TJ11 – YouTube Traffic University with James Wedmore

Hello! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, I’m your host James Reynolds and thank you for listening in to this episode #11. If you’re a regular listener to Traffic Jam you’ll of course know that each week I invite on to the show a world leading traffic expert who shares their top tips for generating traffic and increasing user engagement online whatever their chosen medium may be. Now we have covered a fair few topics already; things like Google+, podcasting, Twitter, Facebook, and email drops and a whole bunch of other topics too. If you haven’t been through the past episodes to this point now is probably a good time to do so, we really have some amazing guests – people like Chris Brogan, Pat Flynn, Scott Stratten, Jennifer Sheahan, Chad Hamzeh, and a whole bunch of amazing experts as well! And of course today is no different; I’ve got another fantastic guest lined up for you today.

Now today’s episode is in fact being recorded on location, I’m actually in Sydney right now, preparing for a three day Mastermind group and conference. Now my guest is undoubtedly super high caliber and I’m hoping that the audio quality, despite the fact that I’ve not got my normal studio set up is going to be pretty high quality as well, and that’s because I’ve got a new trusty portable recording device called a Zoom H4  recorder which seems to be pretty good. It’s what I use for all of my videos so I am hoping for podcasts as well the audio quality is nice and crisp but let me know how it’s sounding, if it’s sounding nice and crisp and clear in your earbuds.

Now just reminder, stick around until the end of the show because today, as always, I will have another one minute traffic tip for you and of course all of the latest news from the past days in traffic generation.

So what is today’s topic, well it’s one that we’ve all been waiting for, at least me anyway, and it’s YouTube traffic and our guest today is James Wedmore. When it comes to YouTube, James really needs no introduction. Over the past couple of years, James has built up a highly successful YouTube channel and has really established his reputation as the YouTube go to guy to YouTube traffic by his product Video Traffic Academy and the training James puts out on his website JamesWedmore.com This dude James is in real demand right now and I can be true testament to that because I have been trying to get James trying to get us in to the same time zone to get an interview, we’ve managed to get it finally, so with that in mind, I really don’t want to delay the content any further, so without further ado, here’s today’s episode and as we said, it’s YouTube traffic and my guest today is James Wedmore.

James R: Hi! This is your host James Reynolds and joining me today is YouTube specialist James Wedmore who is more famous in YouTube than PSY and Charlie who had his finger bitten combined. James Wedmore, welcome to Traffic Jam!

James W: This is all false information you are hearing right now, that’s amazing! Thanks for that introduction, best one I’ve ever had.

James R: Cool! Well we’ve been looking to get you on for some time so I’m excited about this, let’s start off by giving us your back story, from sweeping floors in a gym via anonymous bartender job to now a kind of virtual YouTube sensation, what is the James Wedmore back story?

James W: Yeah, in a nutshell I with film, with video, I remember being 8 or 9 yrs. old taking my mom’s camera, these are the big, clunky, heavy cameras that I can barely lift and all of a sudden I’m making a stop animation video out of may play dough collection where like little balls are turning in to people and waving in the camera, I had no idea how I knew how to do that, I look back and I’m like how did I know how to do that? And that started my career and I said I’m going to go to film school for this. To pay my way through film school, I became a bartender. And that grew in to something and I decided I did not want to go to film school or I decided I don’t want to be in the Hollywood industry anymore and so when I graduated film school, I took this bartending thing I’ve been doing and took it to the internet. And I said I’m going to teach people how to bartend, this is something I know how to do, I love this entrepreneurial thing and I launched my first product website course at the end of 2007 and for about three months, it was a ghost town. No traffic and no sales! Actually, it was no sales and I did not even know why, I did not know that I needed traffic, I did not make that connection, I just assumed, like most people do when they first got started and that was when I said I have to learn how to get people to come to my website and I heard someone in passing at a conference that YouTube and this was back in 2008 and sure enough I put some videos up there and about a week later, it was now April 18, 2008 I made my very first sale of my online bartending course, and that’s a $200 product. This is not like $19.95, it was $200 and that very first sale came in April 18, 2008. I will never forget that day, and I checked the email first I thought it was an order that I had placed for $200 because I had never seen what a new order looks in my email inbox. When I realized it was my first customer, and I remember they came from Arlington, Texas, I looked down and it said how did you hear about us and it said Youtube.com and it’s one of those things as an entrepreneur, as whatever you want to label yourself as, a business owner, a marketing exec, when you find something that works, that’s when you go at a 110% and that’s what I did, the exciting thing is that that product that website is still live today, those videos from 4 years ago are still live and they’re still bringing me sales. So when we talk about all the stuff that changes with social media, Facebook and Twitter and all these new sites that pop up or go away, how many of them have really been working for you for 4 years? People will say video takes too much time; it’s so much easier just to send out a tweet. But what are your posts and tweets doing for you? And it gets me really excited when I have videos that are four to five years old that still bring me traffic qualified leads to my website. So don’t look at it as it’s too much- too much time, too much work, too much effort because you’re putting an investment, you’re putting an autopilot employee in your business for you. You’re putting a system in place that’s going to work for you for a long time and that’s what’s it’s all about for me and that’s extremely powerful.

