Podcircle Podcast

Kyle Cummings: 00:00

A feature that I really love on YouTube called end screens. So if you watch a video on YouTube and you get to the very end, it's where YouTube will suggest other videos from that channel. It'll also give you a place to, like, subscribe to that channel as well. Use this to your benefit and leave space at the end of that 5, 10 seconds at the end of each one of your video podcasts where you can basically have those display. Use that feature.

Kyle Cummings: 00:24

It's really, really crucial to growing your channel.

Mickenzie Vought: 00:27

Welcome to the Podcircle Podcast where we bring practical tips and insights for every podcaster. Caster.

Kyle Cummings: 00:32

Whether you're just getting started or you're already a seasoned podcast pro, these conversations dive into all the topics that matter most to you. And today, we're gonna give you the tips that you need to optimize your YouTube videos to increase reach and engagement and grow your channel. So make sure that you're subscribed to our channel on YouTube where we post all of our episodes.

Mickenzie Vought: 00:53

Also, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, we would really appreciate if you would take a moment to leave us a 5 star rating, a quick review, and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Alright, friends. This is part 3 of our series on YouTube. 1st, we told you how the end of Google Podcasts and their strategy to push people to YouTube Music podcast is actually a great thing for you as a podcaster. If you are ready to tap into the highly engaged audience that is living on YouTube, Then last week, we got really practical and outlined how to set up your podcast YouTube channel the right way.

Mickenzie Vought: 01:30

And then this week, we're gonna walk you through the strategy you need to get the most out of your videos so that you increase reach, increase engagement, and grow your channel. So, Kyle, walk us through what we need to know when we're uploading our video podcast episodes to our YouTube channel. Yeah.

Kyle Cummings: 01:46

So the very first thing that you're gonna see once you drag and drop that video, and that's the easiest way to do it, is you go to your top right hand corner of your page, your YouTube studio page. You click, I think it's create, and you just select new video. Once you drag and drop that over, it's going to come up, a dialog box is gonna come up, and it's gonna ask you what you wanna title your episode. And I can't stress the importance of that title enough. There's kind of 2 different places that you're gonna title it, and we'll talk about that here in a little bit.

Kyle Cummings: 02:17

But make sure that that title is interesting, attention grabbing, and especially searchable. So you're gonna wanna use keywords that your ideal listener is searching for. So I'll just use our podcast as an example. Our podcast is called The Podcircle Podcast, and it is a podcast for podcasters all about podcasting. I don't know if you're noticing a theme here.

Kyle Cummings: 02:40

So you're gonna find the word podcast in almost all of our titles and also our YouTube thumbnail images because people that are searching for resources and knowledge and expertise around podcasting, we wanna make sure that they find our channel because that's exactly what we're here to do.

Mickenzie Vought: 02:58

I think in so much more than any other channel where people are consuming podcast, YouTube is a search engine. Yep. People are using YouTube to go and find very specific content. So making sure that when they look for content, they're going to find yours. The discoverability on YouTube is really the feature that sets it apart from all other platforms.

Mickenzie Vought: 03:17

So I'm excited to see what this new shift from Google Podcasts going away to them really investing is going to do for podcasters because the discoverability is just so phenomenal there. Kyle, you were telling me that some of our most watched YouTube episodes don't necessarily correlate with our most listened audio episodes, right, because of this discoverability piece and because of the way the algorithm is based on search and gets episodes in front of people. So what have been some of the best of our titles on YouTube that have really pulled people in more on YouTube than in our audio version.

Kyle Cummings: 03:50

Yeah. Totally. So I just went looked at this before our our recording. And Yeah. I think our most watched episode, the actual title of the podcast episode on on YouTube is 5 podcast trends to be aware of in 2024.

Kyle Cummings: 04:05

So we really tried to capitalize. That was a beginning of of the year episode. Try to capitalize on the new year. A lot of people I've you know, after being in the podcast business now for 8 years, all of my calls and people wanted to start podcasts, so many of them start at the beginning of the year. Yeah.

