Let's be honest. Running a YouTube channel takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, and can actually 

 you money. You have equipment to buy, you have business trips that you need to get to, plus all sorts of other expenses. What can you do to generate revenue beyond the brand deals, beyond the affiliate links, and beyond YouTube AdSense?

My guest on this episode of TubeTalk is Jess Catorc from 

, who's got an amazing option that we should all be exploring. In this podcast you will learn:

How to create courses for your YouTube audience

How to make the most of your expertise and skills via selling an online course

To take advantage of your considerable content creations skills

Why creating and selling an online course could be a major revenue stream

Why you don't need to be a teacher or educator to create a course - entertainment works too!

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How to Make Money as a YouTuber by Creating Courses: Full Transcript

Jess Catorc: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Liron Segev: Let's start with the beginning. What do you do? What is teachable.com for people who don't know?

Jess Catorc: Teachable is an online course hosting platform, so it's really a platform that allows anyone to sell courses, accept students, enroll students, and share their knowledge. I lead partnerships on the Teachable team, but I've also created courses myself. I've kind of been on both sides of the aisle.

I'm really excited to talk about courses because it's crazy to see just how much this industry has grown and how people are not just becoming course creators, but they're incorporating this concept of sharing their knowledge and diversifying what they're doing in their business with their existing model.

Liron Segev: This is why I love this because one of the common questions that we get is about monetization. As you know, content creators on YouTube, they get monetized based on ad revenue. Maybe they'll do some brand deals, but they've got the skills. We know how to shoot, we know how to edit, we know how to cut scenes, we know how to produce an outline for a shot list for the way that we produce content. Surely, there's a different way that we can take the same skills and then rehome that elsewhere.

Jess Catorc: The nice thing is that I'm not here to say like everyone needs to stop doing brand deals and stop monetize with the way that you're currently doing it.

The nice thing with courses is that you can do it in addition. Really, the whole concept of it is you're diversifying your income because we know when we're searching for brand deals that you're constantly looking for the next deal, you're constantly looking for the next package that you're going to be able to offer, or you're reliant on the algorithm to show your videos, or even for YouTube to determine if your video is ad-friendly or not.

Sometimes videos get demonetized for the wrong reasons and then they put it back up again. Really, this is just creating like a holistic approach to your business that you don't just rely on one or two streams of income, you have more and you're also giving value to your audience.

Liron Segev: You're speaking our language because everything you've just mentioned is pretty hard-hitting. The algorithm makes a change, views take a dive, ad revenue takes a dive. You're constantly on the hunt for that next brand deal, as opposed to just being able to have something that's more reliable, something that you can actually base some prediction on. Is this where a course would maybe come into play?

Jess Catorc: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing with YouTube, and I'm a huge fan of YouTube as a platform, but it is no different to any other social platform, which is that you also don't have direct access to your audience.

I have a friend who had quite a large following on YouTube, and for some reason, something happened where she deleted her account and she lost her entire channel. There was absolutely no way for her to get it back. It's nice too, in addition to what you're doing on YouTube, when you incorporate courses, you're also growing an email list, so you have direct access to your audience. You can even contact them with your new videos. It just expands what you're currently doing.

When it comes to courses, the nice thing is that you can really give a clear cut outcome to your audience. You can say like, "In this course, I'm going to show you how to do X", and you can deliver on a set outcome or a transformation. It's really great for building a relationship with your audience too because you're helping them get to an outcome or to overcome a pain point that they currently have, in addition to the videos that you're currently releasing on your channel.

Liron Segev: Trying to build my relationship with my community, but on the other platforms, I may not have a way to press the button and send my subscribers a message. I don't have that at all. At best, I can rely on YouTube notifications, which are, let's be honest, not as reliable as they need to be. Mailing lists are always a priority. We've been teaching mailing lists for a long time. They just need it to happen.

Let's move to the course itself. Now you convinced me. I have an opportunity. I have my YouTube channel, that doesn't stop, but I'm doing this in addition to that. The first question that comes to mind is, can anyone create a course? In other words, if my channel maybe isn't a teaching channel, I don't teach how to get more views on YouTube, I don't teach a specific skill, I am more of entertainment, can I convert that into a course? Can I think along those lines?

Jess Catorc: Absolutely. The interesting thing is even people who have channels where they're teaching a specific topic or a specific thing, we all have very different skills or unique skill sets. For example, let's say that you are a travel blogger and you're like, "I'm not really showing people how to travel. I'm just documenting my journey and people love following me in the process."

There are a lot of skills that you are consciously or unconsciously or subconsciously using, which is like you're great at video, you're great at maybe traveling on a budget, or maybe you're great at taking beautiful Instagram photos.

What I would say though is rather than just kind of picking a topic that you think people will want a course on, open up the conversation with your audience. I would say this even if you are 99% sure you know what your topic is going to be. It's so important to validate that before you go in and spend all this time creating your videos and marketing your course. Some things that you can do is you can look at certain videos if you're getting more engagement when you're discussing certain topics or there's certain things that people seem to engage with more.

Other things that you can do is just like hop on the phone in a Zoom call with people or do a survey and ask people like, "You follow my channel. You seem to really enjoy the videos I'm making, but I'm curious, is there anything that you're currently struggling with that you think I might be able to help you with, or something you've seen me do that you would love to learn how to do yourself?"

