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Blaine
00:00:02 - 00:00:09
Hey guys, it's your host Blaine here. And today we've got some great news. We're launching a brand new private community for uploading and it's all about building.
Blaine
00:00:09 - 00:00:10
Your personal brand the right way.
Blaine
00:00:10 - 00:00:40
The community will feature access to some of the world's best content creators, some of whom you've heard on uploading and more to come. The best news, this community is absolutely free to join, but there will be a vetting process to make sure that you're serious about your content and personal brand and you're ready to support others. So if you want to scale your content, boost focus, stay consistent, grow your personal brand and connect with other top creators, make sure to apply@castmagic IO Uploading community. We'll drop the link in the show notes and hope to see you there.
Jay Clouse
00:01:34 - 00:02:07
Jay is in Ohio right now, I am in Miami. We're doing a remote podcast, but we're making it work. So we'll, we'll cover some tips on, you know, how to make a remote setup work and then, you know, we'll also talk about growing your own community and business through your creative channels like podcast, podcasts and YouTubing, all that sort of stuff. So, Jay, I'll let you kick us off for anyone who isn't familiar with you. And I know a lot of our listeners will be. Why don't you just give us a quick background, you know, how'd you get started as a creator? You know, why don't you give us the whole story?
Jay Clouse
00:02:08 - 00:03:02
I mean, the honest truth is I started becoming aware of the creator model, even though we weren't using that word in like 2017. My background is in product management, so I like was in software and startups. And after like a pretty not fun experience at a venture backed startup in the healthcare space, I went out on my own. I didn't know what that would look like, but I had started writing an email newsletter because I really liked what Seth Godin was doing at the time and Brian Harris and Matthew Kimberly. So I thought, I like writing, I'll start writing emails. And that got me to discover digital products that people were selling at the time. And I just thought to myself, holy crap, these are products. I can continue to make products, but I don't have to rely on a team of engineers or designers to make the thing that I want to make real.
Jay Clouse
00:03:03 - 00:03:25
I can just make it. Content is a product. And I got so interested in that I had to learn how to do it. I had to learn how other people were doing it. And so the best way I could do that was talk to other people who were doing it. That became the podcast, write about what I was learning, that became the newsletter. And you know, here we are eight years later and I've just continued to crystallize my thinking around all things content.
Jay Clouse
00:03:25 - 00:03:43
And why don't you walk us through that journey? Because like you've been doing this, like you said for eight years. You've talked to, you know, hundreds of, of different creators all along the digital product journey. What, you know, what were some of the early learnings that like really started to help you formulate the stuff that you were doing?
Jay Clouse
00:03:43 - 00:04:37
Well, in the beginning I really bought into the idea that email was basically everything. And so I really over indexed on email because the logic was and still is true that if you have an audience in email, that's a method of communication, it means a distribution that you own and control and that's really valuable. Whereas social media changes all the time. People that you're reaching, you may stop reaching. The truth is you really want to be using both because email doesn't have a lot of built in discoverability. That's changing a little bit now with things like Convert convertkits, Creator Network Recommendations on Sub Stack and Beehive. There's some discoverability in email now, but still probably faster to get people from a discovery platform is what I call it either social media or YouTube into email. So I really was just leading with email for a long time.
Jay Clouse
00:04:37 - 00:05:18
Then I bolted on podcasting, which is yet another notoriously difficult channel to grow. Audio podcasting that is that started in 2020 and you know, I, I think my story is one that people can relate to because I've Never had some sort of, like, huge inflection point where everything changed because of some piece of content that I made or something that happened. It's been very small incremental improvements day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, that have kind of snowballed into putting me now as one of the leading voices in this space.
Blaine
00:05:18 - 00:05:25
And, Jay, why don't you just break down kind of what your content ecosystem looks like specifically?
Blaine
00:05:25 - 00:05:25
Right.