Kyle Cummings: 04:22

And then, like, right around August, September when people's kids are going back to school and

Mickenzie Vought: 04:27

developing new year. Yeah.

Kyle Cummings: 04:28

The second new year. That's right. So we wanted to identify some of the trends for 2024. So we titled that podcast, 5 podcast trends to be aware of in 2024, which honestly, in my opinion, is is a is a fine title. Yeah.

Kyle Cummings: 04:43

It's okay. However, the thumbnail image on YouTube is, I think, is the attention getter. And what what I did is we put the Spotify logo on one side and the Apple logo kind of against it on the other side with text underneath that says, the podcast war of 2024. And to me, if I'm looking at that, I'm thinking like, oh, what's, like, what's this about? Like, what

Mickenzie Vought: 05:06

It pulls you in. It opens a story loop in your head. You're like, what's happening?

Kyle Cummings: 05:10

Because if you're looking at that, you might be thinking like, oh, the music these are kinda warring music platforms, and this is what I feel like everybody does on YouTube. They'll look at the actual title underneath Mhmm. For the subtext of the thumbnail. So they'll look below and see 5 podcast trends to be aware of in 2024, which tells them it's kind of the fine print. It's like, oh, this is actually about podcasting, how these two platforms are competing in the podcast space.

Kyle Cummings: 05:36

A couple of tips on this is on the kind of the YouTube thumbnail side of things is to really limit the amount of text that you put on those images. And I say keep it as simple as possible. Use Canva to create these thumbnails. Canva's got great templates, and you can just go in and edit them or you can create your own from scratch. But I think that you wanna keep your thumbnail title, like, 3 to 5 words max.

Kyle Cummings: 06:01

You wanna make it really simple to read, and I like bold text. And the image should be like if it's if it's your podcast or if you have a guest on, you know, put a picture of of the guest up there. Maybe if you can grab a screenshot of the 2 of you talking on a Riverside call, that's what usually what Mackenzie and I do with our thumbnails. And Yep. Honestly, you're gonna kinda go on a on a journey with these thumbnails because you're gonna you're gonna kinda learn what works and what doesn't.

Kyle Cummings: 06:29

Yeah. Our thumbnails for our podcast, if you go back through our feed, they've evolved and changed over the past year, and they'll continue to just based on how we learn, what works, and what doesn't. So and you're, you know, you're gonna go through the same process too as a YouTuber.

Mickenzie Vought: 06:46

I think, yeah, just I was yesterday scrolling through ours, and I was like, oh, we really have honed this in and optimized, and you've responded on, like, what's working and what's not working. And, yeah, I think it's been really great. And this is such an interesting tip because I don't I think we would necessarily in our minds think, okay. If I'm creating a thumbnail, it should be the exact same title. We should have consistency.

Mickenzie Vought: 07:05

But the idea of these are 2 different things and kind of working in tandem to grab your your, viewer's attention and then give them more context. So Yep. I think this is such a great tip. Alright. Once you've uploaded your episode, we wanna make sure that you've included an extensive episode description full of keywords.

Mickenzie Vought: 07:23

So we like to say 3 to 4 sentences of a show summary, very similar to what you're offering in your other platform. So whatever you're putting into your hosting platform, if you're using Transistor, which is our favorite, or Lipson or Buzzsprout or something else, and then time stamp show notes. So YouTube will actually turn these into chapter markers when they're formatted correctly. So what is the correct format, Kyle?

Kyle Cummings: 07:46

The format that I usually use so say if your first time stamp begins at 1 minute and 30 seconds, What works when I upload our videos is 01colon30. But with YouTube, I'm pretty sure that it's still this way. You you also wanna do a time stamp at the very top that's just zeros. So, like, 0 zero colon zero zero, and then I always just put intro. Or you can put teaser clip or something like that.

