTube creators who offer the topics and subscribers relevant to our potential users. Here is how to find them.
The Science Behind the Strategy
It takes too much time and effort to create your own channel and build a subscriber base. Consistency, time, and money are something we might not have, and thus, we can use the YouTube Hack. So a good shortcut is to find creators relevant to your business and simply collaborating with them.
These creators already rank for the keywords that you want to rank for, so it becomes easier to get more views. Along with that, you are also renting their subscribers list. Follow these few steps to get the strategy right.
Step 1: Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of your journey to be successful on YouTube. YouTube lets you leverage subscribers. However, do not forget that it is also the largest search engine in the world, and thus, keyword searches are huge on YouTube.
You can use several tools to conduct keyword research, but my favorite is Ahrefs: Here is what we do: Enter the keywords that are relevant to your businesses and then check their traffic volume.
There are several ways to find different keywords: Understanding your customers and what they search for, finding competitors, and what they rank for, Google Search, and Google Adwords, etc.
For example, once you know who your target audience is, you can search for relevant keywords and their search traffic. For example, if your tools let folks optimize Google ads, you can create videos around the ‘Google ads tutorial’.
I suggest triangulation from Google ad words as one of the best strategies as it will also allow you to find the most relevant and conversion-centric keywords. Once you have a list of keywords ready, just type them in the YouTube search bar one after the other. To understand Keyword research properly, I strongly suggest that you take the Primal Videos YouTube course.
Step 2: Find the Most Relevant Creators
Search for the keyword relevant to your business: ‘Video Editor’ with the VPN.
These creators are the lowest hanging fruits because they have the audience relevant to your potential customer base. Now, contact all these creators via email and ask them if there was a way to work with them. For example – here is a video on InVideo by Jack Cole, since Jack Cole ranked number 1 for the particular keyword we were targeting.
Step 3: Contact them:
You can contact them by going on the channel and then going to the ‘About’ section on YouTube; that is how you can find the email address.
Do not restrict yourself to just YouTube; contact them on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well. You never know who will reply and how. Here are our Instagram DM’s that worked.
And the ones that did not work:
When you do this for several 100’s of keywords, here is what your YouTube funnel will look like: We mark our creators in different buckets along with keywords, etc.
We use CRM to track everything. Our teams have quotas every month.
Step 4 – Email Copies:
Once you have the email IDs, send them emails. You have to make sure you do not use your primary email address. Buy domains, create email addresses, warm them, and use them for outreach. If you do not do this, most of your emails will go to spam.
Here is what one of our outreach emails look like:
Outreach email template 1:
Hey Biaheza,
I trust you are well. My name is Kunal and I lead Growth for InVideo. We are a video creation platform best suited to create video ads, promo videos, social media videos, etc. We have some great ratings across the internet – Capterra reviews and G2 Crowd reviews. We have worked with creators like Marissa Romero, Greg Gottfried, Steve Dotto, Jenni
Outreach email template 2:
Hi Biaheza,
You can consider sending a sequence using something like HubSpot. But remember, emails alone are not enough. You will have to ping them on other platforms too. However, if you have a huge pipeline, something will always keep going live.
Please note that you will be able to convert only 2-3 creators for every 100 emails you send. You should expect a 3-5% conversion, at best.
Once they agree, fix a topic, choose the right keywords, etc. and make the video live. You can learn more about carrying out page optimization on YouTube in this blog.
Basically, use the right keywords in the description and topic, use a proper thumbnail, and you should be fine. Make sure the creator is also promoting the video.
You can track the traffic you are getting via these pages using Google Analytics and tracking links. Here are a few examples:
You will get great results if you use discounts, so the creator feels valued too. Also, tracking links is essential, so you know how many sales you got through them, etc. We use different ways to track them. We track the performance of each individual creator like this:
How to Crack Deals with the Creators
Before sending emails, we try to check for a few things:
Views to subscriber ratio MATTERS – The lower, the better.
This is an important metric that we follow. Post this, we hop on a call to further understand how these videos performed for them in the past.
After that, we ask them for an estimate – We break down the estimate into a subscriber-to-cost ratio before taking a call. With tight reporting structures, CAC calculations, the strategy works almost every time. It is based on trial and error, though.
Hacks to Crack Deals with Creators
1. Ask them to do an affiliate-only deal. You have to use an affiliate program + tracking system using Tapfiliate or Impact. There is some development effort involved when you do that.
2. Ask them to do it pro-bono – give them access to your tool/product for free.
3. Do a part-upfront and a part-affiliate deal.
4. Push the creator towards getting a minimum guarantee, with respect to sign-ups.
5. Put creators who work best on a retainer basis and have them create videos every month.
Making sure that your short-term CAC for YouTube is lower than your normal CAC is a good enough metric. We aim at a 2-month break-even period for our YouTube videos.
How to Optimize YouTube Videos:
We have drafted an exhaustive blog, and along with that, we also highly recommend that you check out this video by Neil Patel – as well as the video from ahrefs. You can ask your creators to use the same techniques. However, here is another important hack:
“Push your creators to link their highest performing videos to the video they created for your brand” – This will give the video the additional momentum it requires. Along with that, build backlinks to the YouTube video. Also, check this blog out that suggests different YouTube tools for different purposes.
What to Expect from YouTube Videos:
Getting videos created is an ongoing process. It is a process that compounds, but you cannot really completely stop it. Here is an example:
Few videos will keep giving us views and sign-ups, while a few of them will deteriorate.
Here is a chart that shows the increase in YouTube videos, but the views do not really increase proportionally. In such cases, keeping tight control on CAC is the single most important thing.
Here is how we have seen the YouTube traffic decay – But we think it is okay till we are able to meet the right CAC.
YouTube marketing using influencers is actually like a Guest Blogging strategy, having long-term advantages. I hope you were able to understand how you can leverage YouTube without running ads or building your own channel.
We have seen better conversion rates on YouTube videos as compared to anything else because the creators’ audience trusts them. Most creators will also work with you only if they think it is beneficial for their audience.
Consistency and persistence is the key for this strategy to compound.