Blaine
00:05:25 - 00:05:51
I know one of the challenges for a lot of creators is, you know, maybe they start on the channel, they're like, should I be on all the channels? Should I be on one? And clearly you've been at this for eight years where you've been able to kind of build up that audience. But just like you were saying in terms of email, how, you know, email is great for communication, it's tough for discoverability. So you've got discovery platforms. But you personally, what is, you know, what is your content world, content ecosystem look like as. As it is today?
Jay Clouse
00:05:51 - 00:06:26
So it's all under the creator science umbrella. I publish at least one newsletter per week, but often it's two. I publish at least one audio podcast per week, but often it's two. Um, then I'm active pretty much daily on a few social media platforms. Namely, LinkedIn is actually where I'm going the hardest right now, followed by X and Threads and Instagram to a small degree. Then we have YouTube, which is fairly new to us. It's about two years old that we've been publishing on YouTube. We've got about 110 subscribers there, and we publish probably about two videos per month.
Jay Clouse
00:06:26 - 00:06:27
If we get three, we're happy.
Blaine
00:06:27 - 00:06:55
Sweet. And that was going to be my other question as it pertains to some of, some of the different platforms you're on and the content you're creating. Like, what is your. Like, how do you keep your content fresh and what are you writing about? Right. Like when you say, I write a newsletter every single week, I have a couple podcasts every week. How do you keep that content fresh? Like, what's the content overarching content strategy? Has that evolved? Is it the same thing? How do you keep it fresh so you're not just rehashing the same thing over and over and over again?
Jay Clouse
00:06:55 - 00:07:23
I think this is something I could do better, to be honest, because there's a couple of schools of thought. I mean, I, I heard a recent conversation with Gary V. Gary Vander Chuk, and he. He basically said, I say the same six things, but I've been Saying them for years in different ways. And I think that's pretty powerful when you do it, because a lot of people, no one pays as close attention to you and your work as you think. And so repetition is really your friend. You. You want to repeat a lot of your most resonant, successful ideas.
Jay Clouse
00:07:24 - 00:08:14
I tend to create just a ton of bespoke content for every platform all the time. I don't have this great process where it's like I write a newsletter and that becomes a script for my YouTube video, and I strip out the audio for the podcast, and then I take snippets from that podcast and make on social media, like, that's a smart strategy. And I understand why people do it, and I understand why it's successful. The only way that I can continue to create content personally is if I'm really engaged in the work. And so it has to come from my own curiosity. This landscape changes constantly. And so for me to remain relevant and helpful, I need to be following what's going on and testing and experimenting myself. So my content is a natural byproduct of what I'm doing and what I'm learning in my own business.
Jay Clouse
00:08:14 - 00:09:19
And when I find something that I think is different or insightful or new, unique to me, that's usually the push to write something about it. The podcast is a little bit different because that's mostly guest driven. So we come at that from one of two angles. We either say we have the ability to interview this person who's a known person, what should we talk to them about? Or more often actually, we'll say, what is the story we want to tell? Like, what's the thing we want to explore and who's the best person to tell that story? So we have this. We have this idea for a video that we haven't published yet that I want to make a video about the opportunity in review channels, like product review channels. And I'm trying to find the right person who does product reviews. And I have, like, one person in particular that I really want to interview, and I just haven't gotten there yet. But that's kind of the story of how we find guests is we start actually with the package of an episode and we say, who is the right person who can make a great episode out of this? And then we have to go get that person and then we can actually start prep.
Blaine
00:09:19 - 00:10:13
But that's a great example of how things have evolved, especially in the podcasts and YouTube sort of landscape. I feel like, you know, years ago you could just Kind of create whatever you wanted and you know, there were eyeballs on it and it wasn't as important. Whereas now it's like, if I'm going to go through the effort of, you know, having the guest, on telling the whole story, doing it, it needs to be packaged right, it needs to make sense for the audience. And, and there is a lot that goes, like you're saying, into that pre production phase. So maybe that carries us into our next point. So, you know, you mentioned on different podcasts, including your latest with Patty Galloway, how crucial the packaging of a YouTube video is for its performance. You know, for those who are in our audience who are new to YouTube, could you talk to us a little bit about, you know, what you mean by packaging. And you know, I think this is really neat because like you said, you have recently, you know, started to go harder into YouTube, started to think about that packaging.