It's the best way because you're taking the guesswork out. Also, you want to have people along for the journey. I don't know if you followed the Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star series but it's such a great example of the power of taking your audience along for the journey before you launch a product. The very first point is deciding on what do people want to know. It's like they feel like they're a part of creating that course with you, and then when you launch, it's like they feel like they've already been there.

Liron Segev: And they've helped you craft it, so of course they're going to jump on that because it's a part of their journey too now.

Liron Segev: I also love the point that you made, even though you're a travel blogger, you don't have to think of a course to do with the travel per se, but you may be able to work things around it, like how to travel on a budget. Maybe you're really good at that. Maybe that's what your audience wants to know. Your course is related to your YouTube channel, but it isn't the top five places to visit in Cancun, for example.

Liron Segev: Okay. I like it. Now I have a topic. I have an idea that I want to do, but then I kind of asked myself the question, "Why would someone pay for a course when I'm giving them all this amazing value on my channel for free?"

Jess Catorc: Yes. This is probably the most common thought or the common thing that holds people back, which is like, "I'm already delivering all this value. Why would people ... " They're worried that people will be upset that they're now asking for money for a product.

Now, what I would say is if anyone has ever tried to learn a new skill on the internet for free by Googling and YouTubing, what you'll find is that when you're looking for a solution to a pain point, there's a very specific outcome that you're looking for. A lot of the times, when you try to learn it yourself or you're looking at someone's channel and they have millions, not millions, hundreds of videos on their channel, the thing is that you have to sort through all the different videos.

You have to figure out what order you learn the skill in. You maybe learn too much or it's overwhelming. The value and why people purchase and invest in online courses is they want the shortcut to an outcome. Even if you have a channel and you're showing people all these different skills, when you're selling your course, and this is actually going to tie into when you come up with your topic, it's important that you have a very clear outcome.

For example, if your course was how to live your best life, that's a very vague, very big outcome or transformation. It's going to be very hard to deliver on that, but if you get very specific on what you're going to be providing people in this course, it's going to be a lot easier for people to justify investing in it because they know exactly one, what they're going to learn, what they can expect at the end of it, but also they know that they're going to learn it in the shortest amount of time.

Liron Segev: Yes, yes, yes. Even though YouTube clips are very short, they're a little bit all over the place because the creator needs to cover so many topics, and realistically, there's no way to deep dive into every single one of those just by putting out on your channel. Maybe you're left a little bit frustrated, saying, "Look, I kind of get it, but I really wish there was more." This is when a course kind of fills in that gap beautifully.

Jess Catorc: Exactly. There's so many great YouTubers that are incorporating courses in that. I've followed some people's channels for years and I've gotten so much free value, but then they share like, "Oh, I have a course on this specific topic", or, for example, if there's like a baker who has a baking channel and they have a course on a specific decoration skill, like decorating your cakes so it looks like a beach or something like that, and you're like, "I want to learn that specific thing." It's easy to be like, "Okay. Of course I'm going to learn it from the course."

Liron Segev: Because they've built in some trust with you over the years anyway because you've been watching them and they'd been delivering all this amazing value, giving them money for something, it just makes sense. You're supporting them. Plus, you know you're going to get something out of it, as you have up until that point.

Jess Catorc: Yeah, and actually you bring up a really great point, which is that if you are a YouTuber and you are already delivering value upfront, you actually have a bit of an advantage to people who are maybe just starting out from scratch because you have established this relationship with your audience and you've already proven that you can provide value, you can help them with whatever it is that they're looking for because they're seeing your videos.

It's a lot easier to take them to the next step of, "Okay. They also have products that I can dive deeper into this topic."

Liron Segev: Which makes a trust relationship. You build on that, and then it's an easier sell. Do you find that there's a fine line between giving everything away for free and then asking for money because then people get upset, or do you not find that to be an issue?

Jess Catorc: It really depends on I think how you position it. You give a lot of content, but I think really what people are looking for is the guidance, the step by step plan of like, "This is what I do here. This is how long it should take. This is what I should do in this order."

I think really when it comes to creating the content, you can show people what to do. You can tell them what to do, and that might be enough for a segment of your audience. That video might be all that they needed but there's always going to be a group of people that want more or they might even like a community to learn about that.

Liron Segev: Okay. Then I suppose in your course you go deeper dives. You maybe have more tips. You have a downloadable PDF to save you a whole bunch of time for trying to work the stuff on your own. It does kind of make sense transferring them from the free to the paid, but you show them lots of value on the paid. How do I know how much to charge for a course? Some of them are free, some of them are $5, and some of them are $1,000, if not more.

Jess Catorc: Yeah. Pricing is one of those things that I think makes a lot of people even a little bit uncomfortable because it's this like, "I have to charge for this. Who am I to be charging this amount of money?" Now, this is just based on our data, what we see our top-performing creators do. I really would encourage people to use the premium pricing model. What I mean by that is the average price of our top 10 selling instructors on Teachable is around $272.

I'm not in any way saying that everyone should charge $272. What I am saying though is you want to look at similar products or courses or offerings that your audience may be purchasing or that are in your niche and see what the average prices and then be on the higher end of that.