Kyle Cummings: 08:14

That's what lets YouTube know, oh, we're doing timestamp chapter markers now, and so it let lets their, you know, their artificial intelligence know to grab those and then break up that episode into chapters where people can use those to scroll to the most relevant parts of the episode, which is just I I think it sets beginner kind of amateur level YouTube pages apart from ones that that realize and recognize the importance of being able to just give people the content that they want as fast as possible, and that's to be able to give them, like, oh, I, you know, I wanna be able to scroll through and look at some of these kinda chapter markers. And this is actually the section that's most important to me. So I'm just gonna go right there. YouTube and Google, etcetera, will reward you for that level of kind of searchability and, I guess, customization. So

Mickenzie Vought: 09:06

Personally, before I really knew much about YouTube, I would see these markers and feel like, how are they doing this? Because it is so helpful and to know that it's just, like, in our formatting.

Kyle Cummings: 09:16

So And one other thing I'm gonna say about that is that if you have a separate edit for your audio podcast and for your video podcast

Mickenzie Vought: 09:25

Two different time stamps.

Kyle Cummings: 09:27

Two different time stamps. So just be mindful of that. We have a a very slight lead, variation of our audio podcast than we do our video podcast. And so it's always about a 10 second differential because there's there's one separate ask that we make for our audio podcast listeners to rate and subscribe and review and things like that that we don't put in our video podcast. And so that's about a 10 second ask.

Kyle Cummings: 09:51

And so I go into show notes, and I just make it basically a 10 second. And and that's where that's where I think I think that's the stuff.

Mickenzie Vought: 09:59

Behind the scenes stuff.

Kyle Cummings: 10:00

It's so funny. Behind the scenes. But but if you wanna have the time stamps match up and not be off, you know, you gotta kinda think about that stuff. And sometimes I wonder if that's the stuff that doesn't just wear podcasters out because it's for it's it's stuff like that for every episode. You know?

Kyle Cummings: 10:15

You gotta create a really good thumbnail, and you gotta make sure your chapter markers are accurate and things like that. So that's I

Mickenzie Vought: 10:21

mean, yeah, those are the things that when you lose the zest for it, that's Yes. It's just the grind. It's the every week.

Kyle Cummings: 10:28

Yeah. Is the grind. That's exactly right.

Mickenzie Vought: 10:30

That's so funny. I'm sitting here like, oh, do we need to put our ask later so we're not constantly messing up your time stamps? But that's another another conversation.

Kyle Cummings: 10:37

Yeah.

Mickenzie Vought: 10:37

Alright. So, additionally, in your show notes, you want to link any of your resources or additional links. So that could be your social media, if you've got a product or a service website, or your guest information. And so if you are a guest specific podcast, Google is going to love that you are listing them and connecting their credibility with your site's credibility. So make sure you're doing that with their bio and anything links to things that they're doing as well, link out to that.

Mickenzie Vought: 11:06

Any books or articles you reference, anything that you talk about in those show notes and you want your listeners to be able to access them, make sure you're putting them in that full description underneath your video. A note, we talked about this in the last episode, in order to have clickable links in your description, you need to go through an additional verification step with YouTube, and they just wanna make sure that you're a human and it'll unlock a host of features that you don't necessarily get right away. So if you're not sure about that, go back to our last episode, and we'll walk you through how to make sure you have that verification.

Kyle Cummings: 11:37

The last thing I'll mention on that is this is affiliate links too. So in each of our episodes, you'll notice that we have affiliate links for the microphones that Mackenzie and I both use, headphones. We have affiliate links for Transistor, which is our favorite hosting platform. And so for all of those, and this is just a a bonus bonus tip. In order to get to make the URL clickable, the link clickable, you have to put the httpscolon backslash backslash, and then because I don't think that they recognize, like, the www.

Kyle Cummings: 12:10

Thing. Okay. So a little bit of trial and error on that, but just a a little bonus pro tip for you. But, yeah, it's always a great idea if you've had you've got affiliate links, things that you're always talking about, especially if you're a course creator, you're talking about different books or book recommendations. You use your, your description there to link those things out.