Jay Clouse
00:10:13 - 00:10:19
So as you think about the YouTube packaging side of things, like what is that, what does that look like and how does it pertain to performance?
Jay Clouse
00:10:20 - 00:11:27
I love the topic of packaging because I think it's criminally under spoken about in all forms of content. It's most spoken about in YouTube, which is actually an evolution, I believe, of, of like traditional film and media because like most traditional media has figured out a lot of the stuff we're figuring out in independent content literally decades ago. But packaging as a concept, I think about it this way. There are elements of a piece of content that people engage with, interact with before they make the decision to actually go deeper into that thing. So on YouTube, title, thumbnail, and kind of the idea that's inherent in those things, if you go to a bookstore, it's the title and the COVID of the book. It's even the spine of the book, you know, an email, it's the, the subject line. Audio podcast is the title of that episode. So like, every form of content has some bit of packaging that you can think about or you can't think about.
Jay Clouse
00:11:27 - 00:11:40
But if you do think about it, you're going to be more successful because if you intentionally design the package for that medium to be inherently clickable, compelling, where people are like, I need to know more about this, then it's going to be more successful as a piece.
Blaine
00:11:40 - 00:11:57
Of content, a hundred percent. And then for YouTube, let's, let's just talk about, you know, the stuff that's worked for you as it pertains to the title and thumbnail. Is there a specific way that you've optimized or think about that workflow? Like how do you come up with your ideas for the, the videos and how do you package those? With the thumbnail.
Jay Clouse
00:11:57 - 00:12:42
There's a certain element of this that just kind of comes down to being a student of that platform. I was talking to a mentor of mine yesterday who's getting started on YouTube and he's, he's very new to it. He doesn't know what he doesn't know. He was showing me his page and I was looking at his thumbnails and you can just see on an eye test, like, this doesn't feel like YouTube right now. You know, that's kind of an element of packaging. So I'll try to be as specific and tangible as I can here. But, but there is an element of, you know, if you spend time as a consumer of a platform, you're going to start to develop an intuition and a taste for when something clicks and when it doesn't, when it works and when it doesn't. And if you have a team now, you have multiple people's taste and intuition interacting with each other.
Jay Clouse
00:12:42 - 00:13:11
So having a producer on the channel has been super helpful. And we have a thumbnail designer too. So sometimes there's three of us interacting with the potential package of something where we have an idea and you can kind of explain the idea, but that doesn't mean you have a good package of it yet. You know, let's take an episode we had on the channel with Dr. K. He has a channel called Healthy Gamer. He helps mostly streamers have better performance in their videos by focusing on their mental health. That's a lot of explanation there.
Jay Clouse
00:13:11 - 00:13:49
I couldn't tell you what I just told you as a title or it'd be too long and it wouldn't be very compelling. So the idea is, how do we make the idea that I'm talking to a Harvard trained psychiatrist who cares about mental health and gaming. How do we make that a compelling package? You know, and so he's kind of a known person. That means that we have an advantage of using his name and likeness in the package if we want to. If this person is not a known person, their name and likeness isn't really useful. Uh, these, these bits of his background that are compelling. Like Harvard Psychiatrist. That's interesting.
Jay Clouse
00:13:49 - 00:14:28
Can we put that in the title? So I think we ended up with a title that was basically Meet the Harvard psychiatrist getting YouTubers millions of views. Because there's an element of like social proof in that with Harvard Psychiatrist, there's the thing that the audience identifies with as who they are. And what they want. I'm a YouTuber. I want to get more views. So it feels like this person is educated and knows something about the human brain that I don't know, and he's helping people like me get the goal that I want. You know, if you can make the package as short and compelling as possible is kind of the goal. Like, there's no.