Now, this isn't just to charge more money for the sake of it, but there is a thing for like perception of value. I think if people undercharge what they're offering, no matter how amazing your course is, a lot of the times you'll find that people ... We see this all the time when people buy things that are on sale or like $10 online products and then we just don't follow through because it wasn't much of an investment. You want to use some type of premium pricing so your audience values the product that you're offering, but also that you know that they're going to be engaged and they're actually going to go through the content.

Liron Segev: Yeah. That's key because if you put in $1 into something, you'll probably never sign in and use it, but if you spend $300 into something, you got to make sure that you complete the entire thing. It's a big investment. You want to get value out of your $300.

Jess Catorc: Yeah. It really brings up also a larger point, which is that there's this huge focus I find in this industry where people are focused on the marketing and getting new students and really just like the outward-facing marketing, but one of my favorite quotes, and I don't know who said this, but I'm not claiming that it is mine, which was that, "Happy students don't recommend your products. Successful ones do."

Jess Catorc: It really encapsulates all of this because you see a lot of people who have really big course launches the first time because they have great marketing and they did a really great job like selling the course, but then it doesn't necessarily continue like that. That is why it is so important not just to have a great idea and have really flashy videos, but ensuring that your students are going through it, they're really actually getting results because those are going to be your biggest advocates after.

Liron Segev: I've spoken to a lot of people who have said, "I have got my course and the good news is most people don't even take the entire thing and I'm still getting all this money." That is so the wrong attitude to have because first of all, they're never going to advocate for your course. They're never going to sell you, and word of mouth is the best tool, as we know, to sell a course.

Also, you can never come up with course number two or number three or number four because they haven't even finished your first one. They didn't find enough value. I know with my kids' school, like a teacher will say, "Hey, free lessons after school if you want to catch up before the exams." Nobody signs up. $50 a lesson, there's a queue and a waiting list.

Liron Segev: It's weird. Same person, same instructor, but one you've placed value and people want that value. Don't undervalue that. Do you see that? Do you see like really successful, really amazing courses which wow, should have been priced a lot higher?

Jess Catorc: Rule of thumb, I think most people probably could be charging more for their courses because I think naturally we, especially if we're new to this world, we tend to undercharge because that feels safer. You don't want to just charge a lot of money for the sake of it. It's really just looking at the value and the outcome that you're providing people, looking at the average prices for similar products, and then using that to decide what you're going to charge. There are so many things that you can look at for what is the value that I'm providing.

Are people going to save money because they've done my course? Is it going to add value to their life? What would that be deemed as for value? There's so many ways to look at it, but a lot of people definitely do undercharge when really they don't have to.

Liron Segev: They don't need to. People would pay more, but of course, they're not going to own up to that. If you're charging me much less, of course I'm going to take that. A word that you used earlier which I want to go back to is transformation. I think a successful course is a course that takes you from point A to point B. How do I know that my person is going to sign up for this course and I know that by the time they leave, I am confident that they're going to feel that something has changed, they have won?

Jess Catorc: Such a good question. Two things. The first thing I would say is when it comes to coming up with your curriculum, we always say like creating a course outline. Start with the transformation or the outcome. Really, a transformation needs to be, like you were saying, it needs to be specific. We need to know when we have hit this transformation. Feeling great is too big of a transformation. Feeling more confident at dinner parties and talking to new people, boom, this is something that we can deliver on.

Now working backwards, you want to think through like, what does someone need to do step by step to get to the desired outcome that your course provides? Then from there, that's when you can add in your sections and the lectures and the videos. That's kind of like the overarching idea.

When it comes to your videos, I encourage people to always answer three questions, which is, what the person is about to learn, why is it important ... Now, this is key and a lot of people miss this step. They just think that if they go in right into the tutorial or right into the how-to that people are going to learn, but you really want to ensure that the people watching the video are engaged and they understand why this is important. You have to sell them on the idea of like, "Look, we're going to cover this and this is why you should be excited that you're about to learn this topic." Then you show them how to do it.

Liron Segev: And then the how, so the what, why, and how.

Jess Catorc: Yes. You can rinse and repeat every single video. It should follow that. Now as far as do you know if people are going to hit this outcome, it's really tough, especially if you're teaching a topic that you are really close to or you are really knowledgeable in, because sometimes we overestimate or underestimate what people actually need to learn.

What I would encourage doing is a beta launch. A beta launch is really just like a teaser or like a test run of your course where you offer it at a lower price point or offer it for free, but I think you can definitely charge a lower price point with the understanding that this launch is your first launch. You're really going to be working with the students. You're going to be getting their feedback. You're going to be seeing where they're stumbling, where they're struggling, what can be improved.

Honestly, I would recommend this even if you were like launching your fifth course because we can never anticipate what people might be struggling with until you actually go through that launch, and then you can adjust your content accordingly.

Liron Segev: Okay. This is great. A little closed group, definitely not just friends and family because they'll tell you what you want to hear. You want to open it up to the community just to get that real feedback. That is vital, vital, vital. Do we create the entire course outline like right off the bat or do you find that maybe it's better to create module one, two, and three and then build it as the course is developing?