James R: And you’re not going to get that return are you from a tweet? I mean a tweet goes out and its lifetime is finished within about 10 seconds but as you said a YouTube video, it remains up there, people are going to find it if its good content and it can work for you and work for you for months and years on end and like you said bring you the results.

James W: Absolutely! Absolutely!

James R: So here’s the premise James, each week we invite on to the show a specialist who is onboard a particular traffic channel, yours is YouTube, what is it that you really like about Youtube? You’ve touched about one point there, is there anything else that really makes it the great traffic channel that it is for you?

James W: There are three things. Number one is the thing I shared; it’s that it’s going to work for you for the long haul. It’s not about just a weekly video and then your traffic disappears. That’s the first part. The second part is that with all these social networks, it really is the one place that can inject itself in to whatever social network you have. So whether you’re like our audience really likes us, we’re going to do Facebook fanpage, that’s great! You can be sharing videos every day on Facebook, in fact YouTube is the most shared type of content on Facebook. Instead of just like internal Facebook content, it’s the largest external source of content. Any social network as well, call it a viral video, because it is so easy to share, when you are in a place like Facebook and Twitter, where everyone is talking and no one is listening, how many times have you felt like that? YouTube is the one place or type of content where everyone shuts up to watch your video. And since so few people do it, it allows you to take center stage and have all eyes on you. So that’s the second thing, and the third thing is that for me, and I think this is important, the biggest sin in marketing is to be boring, we have heard this before, and video allows you to be infinitely creative. And I think people, I think big companies that are finally starting to get this, and are being so much more creative now than they were. Look at the old sized campaign, it was ahead of its time, the Hello ladies guy and it was so creative and unique that it went insanely viral and you’re seeing a lot more of these bigger companies with big budgets to do that, and whether you have access to that budget or if you’re someone like me who does not have a million dollars to spend on a YouTube campaign, you can still be so unique and creative. Just finding a concept, a great song, or a great idea and turning that in to video, we have the opportunity to be so creative and I just think that’s important because I think we need to let that creativeness shine instead of all just being black and white, buy my stuff, buy my stuff.

James R: Well this is something that you do very well James, and I’m sure before the end of this interview we’ll point people off to some of the examples of your stuff which is really creative. You obviously spend a lot of time of energy and thought in to the kind of structure that content in your videos so we’ll make sure that that happens, the question I want to ask now is we’d kind of covered off the why and we’ll talk a little bit later about a lot of things like what software we use, what editing and that type of stuff, I’m going to ask you about strategy, how can video be used in your business and marketing, what are some of the possibilities for it?