Jay Clouse
00:14:28 - 00:15:01
I think there's probably some guidance on how long people say this should be. I think, I think titles cut off around like 46 characters or something in there. So there is like a theoretical threshold of how long is too long, but generally shorter is better. If you can quickly get the idea across on a title and thumbnail that this is something that's interesting and relevant to you, dear viewer, that's a hard game to play because YouTube is showing your package against nine to 11 other videos concurrently at any given time. And if you aren't performing to some standard, you're gonna stop getting recommended.
Blaine
00:15:01 - 00:15:28
Yeah, and one thing I wanted to double click on there was what you said about social proof and how social proof plays into the actual title. Right. So this is that we've seen when we work with content strategists or content that performs. It's like, how does someone. How should you think about integrating social proof into the beginning phases of any part of. Whether it's a content packaging, the hook of the content. Like, what role does social proof play in?
Jay Clouse
00:15:28 - 00:16:21
Good content really depends on the content. I think the higher degree of trust required to take the action you want, the. The more social proof you need. So, like, if I was trying to sell you a membership to my community that's a $2,000 product, I'm going to need to show you a lot of social proof, probably for you to invest that. But for a YouTube video that's five minutes long, probably don't need, like a ton of social proof. What we've learned in talking to other people who study this even more than we do, namely Jake Thomas of Creatorhooks.com he studied a lot of titles, and the vast majority of these titles that he recommends are based in curiosity. And then there's a secondary emotion of either desire or fear. So he says, like, basically most high performing titles have curiosity involved, but then they also integrate either desire or fear for something else.
Jay Clouse
00:16:21 - 00:16:58
And that's what we tend to follow the most. Because the hook that grabs people in is basically, I need to know what happens next or I need to know what is in here. You know, it's this tension you create in the viewer to say, I have enough information about this video that I'm now curious to fill in the gap of what I don't know. That's really what you're trying to, to nail. I think that's far more important than social proof because YouTube already has some metrics of social proof. The number of views a video has, the number of subscribers a channel that uploaded it has. There's going to be social proof on that video. That's probably more important than what you put into the package.
Jay Clouse
00:16:58 - 00:17:16
But if you do have somebody who has achieved crazy results that taps into the desire point. I'm, I, I'm mentioning, you know, if I can say helping YouTubers get millions of views, that is the desire, the curiosity is what does this guy know that I don't know?
Blaine
00:17:16 - 00:17:45
Yeah, I, I think that's really solid. And I think you make a great point about the different elements of social proof on the different platforms. Right. Like if we're talking about a post on X or Threads or something where maybe someone hasn't seen it, then integrating social proof into the first bit of content may be a different experience. And the social proof you have on YouTube where you see the views, you see the channel, all that sort of stuff. So moving on, I'd like to talk a little bit about podcasting. Right. I think podcast, podcasting is something that a lot of people do.
Blaine
00:17:46 - 00:18:17
We're doing it right now and people do it remote. People a lot of times do interview. There's multiple different formats. Sometimes they're show based. We don't. You tell us a little bit about your podcast, how you, you know, how you think about it and specifically how you think about it. Like you were saying in terms of the packaging with the, the guests, right? Like is it just an open ended interview? Like how much pre production do you go? Like, where's the balance between scripting and over scripting, Packaging and under packaging, that sort of thing?
Jay Clouse
00:18:17 - 00:19:28
For podcasts, when you have an interv interview based product, it's a lot easier to package that interview if either the guest is really well known and you can basically just package their identity and say this is my interview with Scott Galloway. Or if you have a much tighter breadth of discussion, you know, you have like a narrow topic that you go deep on that's easier to package. So the, the issue a lot of people run into when they're trying to package interviews is they don't have the restraint to stay kind of narrow in the conversation. And so then you're kind of backed into a corner of Having to package around the identity of the guest, and if they don't have a strong reputation or they're not well known, it doesn't help. If they are really well known, but they're basically a professional guest at this point, then it also isn't all that compelling. So, so what you end up with is these interview podcasts that are packaged around the identity and it has in the title, like, here are three things that we cover and it's just not that compelling. You know, it's. It's far more compelling to basically say, we are going to talk to this person about this very specific subject.