Jess Catorc: Great question. My answer is like each to their own and you know which ways that you work best, but what I have found and just looking at what a lot of our top instructors are doing is you want to first validate the idea. I would definitely have your outline, clear on what your outline is and the topics you want to talk about, but something that people have been doing lately, and I think this is a really interesting idea, is running live courses so you can like teach the content live and get feedback. This is especially great if you're doing a beta launch, but it depends on your personality.

If you're launching a course and you say, "Hey, the start date is going to be in two weeks", and you have no content, but you're confident that if you pre-sell this, enough people buy, you'll be able just to like whip out those videos and you're great. Not everyone is like that.

Liron Segev: That's way too much pressure, way too much pressure.

Jess Catorc: Yes, but that's why I think it's important to do a beta launch because you don't have to create all of your content up front. You can create the outline. You can teach it live, like doing like a Zoom call and teach it and then get feedback. Then once you know that people are interested because they have invested in this course already, they're going through it, then you feel confident to record the videos and do it like that.

Jess Catorc: Yeah, yeah. You just have to be really confident in you know what your talking points are, you know that maybe you've taught this topic in person so you know how to deliver on the outcome. Yeah.

Liron Segev: That actually leads to an interesting question. We've got a lot of people who attend events. We speak on stages and we teach the stuff. Is this still a good opportunity? Could we still package everything that we teach on a stage in front of a large group of people, but package it into something that's consumable, maybe something that we charge for and people can do it at their leisure when they get back to their homes and they're in front of their computers and they can get that rich, rich value, as opposed to a keynote speech for 45 minutes?

Jess Catorc: Oh, absolutely. There are some people that I know that their entire sales process is they don't even really do email marketing. It's just from the stage. That is how they sell and enroll people in their courses.

Yeah. I think really like the interesting thing is when you're doing a 45-minute keynote or you're doing a workshop at a conference, that's great, but you have to take really quick notes. You might have further questions. It is a great way to get people interested in the topic, to show that you can provide some type of value because you know what you're talking about, but then the course is really the way that you can go deeper on the concepts, if you want to have like some type of community where you're answering questions.

I've also seen, depending on who your listeners are, but some people might have conferences that they hold themselves. I've actually seen people record their conferences, and I've actually purchased a few courses, record their conference, break up the videos, and provide that as a course. It's like you're there live, but it's the recorded sessions. Those do very well as well.

Liron Segev: You repackage what you've already shot, what you've already filmed. It's available to you. It's your content. Why not reuse it somewhere else?

Liron Segev: I think one other big thing that's holding people back is this whole notion of failing. I've spent this effort, I spent this time, I've launched the course, and then crickets. Nobody's buying anything. Is there anything we can do to prevent that oh my gosh moment?

Jess Catorc: Yeah. Actually, there's two things. The first thing is leading up to your launch, you shouldn't be wondering if there is interest in your course topic. This goes back to what we discussed earlier about validating your topic, having people engaged, even doing like behind the scenes videos as you're creating your content and getting people to vote on like which video cover do you like the best or image cover do you like the best, and getting people excited so they know that when you launch your course, it's not a surprise.

The other thing though is that it's hard to really predict how a launch is going to go. In fact, it's impossible. What I would say though, and this is even if you hit your goals, let's say you had a crazy big goal that you wanted to enroll, like so many students, and you hit that, I would say for every single person listening that launches a course or any product, at the end of that sequence, email everyone that didn't join and ask them why.

You want to make it clear that you're not going to be selling to them. You're like, "This is just so I can better understand my audience and understand why you thought it wasn't the right fit for you."

I've even personally done this, and you'll find that the responses are very interesting. You'll have people that say, "Oh, I didn't know that the cart was closing. Can I still join?" You'll have people that say, "It was too expensive for me." People that just say, "It wasn't for me." If you can hop on the phone with them as well, I would highly encourage that because sometimes you'll find that the way that we see ourselves is different to how the public sees us.

What I mean by that is if your course was on organization, like organizing your home, and on your sales page you say like, "Is your life a hot mess? Are you all over the place? This course is going to help you with A, B, and C", your target audience might not perceive their reality and their life like that. They might read that and be like, "I'm a little bit messy, but I'm not all over the place."

Even though the outcome that you're providing, the transformation, is for them, it is exactly what they are looking for, the language that you're using, the way that you're communicating the value, isn't resonating. That's why it's so important to speak to the people and like hop on the phone and just get them to describe how are they feeling now. "What do you feel about this problem? What is the pain point? How would you describe this in your own words?"

Maybe you start to see a trend in certain words that people are using or how they're describing it. Even if it isn't like proper grammar, but you see that everyone is describing it in the same way, using that on your sales page, you're going to resonate with more people. Then you can relaunch the same product but just using those tweaks.

Liron Segev: Oh, so it's okay to relaunch something that wasn't as successful as you wanted it to be? You can give another spin and do a second launch?

Jess Catorc: Absolutely. People launch the same course every single year or they'll do launches every couple of months. It's just like the thing is that you're selling or you're providing an outcome, and some people who might be a good fit for it might not realize it, so there's absolutely no problem in relaunching a course. In fact, I think it's very standard to do that. It's always improving. You're always tweaking. You're copying the way that you're positioning yourself.

Liron Segev: And the same question, could you launch the exact same course because maybe it's seasonal and you might want to have a January one and then you might want to have a June one or might want to have one towards the end of the year? Another little push for the course, but it's the exact same course. Is that okay to do?