Mickenzie Vought: 12:29

Alright, Kyle. So we've talked about verifications. We've talked about show notes. What is next? What are some other things that we need to be thinking of as we're uploading videos?

Kyle Cummings: 12:37

Yeah. So when you upload and that video is uploading in the background there, use your playlist. So there's if you go down, you put in your your title, you put in your description, your show notes, your links, all those sorts of things. Under that is where you can select what kind of playlist that you want your your video to belong to. And since this is a podcast, you can actually select and we talked about this a little bit in the last episode, but make sure you select a podcast playlist.

Kyle Cummings: 13:05

And if if you haven't done that already, I think you can actually click create playlist, and it's gonna give you the option to create a playlist that's specific to your podcast. And so for each podcast video that you upload, for each episode, make sure you select that so that all your podcasts appear together on your channel or your podcast episodes, I should say. And then there's a feature that I really love on YouTube called end screens. And this is basically so if you watch a video on YouTube and you get to the very end, it's where YouTube will suggest other videos from that channel. It'll also give you a a place to, like, subscribe to that channel as well.

Kyle Cummings: 13:43

Use this Gotcha. All the way. Use this to your benefit and leave space at the end of that 5, 10 seconds at the end of each one of your video podcasts where the where you can basically have those display, and you can select how those things appear, like the suggested videos, and you can arrange all that stuff within YouTube when you go to upload that video. You're gonna click end screens. It's gonna pull it up, and then you can arrange and kind of customize that there.

Kyle Cummings: 14:09

So I'll shout it from the rooftops that use that feature. It's really, really crucial to growing your channel and getting people to your other videos and just consuming more of your content on your channel. Also, if you're using music in your podcast, make sure that you're using royalty free music from sites like Soundstripe.com or Epidemic Sound. This is gonna keep your channel from getting flagged for any kind of copyright infringement. You just wanna make sure that you're using music that you have the rights to use.

Kyle Cummings: 14:41

And so those are 2 of my favorite sites where you can get really good music that's well produced and sounds cool, and it's not like the the cheesy you know, we're we're out of the age of just bad podcast music or at least we should be. Yes.

Mickenzie Vought: 14:53

We should be.

Kyle Cummings: 14:53

Resources for that. Last one here is to pay attention to that very first minute of each one of your videos. It's maybe the most important minute of the whole video because, honestly, even just the first 5 to 15 seconds is where people decide, do I wanna engage with this? Do I wanna keep watching? So I think one of the easiest ways to do that is to take a really great clip from the episode, from the video, use it as a teaser clip, put it right up front so that it's like a 32nd clip that rolls right at the beginning and then transitions into, you know, the intro of your podcast where you're intro in the episode, telling people what it's gonna be about.

Kyle Cummings: 15:32

And it just that's just kind of a a little hook that gets people intrigued and engaged. And then Yeah. The last thing, my last tip is not gonna be new to anybody who's listened to this podcast or watched this podcast. Is to post consistently. Post Mhmm.

Kyle Cummings: 15:47

Consistently post at least a video per week and do it consistently. And YouTube recognizes that.

Mickenzie Vought: 15:55

And if you don't have a weekly show, I think another way from this is to take, like, segments of your show and create smaller bite sized videos. And Yep. Those could be something you link to at the end screen. And just thinking through, if I don't have content every week, how can I reuse and repurpose? You know we're all about reusing and repurposing.

Mickenzie Vought: 16:13

Yes.

Kyle Cummings: 16:13

That's literally what we do

Mickenzie Vought: 16:15

Yes.

Kyle Cummings: 16:16

Is we take podcast episodes 20, 30, 45 minutes an hour, and then we create so much stinking content out of those episodes for the benefit of our clients. So

Mickenzie Vought: 16:26

awesome tips. Thank you for walking us through this, Kyle. I feel like I learned something

Kyle Cummings: 16:29

prepping this

Mickenzie Vought: 16:29

episode and talking through it with you. And as we wrap up, I wanna talk about a couple additional features or additional things on YouTube that I think would be helpful and maybe even opportunities for further monetization or growth. So the first is the idea of YouTube Shorts. Can you talk shortly? We talked about reusing and creating content for our clients who wanna have a social media strategy and wanna do that in the most efficient way.