James W: there’s several ways that we can be using video but there’s really only one way that I teach time and time again that’s just a proven simple traffic strategy on YouTube and it comes down to what is basically called the video SEO and it’s simply identifying what is your ideal customer searching for, what are the keywords or keyword phrases and then you create video content based off those keywords. Optimize your videos in YouTube and you can get results, so when you understand that YouTube is a search engine, which most people don’t. that’s probably what we need to like get over that hurdle first. YouTube is not just a place to share videos, it’s not just a place to go when you’re bored. People are going there for information, education, how to use tutorials etc. and a lot of younger generations are bypassing Google altogether and they are going straight to YouTube. They want the full effect, they want the audio visual kinesthetic answer. And that means when the young generation do it and are going to do it even more, we always pick up their trends. So YouTube is a search engine but not only that, videos and mostly YouTube videos get ranked inside of Google. And with all those Panda, Penguin and Polar bear update where all of a sudden people’s websites get deranked and disappear because they did scammy backlinking strategy or they paid some SEO company three thousand dollars to do these black hat things. YouTube and these videos are impenetrable to any of those changes. And that right there is amazing, and that’s why my video is 4 years old and still getting ranked for their keywords because YouTube is owned by Google, Google is not going to derank YouTube. They want videos on the first page in there so they’re not going to all of a sudden say no, no, let’s push videos down. And so if you just create target content based off of relevant keywords which we can go in to as much details as you want James, people type in that keyword, they find your video, they watch your video, they like what they’ve seen, you give a call to action at the end of the video, they go to your website. But here’s the best part, and this is the cherry on top, the magic ingredient, the thing that makes it all worth it – it’s an extra step to get to your website. Watch the video first, but the traffic that comes to your site, to your blog, your sales page, whatever, from YouTube will be the highest qualified, highest quality, highest targeted traffic you’ll ever experience. Except from an email list – but those people you’ve already captured, we’re talking brand new people, and we did a study on this where we sent traffic Google.com from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites and YouTube and we sent them all to a squeeze page or a landing page or an opt in page, same thing just different verbiage different vocabulary, where the goal on that page was to capture their name and email address. And we tracked which traffic source converted the best, all traffic is not created equally and YouTube hands down destroyed everyone else in the test and its simple if you think about it because no one is going to go to your website from a YouTube video unless they liked your video. So your video ends up being this – like I said earlier, an employee that works for you 24 hrs. a day 7 days a week to build rapport, to build a relationship with your future customer, and your audience member because we all know people buy from who they know, like and trust, so now people are watching this and they’re primed, they’re pumped, they’re ready to go, they click over to your website and the next step is a no brainer for them. Absolute no brainer, otherwise they wouldn’t have clicked. So you get the highest quality traffic source – this is just huge that I have to like share that because there are all these reasons that do make YouTube this, it’s still untapped and it’s not that YouTube is anything new and it’s not visionary, like so many people I have talked with convince themselves that YouTube is not for them because they go I don’t want to be in front of the camera, I don’t have the time, or I don’t know how so I don’t need to do it, so I am like, I mean, it is right there staring you in the face all the reasons why this is such a game changer for any business. I have been talking about this for years and I still get passionate about it so …

James R: I can tell, I can tell, you spilled out for a good few minutes there, you unleashed some real strong gems and a few of them I have got to agree with and I don’t always agree with my guests by the way…

James W: Good! You should!

James R: Well, I’m an SEO guy and I agree the future in traffic is in video SEO and starting off with video media and then getting it out to other sources and leverage but for that simple reason that you mentioned of video being so high converting, it’s just no reason not to do it and it’s so damn easy to create video now with the equipment that’s available there is just no reason why people should not be doing it.

James W: Yup I agree, and here’s the funny thing, if you’re listening to this right now and you’re saying yeah, but I don’t want to be in front of the camera, here’s my only answer to you, whoever said you had to be? I just think it’s so funny that people automatically equate because the word says YouTube that it has to be you on camera. And it really doesn’t! I mean we can do an entire hour interview just on all the creative ways that you can make amazing converting videos without being in front of the camera, that’s just an excuse, that’s no reason to just say I’m not going to do video. I choose to be in front of the camera because I am a personal brand and if you are a personal brand you should be in the spotlight but it does not mean that you have to be, not by a long shot.

James R: Well, I’d like to just touch up on the conversation we started a short while ago about actually building up viewership on YouTube. I think you’ve got well over 160 videos in YouTube I believe, on your YouTube channel now, 10,000 subscribers or more, and 7 of your videos have been watched more than 30,000 times. Is the secret literally keyword research on YouTube and creating a video that meets those searches or is there a deeper secret on getting a lot of eyeballs on your videos?