Jess Catorc: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think creating genuine scarcity is very important because for some reason, it's human nature to procrastinate. When we know something is available all the time, we always just kind of wait to actually take action on it. I might be projecting, but it's important to have scarcity so people have a reason to make a decision. It's not to force people to join your course. It's for them to take action on a certain date, whether that is a yes or it's a no or a not now, but you want to give them some type of deadline.

Liron Segev: As we're kind of wrapping up, the one thing that we kept on mentioning is people that have already got an audience, people that have already got a YouTube channel, people that are already speaking on stage, that really have some sort of a presence out there. Could you still create a course and be successful even if you don't have an existing audience?

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Generating revenue from your content is one of the biggest goals for most YouTubers. But how do you monetize beyond AdSense or brand deals? If you've asked yourself that question, we have a solution for you on this week's TubeTalk

How to Make Money as a YouTuber by Creating Courses: TubeTalk 199 with Jess Catorc

On this week’s episode of TubeTalk, we're going to unpack the world of blogging, YouTube, brand deals, and everything in between.

As a blogger myself, this topic is very close to my heart, and I wanted to get one of the industry's leading experts who's going to help us navigate those blogging and video world together. Kristen Hills of 

, not only created this amazing blog with her five sisters, but has also very successfully transitioned into the world of video. In this podcast you will learn:

How to use YouTube to provide invaluable content to your other audiences

How to diversify your revenue streams across different platforms

How it is absolutely possible to make a successful living from blogging

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast

Don't forget to leave us a review if you love the show!

From Successful Blogger to Successful YouTuber: Full Transcript

Liron: So this is very exciting stuff, kind of the old blogging worlds and YouTube colliding. So, let's take kind of two steps back, and set the scene for people who don't know you. Let's talk about Six Sisters Stuff. Who is Kristen, in a tweet?

Kristen: Okay. So like you said, I have five sisters, so there are six of us. And we started a blog back in 2011 ,so one of the very first ones to start a blog. And then we started making content, and realized that people really liked food. When we made food, they would come, and come to our blog.

So we decided, okay, let's push food. So we always kind of jump on the trend of, okay, what's working for us? Let's go with that. And so Pinterest came about and we've made a lot of recipes, put them on Pinterest, and then we just started growing. So we were about, we were maybe at 2000 page views a day, we jumped to about 200,000 page views a day. Yes. In a few weeks. Yeah. It was unreal what Pinterest did for us.

Liron:	Wow. How long ago was this? Was this still in 2011?

Kristen: Right when Pinterest came out, we were one of the first ones. And so, instead of just like pinning a little bit, we literally had a system where we would pin almost 30 to 40 times a day at the very, very beginning. And so not many people were on Pinterest, and so they saw our stuff constantly. So, I mean it came with work, but that's kind of how we started.

Liron:	Unlimited content on a specific platform. And you kind of recognized that really early on, knowing that if you jump onto this, the likelihood is pretty good that people are going to see this. That was pretty smart. That just before you kind of carry on, you said you, you moved into food. What were you doing on your blog before you realized that food was your thing?

Kristen: Oh, man. So we started the blog because my sisters and I, we moved to different states now. There were, there's six of us, but two of them were still in junior high when we started this blog. And so there was really like the three oldest, we moved away from each other and we needed a way to communicate with each other.

So our husbands kind of suggested, "Oh, you should look into blogging." So we started a blog to share our mommy tips, and what books we were reading that day. And yeah, it started out as a conversation with each other.

Liron:	That is so cool. And then people saw your food stuff, and they kind of really gravitated to that. And how did you know that they liked your food stuff over something else, for example?

Kristen: Well, so you'd write about your favorite book, and you'd get two views. Then you'd write about your mom's brownie recipes, and anyways, we'd get 200 views. So I mean 2 views to 200 was huge for us.

Liron: So blogging, did your food thing, understood Pinterest. What was next?

Kristen: We grew Pinterest, and then we jumped onto Facebook and started just pushing our Facebook. On each blog post we'd write about our Facebook. So we've kind of focused on one platform at a time, just slowly grow it. So Pinterest was first, then Facebook, and then the other platforms from there. So right now I think Pinterest, we have like 800,000 followers on there and Facebook is almost at 1.5 million. And so it's just a process, always a process.

Liron:	Well, there's always something going on. Okay. Where did YouTube come into play here?

Kristen: We actually started making a few videos in 2013 but he had no idea what we were doing. And so we just kind of made videos for Facebook, and just threw them on our YouTubechannel. And so we just, we did not understand anything.

Then 2017 came, and I knew that that's where the world was going, was video. Everything was video. And so I went to CVX Live in Salt Lake just to learn about it, and I was blown away. I was just in love with the thought of YouTube. And so I did a lot of research. I did a lot of podcasts. I slowly was learning, and then really started figuring out YouTube, and how it worked. And yeah, it just became a huge part of my life, a huge part of the blog. So now with our blog, each sister kind of has a job and my job is YouTube. So that's mostly what I focus on.

Liron:	Wow. Okay. And how many subscribers is your blog, has your YouTube channel got at the moment?

Kristen: Our YouTube is at, we just hit 234,000 this morning.