Mickenzie Vought: 16:56

What are YouTube shorts and how can they benefit people?

Kyle Cummings: 16:59

Love YouTube shorts. So YouTube shorts, if you're not familiar, are like TikToks, Instagram Reels. There's those vertical videos, you know, 6 around 60 seconds or less. Make sure that you're clipping those out. If you don't know how to do that, that's so much of what we do at Podcircle.

Kyle Cummings: 17:14

So and if you even wanna check out what that even is and how we use those, head over to our YouTube channel at Podcircle. Check out our shorts page. You can I mean, we've got tons of them at this point? So one of my very favorite things to do 2 things here. When you upload those those vertical videos, somewhere in your either in the title or in the description, they recommend that you do that you put in hashtag shorts.

Kyle Cummings: 17:37

And that's basically tipping YouTube off to say, oh, this is not a standard YouTube video. Okay. And that's kinda how they flag it for or designated as a short. As if uploading a vertical video, you know, shouldn't be enough. But that's kinda how they're handling that for right now, so just make sure you're always doing hashtag shorts.

Kyle Cummings: 17:58

The next most important thing to do is that you can select a related video that also is displayed while that short is playing. And what I recommend is that you link to whatever long form video, whatever long form podcast episode that that clip is from As if to say, hey. If you like this clip, if you like what the what we're talking about here and you wanna learn more, click this link right here, and it's gonna take them right to the long form podcast episode. And to me, that is how you grow your channel. You use those short bite sized clips to feed people or feed them and get them over to your long form content to where they can dig in even more and learn about your knowledge and expertise.

Kyle Cummings: 18:42

And to me, that's what it's all about.

Mickenzie Vought: 18:44

Awesome. I know this has been a very meaty episode, but I wanna make sure I talk about one last thing, and it's the idea of premium paid subscriptions. So similar to Apple subscriptions or Patreon or other things where you can provide a small amount of money to get, like, exclusive access to podcasting, people can subscribe to your channel and get additional access to additional, like, additional access to you, basically, whether that's additional content or additional resources or additional features, all that. It's just a really interesting way to monetize that you can actually someone can choose to have a membership to a channel and go beyond what is forward facing and free to the public. So I just wanna make sure I mentioned that.

Mickenzie Vought: 19:23

If that's a strategy that you're currently using with, like, Patreon or Apple subscriptions, you could also bring that over to your YouTube. So, Kyle, this has been a really, really full episode. Anything we missed? Anything you wanna make sure people know about YouTube?

Kyle Cummings: 19:35

No. I think we're gonna come back and and expound on some of these things in future episodes. But for now, I wanna keep it as as tight and bite sized as possible. So And

Mickenzie Vought: 19:44

And I think this is one that you're probably gonna need to come back to, or you could bookmark this episode. And as you're literally going through and setting up your YouTube channel or literally going through and uploading an episode, you could listen back. Thanks for your intel, Kyle. And if you're looking to start a video podcast, but you aren't sure if it's right for you or even where to begin, make sure you check out episode 11 of the Podcircle podcast. We dive into, should I start a video podcast?

Mickenzie Vought: 20:08

Also, you can reach out to Kyle and his team. They are pros at setting up YouTube channels and helping outfit the necessary branding elements and streamlining the process so you can get the most out of your podcast on YouTube and beyond. So set up a free consultation call with him at kyle@podcircle.com, or click the link in our show notes if you're listening on YouTube. Are there any tips that we're missing to get the most out of your YouTube channel? Drop it in the comments and we will respond to you.

Mickenzie Vought: 20:35

So see you next week, friends. This was a super fun episode.