Jay Clouse
00:19:28 - 00:19:54
Um, we just released an episode of the podcast today in audio. And that was. I knew a guy who has a membership that's $12,500 per year. He has 36 members. That's $450,000. That's all we need to talk about. Like, let's go as deep into that as we can. And then we can package this episode as anatomy of a twelve thousand five hundred dollar membership that earns $450,000 per year.
Jay Clouse
00:19:55 - 00:20:28
You know, right away. Is that something I care about? Is that relevant to me? If that's relevant to you, you're going to listen to that episode. But if I would have just said, here's my interview with Ryan Hawk, you have to know who Ryan Hawk is, or, you know, it's just not going to be compelling. So in audio, it's interesting because anyone who listens to your show and audio, I should say Anyone, but about 80% of people who listen to your show and audio, they are returning listeners. So you've already built trust, you've already built a relationship. You actually don't need to package as intensely. At least that's what I thought. And I think that's true to some degree.
Jay Clouse
00:20:28 - 00:20:54
But I have found over the last few months, as I've grown a deeper appreciation of packaging. If I do package audio episodes as if they are YouTube videos, I get more listens even from regular listeners. So there is an element here where you really should be thoughtful about the title of your audio podcast, even though, you know, these people already know me. They know my album art, they know I release on Tuesdays. You have a good title. You're still going to get more listens than if you don't.
Blaine
00:20:54 - 00:21:21
And Jay, why don't you tell us a little bit about, like the. The one question I had was about, you know, the scripting versus non scripting, like, even as it pertains to a podcast, right? Like, do you have like an entire outline that you're going in for? Do you just know the general topic that you want to cover and have talking points and, you know, kind of what to drill in on. But so where, where's that balance between kind of like off the cuff or versus being like, very strategic in those interview sort of conversations?
Jay Clouse
00:21:21 - 00:22:09
Well, we do prep and we come up with some questions that we think are aligned with the big idea. So I should start there. Actually, every episode that we have, once the guest is confirmed, we spend some time thinking about what's the big idea of this episode, which is basically what we're going to package around. Once we have the big idea of what we're going to package around, then we form the questions based on that big idea. But to be a great interviewer, you really have to have good active listening skills. And so the act of prepping questions is more priming my own mind than it is like a structure that I have to follow. You know, I'm very intentional about where I start, and I'm good at leading us to the area of discussion that I want. But often I would say at least half the questions that I asked were not, you know, quote unquote, prepped.
Jay Clouse
00:22:09 - 00:22:42
They, they come from what happens. And I think, I think that's the right balance, you know, because even if you have a two display system, as I do here, if I have the interview doc on my right hand display and I have questions there, if I'm looking at that and trying to think about which one of these questions should I ask next, I'm not listening. And a guest is opening some door that inevitably I won't walk through. And as the listener of the final product, you're going to be saying, why didn't you follow up on this thing that person just said? And the answer is, because you weren't listening. You were looking at your display.
Blaine
00:22:42 - 00:23:14
Yeah, I think that's such a good point. And it's a, it's a tricky balance, right, because you, you want to ask the right questions, but you can end up with these, like, really weird sort of sounding interviews where it's like, he said something so good. Why didn't you, like, press down there? I wanted to learn more as a listener and even you. And like, this goes back to your point about general curiosity and, and having curiosity for the space that you're in. If you're genuinely curious, that's probably the best way to run an interview because then you're going to be like, I want to know this because I want to know it not because, like, I have to stick to a specific scripting doc.