*Liron:	Nice. Kind of key message here. You started this in 2017 and that's not so long ago. *

Kristen: No, I started, so it hasn't even been two years, and I started with about 8,000 subscribers on there. But the channel was dead. There was nothing happening there.

Liron:	No. Of course obviously having the blog as your main platform, you already had an audience there, and Pinterest, and Facebook. So it was easier to direct that audience to yet another location. Do you have a specific strategy that you work with at the moment to move audiences around between the various platforms, or do you kind of see them all as completely separate?

Kristen: So that's a good question. At first I thought, yes, I am going to crush this YouTube thing, because I have a huge audience and I'm going to herd everyone over. And I'll tell you right now, that is not the case. Not even a little bit. Push people over, and get them to subscribe.

But they weren't my followers on YouTube. Like, once I found people on YouTube that watched YouTube , those were my good followers. But I did start by, I guess I want to say I jump started my channel. I did a big giant giveaway with Gleam, and I know YouTube doesn't really love that anymore. But in 2017 it was okay. I did a giveaway, and put it on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, on our blog posts, on our email list, and just to push everyone over to YouTube. So, from there I gained about 10,000 subscribers from that huge, massive push. But my numbers were still the same. I might've gotten to a lot of subscribers, but they weren't actually watching my content.

Liron:	Oh, so that's a great little nugget right there. Just because you have a number which is rather large, and that's your subscriber numbers. But that doesn't necessarily mean that those are going to watch your videos, not your audience. Would you do another giveaway of the same nature if YouTube said it was okay, would you think there's value in doing that?

Kristen: I think its value, this sounds ridiculous, but usually if a channel has, you know, a thousand subscribers, I necessarily don't subscribe, because I'm like, oh they're just tiny. And I know a lot of people don't think that, but for me personally, yeah. But if someone has 18,000 subscribers, I'll look into it more like, "Okay, people are following them." So in a way I would do it for the numbers but I'll, I mentally will know that that's not necessarily going to be watching my content.

Liron:	So, you're setting your own expectations so it serves a purpose, and the purpose is to give you a nice kind of jumpstart on the channel. It gives you a nice kind of almost some sort of authority I suppose? But you know that these are not going to be your core audience into the future. You're kind of building from there essentially.

Liron:	Okay. So what do you do today? I mean, is the blog kind of your main thing? I know each sister has got her own responsibility, her own job, but you kind of, where do you guys focus most of your attention? Is it all on the blog, or are you kind of prioritizing the other platforms just as equally as that blog?

Kristen: Got you. So yeah, our main thing is the blog. But I want to say that YouTube is kind of a separate thing. They work together, but there they're such very different things. So, if you don't mind, I'm going to jump into this just a little bit.

So the blog is our main thing. We post seven times a week. Each sister takes a day, and then my mom also works for us. She takes a day also. And so we have blog posts going out. Then we're also redoing old posts with the correct keywords. Where we first started, we were just throwing up a picture, throwing up the recipe, and Google doesn't like that. They love, you know, helps people out, make sure you have the right words, that kind of stuff. And so we're going back and we're redoing all those.

Liron:	Kind of re-optimizing your old content.

Liron:	Do you know how many pages you have on your blog, or how big it is?

Kristen: We're close to 4,000 recipes now.

Liron:	Wow. Okay. Do you mind sharing kind of any numbers in terms of stats on your blog?

Kristen: Yeah, it depends on the season. Usually holidays, and fall, and Christmas, and even January do really well. Summertime kind of dies off because everyone's busy. So right now we're averaging about 3 million a month, which doesn't seem like a lot when it comes to YouTube numbers. But if you think about it, YouTube, you get one ad usually before each video. On our blog we have eight or nine ads. So we're getting that much more money from our blog compared.

Liron:	Absolutely. In the blogging world, that's huge. I mean that ranks up there with the best of the best. But that's a great point about being able to serve more than one ad. Look, I run a tech blog, and what I really like about the technology kind of world, and running my own blog is it's my own. I get to control it.

When you are on somebody else's platform, you're pretty much at their mercy. They change an algorithm. You've got to go with it. Your blog is your own. Right now when it comes to kind of revenue, and again, don't share anything, you're not comfortable sharing. Is the ad revenue more lucrative on the blog side just because of the volume? Or is it kind of other opportunities? I mean I know you guys have cookbooks, can you talk to some of those revenue streams?

Kristen: No. I would love to. Okay, so first off we'll start with ads on the blog ads. It used to be our biggest revenue stream. It's not anymore, but it's still a big chunk for us. So I don't know if average month is about, it can be anywhere from 30 to $60,000 a month, just from the blog revenue. It depends. It really depends on the month.

Liron:	Ads are passive income, after you've done the work obviously.

Liron:	So, we've got ads on blog, right? What else we got?

Kristen: Then we have, once we started getting an audience, we realized we can make a lot more money if we have our own product. And so that's what we've been starting to do. So we started something called a menu plan and it, it's a membership. So you can sign up, and every week we will send you six recipes and two side dishes and all the ingredients you need to make these recipes.

So all you have to do is you can shop online, you can go to the store, but your grocery list is already taken care of, like it's all done for you. Every week they'll get one of those and then they pay monthly. I think it's depending on what sales are going on. It's about $1,499 per person per month. So that's been our biggest revenue stream by far outweighing the ads.

