Mad YouTube Idea Becomes Serious...
Read More: For a long time, I've used YouTube as an announcement platform, without any real strategy* of how to use it effectively for lead generation.
So I decided to friend-add on a new YouTube channel lots of people to see what would happen.
Here are the results so far:
- 855 friend-adds, 408 video views
- 42 subscribers (they're from the 855 friends who accepted my friend requests)
- 85 visitors to the Mad Web Scientist website, 21 of those from YouTube
- 7 leads
- 1 personal email follow-up conversation from the lead.
Now, the opt-in rate was pretty rubbish because I didn't have a video on the website at the time, just a mad animated gif image of myself with an "surprised Einstein" look.
I'm just making some pages to the website at the moment, and it will be interesting to see how that changes the optin rate.
In summary then:
Just under 5% of the friends added became subscribers
About 5% of the YouTube viewers have visited the website
Around 10% of the total visitors have turned into leads on a poorly-optimized page.
I'll be more pleased if I can get my visitor to optin-in percentage up to say 25 - 30%
Next immediate steps:
1) Brand the Mad Web Scientist website better (header graphic, congruent color scheme)
2) Create a custom welcome video which gives the visitor a more specific reason to optin than the current incentive
3) Add an integrated Facebook comments section under the video
4) Create a properly branded intro & outro for future Mad Web Scientist videos on YouTube.
5) Distribute future videos via Traffic Geyser to get more traffic to the website.
I've got lots more ideas too, but those top 5 will keep me occupied for some time to come :)
Cheers,
Dez.
aka The Mad Web Scientist.
*There are a couple of exceptions to this, one being my most-viewed YouTube video on my main channel - watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRoAEU4QiWs & then visit the website to see what I mean.
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About the Author: Dez Futak
Member Since: 10/12/2008
I'm a Distributor For:: CarbonCopyPRO
Other Company: Magnetic Marketing Ltd
Industry: Internet
Primary Web Site: http://DezFutak.com
Mad Web Scientist - Update on some stats
Howdee doode Better Networker Community - just some quick update on the stats.
At the moment, I'm focusing on building friends & subscribers for the channel - as of today, here are the stats:
Friends: 948
Views: 469
Average views/day: 20
Youtube Subscribers: 45
As far as I can tell, the Youtube subscribers have almost all come from the same group as the friends, so we can see the friend/subscriber ratio is sitting comfortably at 4.8%, without me making much of an effort to connect with people yet.
The real power of YouTube, like *any* community, comes with networking, so it will be interesting to see how the above stat changes once I start doing this.
Ideally, I want the number of subscribers to be up near the 1K level, so that when I release another video, it gets a lot of views quickly.
If the video is of very good quality, then the subscriber base could knock it up a notch in terms of views & comments quite quickly.
With more interaction with other significant Youtube users, that's the stage at which you can end up on the front page of YouTube - and, just like with BetterNetworker's front page & email newsletter featured posts, you can suddenly be inundated with some pretty cool traffic spikes.
Anyway, as I do more experimentation with this new YouTube channel, I'll continue to document my findings (which, of course, being mad, will not be typical :D ).
Dez.
aka The Mad Web Scientist
http://youtube.com/madwebscientist
PS!
I've got the YouTube friends up to just over 1k, so now I'm busy subscribing to their channels to see how many subscribe back.
This is a better strategy than just subscribing to lots of people's YT channels, because these requests are more likely to be reciprocated as they've already said "yes" to becoming friends.
At the start of this phase of the experiment, the stats were as follow:
Friends: 1052
Subscribers: 57
Views: 552
It'll be interesting to see how those figures change now that I'm swapping from getting friends to subscribers.
I predict that the view count will drop off to some extent, because I've not yet made any time to shoot more videos to-date (but I wanted to get the "non-momentum" stats first, before launching out on a momentum-building video 'campaign' :D ).
Dez.
Latest update 02/02/11
Latest stats:
Friends: 1401
Subscribers: 88
Views: 780
Views/day over a 11 day period: 22/day (on average)
Subscriber/View percentage: 11.3%
Views/Friends percentage: 55.7%
Subscribers/Friends percentage: 6.3%
Subscribers to website email list: 12 (1.5% of total viewers)
Latet update 22 February 2011
2nd video launched here, which has had 529 views in 9 ***DAYS***!!!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlAaAdRHPU0
:) :) :) :) :)
Latest stats:
Friends: 2550
Subscribers: 140
Views: video #1: 1102 video #2: 529
Average Views/day Video #2: 50/day (9 day average)
Average Views/day Video #1: 22/day (50 day average)
Subscriber/View percentage: 8.6%
Views/Friends percentage: 64.0%
Subscribers/Friends percentage: 5.5%
Subscribers to website email list: 26 (1.6% of total viewers)
PS for 22 Feb
The drop in Subscribers/Views percentage from 11.3% down to 8.6% reflects my overall strategy of focusing on finding friends first.
PM me if you want more details on the strategy I'm using, or add me on Skype (make sure you include a relevant message when you add me as a contact though, so I know who you are)