Jay Clouse
00:23:14 - 00:23:58
And you're having a much closer experience that the audience is having, having too. If you are listening to the speaker, that's exactly what your listener is doing. And so if you don't follow the flow of the conversation, it's going to not feel like a flowing conversation. I also find that you can actually over prepare not in that. I mean, obviously you can over prepare in that you, you stick to this rigid structure of questions, but you can also over prepare in that if you know so much information about this person, you sometimes leave the guest behind. You know, sometimes you need to ask clarifying questions to get it in the literal asset, you know. Let me give you a specific example. Ryan Hawk comes on.
Jay Clouse
00:23:58 - 00:24:17
We're talking about his membership. As I was just sharing, I knew that he was running three groups at any given time. I knew that from the prep. He told me ahead of time. The listener didn't know that. So I can either say, hey, and you, you have three groups at a time. Right. I can clarify that, put that out into the world.
Jay Clouse
00:24:17 - 00:24:36
But sometimes that almost comes across, um, almost like you're trying to sound smart. So sometimes even when I have information, I will ask a question just to have the guest say that information so that the listener has the proper context to continue the conversation.
Blaine
00:24:36 - 00:25:04
That's super interesting. So it's almost like you're saying you can basically take yourself to like the level of the viewer, because the viewer is approaching the conversation with very little context. Right. You've packaged them, you've got them in the door, they're listening, but they don't have your prep doc. They don't know what you know. So you're not kind of saying, I know way more than you and I'm going to have this conversation at this level. You're saying, no, like you're at the same level of me and we're discovering this together. So I think that's a really cool way to, to think about it.
Jay Clouse
00:25:05 - 00:25:50
Yeah. And that partially plays into this, this frame I have for our, both our audio and video show, which is, I'm not doing a celebrity profile of the guest where I'm just trying to like, paint this portrait of who they are and what they've done. I'm actually trying to put the guest into the role of guest lecturer, essentially. Like, I want them to show up and teach a workshop without having to prep. And so I have to do the work of. What is the goal of this workshop? How do I ask the right questions so that they can teach the workshop without even knowing that they're teaching a workshop. And if you're trying to learn something and you don't have some piece of information to apply the thing, that's my job then as a facilitator to basically ask that clarifying point.
Blaine
00:25:50 - 00:26:31
Yeah, I think it's super interesting. Something that we see a lot, right? Like especially the podcast that I run in the direct to consumer space. A lot of it is like approaching it. I can't ask these people, hey, like prepare an entire, you know, playbook guest lecture on this particular topic. That's not going to be fun for the audience. That's not going to be fun for the, the expert to like have to put together a bunch of slides and information. So part of your job in this interview role is to be able to tease that out naturally where someone can listen to that conversation, feel like they've gotten and absorbed all the information they would get in the lecture, but, you know, get it in a much more approachable format. And Jay, this kind of carries me into the another point that I'm curious about right now.
Blaine
00:26:32 - 00:26:51
Like we said, we're doing a remote interview. You do interviews remotely as well. What, what tips do you have for getting that side of the equation done? Right? Obviously when you're doing things in person, there's a different sort of chemistry that you can build and all that. Do you have any tips in terms of really nailing a remote recording?
Jay Clouse
00:26:51 - 00:27:32
I'm trying to think of how to answer this question. My producer and I just did a four and a half hour workshop on this because I feel like we had to learn it ourselves because there weren't good models for it. It's a hard thing to do. We believe that you really do have to take a lot of pre production and post production work. So if anyone's interested in that, just go to creatorscience.com and look for podcasts like a YouTuber. But I would say the most important, I think thinking about the package ahead of time is super important. We spend a lot of time in pre production, far more than we used to. So this, this bit we already talked about of designing the package of the episode ahead of time so that you can record an interview that fits the package.