Liron:	Oh, wow. Okay. So people are obviously wanting that customer-specific information.

Liron:	They're happy to pay for it if it's delivered to them, I suppose.

Kristen: Exactly. It takes me a good hour and a half to make a shopping list. If I can get one automatically. That is worth my time.

Liron:	Thank you very much. Absolutely. Do the same recipes, would they appear somewhere else or is that kind of more exclusive content to people who pay?

Kristen: No, because we have about 4,000 recipes, so lots of times we'll take old recipes that have kind of been buried, because there's a lot of them. And then we'll bring them back up. You can take a picture, fix it a little bit and put it in there. Majority of the time that people have not seen these recipes.

Liron:	And again it's not, it's about the convenience. It's about switching my inbox and saying, "There it is." Press print, it's done.

Liron:	Okay. Ad revenue, we got. Memberships, number two. What else have we got?

Kristen: We have published cookbooks. So, we have seven cookbooks out, and we actually have three more in the works.

Kristen: We weren't expecting to sign three more, but they had some great ideas, and that's kind of where it's go on from there.

Liron:	It's funny, every time we speak, "This is the last one." And then it's six and seven, and now we have three more. Okay.

Kristen: I know I really thought this one was the last one. It's a great opportunity and we're grateful to have those published cookbooks. It's a little time consuming to make a cookbook. Thankfully there are six of us. Well seven of us cause our mom and so, yeah. Usually without a cookbook and about six weeks. It's a lot of work.

Liron:	I've got to ask this question because it has to be asked, do the hubbies contribute to this process?

Kristen: They, well my husband, he eats the food that counts.

Kristen: No. Yeah. We actually have a few that contribute. So, we have the sister who's in charge of the membership plan, the menu plan. Her husband kind of quit his job, and works on that full time with her. So he works for the company. And then we also have another sister whose husband is our accountant. He takes care of all our money, and all that fun stuff.

Liron:	Oh, the fun stuff. Keep it in the family. I mean, that's the one thing is that people really underestimate is the time commitment that this requires. And it definitely has an impact on the family. It's got impact on how you plan, or what you're going to be doing ,and who can and cannot do. So it's a business at the end of the day, and the business needs to be run like a regular business. It's got expenses, it's got an income, its got its ups and downs, and you've got to kind of bob and weave and adjust as you need to.

Kristen: Yeah, yeah. No, it's funny, we're purchasing a house right now and I'm the one whose name is on it. And when they ask what I do, "We're like, yeah, well I'm a blogger, and a YouTuber." And they just stare at me like, "And you make money from that?"

Liron:	Yes. Hence I'm buying this property. So where do you see this kind of all going? You've made a transition from the blogging world to other media, but you haven't left your backs. I mean your base is still the blog. What's the next step? Where do you see this going?

Kristen:	Well, that's a really good question. So for me personally, the goal is to get YouTube to a million subscribers. YouTube is a little bit different. Like we, we used to make just normal recipes on YouTube, and we just weren't growing. Like I was so frustrated it wasn't working. And then I did a random video about an instant pot, and it just took off. And so then I'm like, oh well maybe I'll do another instant pot video. Took off again. So, third video took off again. I'm like, okay, well we're not going to do other food. We're going to kind of focus on the instant pot.

So once I niche down on a food topic, which was not my goal, like I did not really want to do that. But now that I've done it and seen the progress that I've made, and the tight knit group that's come together to learn about the instant pot, and it's hilarious. It's a blast. And I've loved doing it.

So, we share instant pot recipes on the blog, transitioning back and forth from YouTube to blog, making sure there's instant pot on both. But the next step is hopefully to get some instant pot products, and kind of go that direction to try and push the instant pot more. It's one of the most purchased items on Amazon. And so I figured why not go with that? You know?

Liron:	Well, you've got, you've got the hottest thing that it's virtually impossible to get out there, which is an audience. So if your audience kind of loves you, they know what to do, they can see the quality. It's just natural for them to support you and take that step, which is kind of beautiful.

Liron:	I also like the fact that you've recognized, "Look, I want to do lots of things." Sit back ,and then you realize that's just not working well, because you're competing with literally every other food blogger, YouTubeare out there. But as soon as you did one that took off, you were smart enough to say, "Well hold on, we may be onto something. Let's test it again, and let's test it again. And then there we go."

If it became the instant pot, I mean I recommend that channel to anybody who buys one. They said, "Hey, before you get started, off you go, this is how, this is how you do it." People want this information, so let's give it to them. So I love the direction, I love the kind of way where you're going with this. So let me ask you, what has got you really excited right now?

Kristen: Oh, man. Well, I am slightly obsessed with YouTube, and just the number game. And my girls and I have a different channel. And so right now after going to, we just got back from a Clamor conference and seeing all the, there was a lot of family vloggers there and everything that they did. After talking with my husband and my girls and I think we might jump back into a channel that we've been working on. So my brain is just going constantly about that. It was so much fun and I love the back end and kind of playing the game that YouTubeplays. It's fun for me.

Liron:	Okay. So, yet another often spoken any kind of these, "I love this, I've tried this, this is kind of. Oh, I tried that and it didn't work." And that was okay as well. I mean, you live, learn, and learn quickly, and move on.