Jay Clouse
00:27:33 - 00:28:13
That is paramount because YouTube isn't really set up for long form remote podcasts to be successful. And then in post production you've got to make it feel like a native video. You know, so many remote recorded podcast interviews are like the side by side zoom window that wastes a ton of space in the browser and basically stays the same visual thing for an hour. And it's not visually interesting. So retention is super low. Even if you did package it really well, retention is going to be low. It's not going to get a lot of views. But if you're not doing post production, you're probably also not packaging very well.
Jay Clouse
00:28:13 - 00:28:55
So a lot of people are recording and uploading these remote shot interviews and not getting any success because it's not an interesting video. You have to package well and you have to edit the recording. So that's interesting. So for us we have at least, you know, a three camera setup I guess you could call it, or a three shot setup where you have each me and the guest individually. Those are two shots and you have the dual shot. But then we also do a lot with. Since the guest is often teaching something, we will throw up a graphic where we are writing down and showing a lot of what this person is saying and we'll move that person up into the corner. Sometimes we'll flash like a little ribbon at the bottom of the screen with a takeaway that we think is really important for people to cement.
Jay Clouse
00:28:55 - 00:29:29
All of this is kind of adding up to. We want the visual frame to change constantly. That's what happens in YouTube videos like the, the video is changing all the time. So we really are trying to make the visual element of our podcast as entertaining as we can. And it's just going to be naturally less compelling than an in studio conversation. It feels less natural in studio conversations can basically stick on these. They can use the same three camera setup, but it's just more visually interesting because we're used to seeing people in studio. We have to overcome that.
Jay Clouse
00:29:29 - 00:29:46
When you shoot remotely. I'm lucky that a lot of my guests have great equipment, but that's also not true for a lot of podcasts. So you, you have to compensate for, for that with great content, great audio. But also probably you're going to want to put on B roll and other things on the screen.
Blaine
00:29:46 - 00:31:03
Let's talk about that post production part because you said something really interesting. If you take a remote podcasts like we're doing now and you just put it on YouTube, that's not a really compelling video. And this is actually something that I've been kind of wrestling with for a while because I have these great conversations. I have conversations with people like you, other top creators and even in my other podcast, great builders of brands, right. And we've pack, we've Done some packaging where we'll, you know, package it up and distribute it in formats that are more, you know, suitable towards like getting that information, whether it's shorter form, things that we produce and crop the hooks around or written content, newsletter, that sort of thing. But we've got all these interviews and some people are like, well, why don't you just post that? And I'm like, I don't really want to just post it because if I put it up there, it's not packaged for, you know, YouTube and it's not packaged to perform. So how do you think about, you know, that side of the equation? If people are having interviews like this, do you think they should a just put it up on YouTube or do you think there should be a real strong focus in the post production part like you were saying to maybe even chop it down, maybe take that, you know, hourong interview and condense it into like a 10 minute, you know, video with different sort of visual elements that's like really tailored. Like how, how would you approach that sort of thing?
Jay Clouse
00:31:03 - 00:31:43
Everybody's going to be a little bit different in terms of what resources they have to command. Right? My point is, my thought is if you want to succeed on YouTube, you need to make good YouTube videos. And if you don't want to succeed on YouTube, don't worry about YouTube. What makes a good YouTube video, you know, you'll learn that as you upload and you edit things down. You don't have to take a 60 minute thing and condense it down in 10 minutes if you don't want to. I mean our interviews are at least 30 minutes, some of them are closer to an hour and we do quite a bit of post production. Doing a lot of post production doesn't mean that you have to cut out a ton of the body of the thing. You know, you cut out the things that slow it down, make it feel awkward, you move stuff around, you add other visual components that are interesting.
Jay Clouse
00:31:44 - 00:31:56
So that's I, I would just say like at the highest level, if you want to succeed on YouTube, strive to make great videos for YouTube. Do all the things that you need to do to make great videos. And if you don't care about YouTube, don't upload YouTube.