Liron:	So if somebody else is kind of thinking, "Okay look, I have a blog, and I'm kind of been cool with Adsense and some sponsored posts, and some brand deals on my blog. And now I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, oh, hold on. There's other opportunities out there." What advice could you give me?

Kristen: First of all, you need a product.

Kristen: Oh, my word. I'm telling you right now. Everyone needs to have a product. Everyone, it's a game changer. We've sold, like I talked a little bit about our income but I didn't even go into our Ebooks that we have. We have Ebooks that focus on how to grow a blog. How to, you know, monetize a blog.

Even small E-cookbooks that are specifically niche. So I have an instant pot one coming out soon, and just a little bit of money, like even a few thousand a month, which is huge when it comes to product. All you have to do is talk about it a little bit, and that's all I have to do. It's just passive income, which is my most favorite thing.

Liron:	So product, product, product, product, product.

Kristen: Product. Yup. Because that's really where it is. I mean unless you can get amazing brand deals, which there is a lot of money with brand deals. But, product. If you're first starting out and you don't have a lot of stuff, if you, okay, here's the biggest thing. A lot of people I talk to, they're like, "Well I don't know what to do. What could my product be? I'm not good at anything." Like no, if you're blogging, if you're YouTubing, you're good at something. So, go with that.

Whatever videos are doing good, whatever blog posts are doing good. If you have, like instance for food, like we had our brownies were our most popular ones, so we made an ebook of brownies and we sold hundreds of those things because brownies were doing well. So we put them at the bottom of each post. We put it on all our social media and we could just sell it.

Liron:	Oh, okay. I wonder if it applies throughout all types of blogs? Because I know YouTube is divided into the whole education, you know the how two channels, and then you have the entertainment channels, the Vloggers, you know, things of that nature. But in the blogging world, is it the same?

Kristen: Oh, definitely. Definitely. I don't know a lot about cars.

Kristen: So for us, when we first started we knew mostly about blogs. So that's why we did like blogging 101, so you do car mechanics 101. You do the very simple basic things that if someone doesn't know anything about car mechanics, you can easily write an ebook about that. Because you probably know the basics if you're writing a blog about it, right?

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Are you a blogger looking to build huge success on YouTube? On this week's TubeTalk we talk to a channel that has done just that!

From Successful Blogger to Successful YouTuber: TubeTalk 174 Kristen Hills

Many YouTubers have had that one successful video that has outperformed all others, and a deep-dive into your analytics can uncover the secrets to your most-viewed content. In this episode of TubeTalk, the YouTuber podcast, we show you what metrics to look out for, what you should be focusing on, and how you can replicate success across your channel.

, and he’s all about helping businesses get more value from their video marketing efforts. Dane is the founder of the TubeTalk podcast, and he's also been a vidIQ user since Day 1. He’s also a proud 

! Click on the link above or download the TubeTalk podcast from the following:

If you have followed all the best practices for creating a great video, like giving it a great title and a compelling thumbnail, it should perform as well as any other you have uploaded. But we all know that’s not the case - some videos underperform and it pays to understand exactly why. In this podcast we take a look at:

Optimizing Thumbnails for a good click through rate

Using the right language to end your video

Leveraging traffic sources for views & content ideas

Why buying YouTube views is a really, really terrible idea

Understanding Audience Retention for YouTube Success

Just one of the topics covered in this TubeTalk podcast is Audience Retention. Dane confirms that a good way to look at the audience retention metric is to ask “how fast do people want to leave this video?" because in many videos it's very fast! He divides audience retention into three parts:

 How well does your intro and hook correspond with what you're doing in the thumbnail and title? If there is a disconnect between what you’ve promised and what you actually deliver your audience retention can drop very fast. For instance, if your thumbnail and title promises a video about ice cream but you actually focus on pizza your audience is not going to stick around (or come back).

 This really is the bulk of the video where you should be engaging your viewers after the initial premise, keeping them interested and continuing to add value.

 Did you convince your viewers to stay to the very end? Getting them to click on your end screen can really improve not just the ranking of that video, but the channel overall. You want to keep them watching as long as possible, and convince them to convince them to click and watch another video. If you can get them to watch to the end and get them to watch your next video, that's a very powerful signal for 

Looking at each of these sections independently can really help you understand how your content appeals to your audience. A lot of creators focused on the intro and the hook, but should take into consideration all three parts.

If you're a marketer and want to out more about how to promote your business on YouTube using high value, low cost, helpful how-to videos, you can watch Dane and HEY.com 

. Also he interviews the top video marketing experts on the "

TubeTalk has been informing video creators amd marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

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Want to better understanding YOUR YouTube analytics? Make sure to download vidIQ today. It will help you research YouTube, understand what's working and what isn't, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

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Understanding your YouTube analytics is the first to step to creating content that drives views and subscriber growth. In this episode of TubeTalk we discuss Audience Retention, how to end your video, and why buying views is a really, really terrible idea.

Liron Segev

Posts Written By Liron Segev

How to Make Money as a YouTuber by Creating Courses: TubeTalk 199 with Jess C...

From Successful Blogger to Successful YouTuber: TubeTalk 174 Kristen Hills

Recreating YouTube Success by Understanding Analytics: TubeTalk Episode 158