Blaine
00:31:56 - 00:32:25
I love that. I think that makes it really, really easy. It's like if you're not going to make a just cause something, just because you have something doesn't mean it's going to make a great YouTube video. So really simple, concise way to think about it and kind of as we wrap up here. Jay, I'd love to also just touch on, you know, your products, your business, the things that you sell. Now that you've got all this going on, how have you turned your content into your business? What does your business look like? How do you generate income? What do you do with that? How do you run things?
Jay Clouse
00:32:25 - 00:33:28
Well, we've got six lines of income that I look at now. Memberships, digital products, sponsorship, affiliates, royalties and services. And it's about 60% membership, about 20% digital products, 15% sponsorship, and then the rest make up the last 15% or 10%, 5%. And so you know, content is about, on, on a discovery platform, social media, YouTube, that's discovery, that's getting in front of new people saying, hey, I make stuff that solves the problems, answers the questions that you have. Email and audio podcasting is about deepening relationships and building trust. So it's once I've got your attention and you think, I kind of like this guy, great. You should check out our newsletter, you should check out this free email based course, you should check out our audio podcast. Over time communicating through those mediums, you build even deeper trust and you can let them know like by the way, I have a paid program that gets you this specific outcome and that's kind of it.
Jay Clouse
00:33:28 - 00:34:31
You know, ideally you build systems in the back end that do a lot of that awareness and pitching of your paid products on a repeating basis that you having to think about it. You know, once this individual comes in through this door and takes this action that fires off the sequence of events that gets them to know about this product and some percentage of the people who get that journey end up purchasing, then the game is how do I reach as many people top of funnel through social media and YouTube as possible to get people through that door in the first place. That's the model in a nutshell. Very brief, but I mean like high level. That's, that's what's happening. Of course, all those properties that I have, the podcast, YouTube, the newsletter, we have advertising inventory in that as well. So the more we publish, the more ad inventory we have. And that's nice, but I've actually been finding lately that I prefer to quote unquote, buy my own ad inventory to promote my own products because it converts well enough, because I've build enough trust that it's more profitable and more incentive aligned also.
Blaine
00:34:31 - 00:35:06
I like that. And your, your, your old, your old job as a PM is definitely coming through. The way you think about the funnel and how you, you're able to optimize it. So I really love that. As last question that I've got for you is as you think about the next year, like you said it yourself, you know, the content landscape, it changes so quickly. There's always things going on. But are there any initiatives that you're looking at over the next year that you want to bring into your kind of content ecosystem, whether it's on the business side of things, on the content side of things. Like what are you looking at over the next year to to really go hard at.
Jay Clouse
00:35:07 - 00:36:08
I'm looking at bringing more in person experiences to our membership, which has been mostly online to this point. You know, it's called the Lab. It says membership for professional creators, people who are doing this full time. And we've had meetups around events that a lot of us naturally go to and those have just been awesome. So what I'm looking at doing now is having some more purpose built, multi day like planned events specifically for members of the Lab that I think will actually make the membership even more transformative for people. And I think I can do a really unique version of that and then following on to that, if I enjoy that, I think there's a worldwide do a larger event. Generally I'd love to get into writing books at some point, but I look at books as the highest opportunity cost project I could take on and so I really have to have high conviction around what is this book about to start down that journey and I haven't landed that plane yet.
Blaine
00:36:09 - 00:36:19
Love it. Well Jay, for anyone who's tuning in, where can we connect with you? Where do we find you? Where do we find you across socials and your newsletter properties and all that good stuff.
Jay Clouse
00:36:19 - 00:36:32
Probably the best place is creatorscience.com that's where you can start seeing what we do in email. It's where my best writing is. And it'll also direct you to anywhere else that you want to go. But if you're on social media, you can search J. Klaus and I'll probably be the top result on whatever platform that is.
Jay Clouse
00:36:33 - 00:36:35
Love it. Thanks so much Jay. This was a blast.
Jay Clouse
00:36:35 - 00:36:35
Yeah, thanks Blaine.