James W: To me that is the secret. I have some good friends of mine, people I have consulted with and worked with, you might know them Marie Folio, Derek Halpern, and these people have in the last couple of years or so, and Derek in the last 6 to 8 months and Marie for the last 2 years have really turned YouTube in to a cornerstone of their business, and they kick my butt, I mean Derek in a couple of months got the same amount of subscribers that it took me a year and a half to build he did it in like a couple of months. Marie has 4 times as many subscribers, she’s like 3 and a half million views something like that and it’s funny because even though I am good friends with them but I have given them a lot of advice and tips over the years on YouTube stuff, we don’t see eye to eye on this one element here and I’ll show you the difference but I am all about at the core of everything, it’s keyword, it’s video SEO. And they’re not really the same way, they’re much more about making videos that are topical and relevant to what they share and discuss in their industry, not necessarily what the person is typing in to Google. So let me give you an example, there is a keyword on things like how to attract women, or how attract the woman of my dreams how to get dates- stuff like that, these keywords, if you were to do a research, I mean half a million searches a month. Like this are a lot of people typing in how to attract a woman how to get girls, ton of searches. And if James here were to be a dating expert, one of things that James would teach these young guys teaching the searches is you have to have confidence to get the woman of your dreams blah, blah, blah. Well, if you were to check the term how to be confident, it has like 1/100^th of the searches. It has a fraction of the monthly searches. Literally, I can’t remember now but we’re talking like a thousand searches a month for how to be confident, we have half a million for how to attract a woman. So for me, if I am in that industry, I am going to make a video on how to attract a woman but Marie and Derek are going I’m going to make a video on how to be confident because that’s what they need and I know that that’s the answer and they still get views and the reason is they already have a base audience. So this is the important distinction and I fragged that point out for this very important reason, when you have the audience already through email list and other social channels, you can create content that’s much more on your terms but if you’re starting with very little or nothing at all, no leverage, no audience, no previous whatever, you have to go for the keywords, otherwise, how is anybody going to find you? So if you are starting out, it has to be the exact keyword as the people are typing in or looking for, as that’s the only way they are going to find you, otherwise if you already have a big list, a big audience, they can be sharing that for you and then they become your virtual salesman or saleswoman promoting your content and then your list grows even more. Does that make sense?

James R: Got it. Perfect sense, and if we keep it strictly on subject here talking about traffic then your method is right way to go about it because what we’re talking about here is reaching a new audience and then bringing all those in to whatever sphere it is that you have – your website, whatever it is you’re driving people to, attracting people from YouTube and bringing them to where you want them.

James W: Yeah, absolutely! But James, real quick, let me share with you though, and Derek does this, and I don’t know if Marie does this that much but there are other real cool tricks that we can always get in to and go deeper with where we’ll do things like, when I mail a video to my list, that are people already subscribed to me, I’ll say things like hey if you’ve enjoyed this video, can you forward it to a friend who you think will enjoy it? Or can you share it, can you tweet it, can you promote it, can you do something? When you ask those things to a loyal follower or subscriber, believe it or not, they do it, and so they’re not to be ignored because they will help you find a new audience as well. And that’s what it’s all about, it’s about continual momentum that you get not just from the search but now your fans become your promoters basically.

James R: Right, good, cool! Well I want to dive deep on what could be a touchy subject for you, your business is really built on YouTube and there has been several cases of video bloggers getting their accounts banned in the last year or so and in just a few weeks ago Facebook banned thousands of advertising accounts by mistake, do you ever feel vulnerable that your traffic is kind of dependent on a third party channel and if so, how do you handle that?

 James: Since this is more of a traffic related call, I will really let you know how I have set it up, so no, I have never really felt that even though I have felt vulnerable or nervous that YouTube would shut me down because it did happen to a lot of people and it happened really fast, and it’s the last thing you want – you’ve been putting all these work on these videos and all these stuff and then they just say goodbye to everything you have ever done, good news is on that, we have actually had some students of ours, and I have a whole case study in my blog where they got their account banned and actually got it back, so it is possible, but for the sake of this interview because we are really talking about traffic what I learned rather quickly was not try and do it all. There are so many traffic sources and if you’re listening to James’s stuff every week, you know that you are going to have a new traffic strategy and my firm belief is that the more you try and do all of it the more you’re going to spread yourself thin, you can’t master everything and you’re going to see minimal results. So I am all about what I have struggled is that I have struggled in three traffic sources and I try and do the best I can will all those and ignore the rest. And maybe I will switch one out and it does not mean they are permanent, and yes have a few things and for me right now, it’s Facebook ads, its YouTube, and it’s actually JVs. So connecting with other people and leveraging their existing audiences has been a wonderful traffic source for me so I have never felt like Oh my gosh I’m totally dependent on this one source but yes it would still suck if my channel’s deleted and I don’t want anyone to put all their eggs in one basket. I also don’t want people to worry about it, don’t buy views, don’t do anything shady, and don’t do anything that your mother or anyone over at YouTube will frown upon, and you’re going to be fine. Don’t copy other people’s videos or music and upload it t0 your channel, don’t do anything stupid like that, you’re going to be fine.

James R: You heard it here, we’re going to send you off to look at James’s channel at the end of this interview but don’t copy his stuff just look for inspiration; we don’t want to get you banned.

James W: Thank you!

James R: So James we talked a lot about how to attract views and build traffic to your videos, I really want to talk to you about how you move those viewers away from YouTube to your own website perhaps and I guess this is going to be a 2 part question, A – how do you move them, and B- where do you suggest moving them to?

James W: Yes I love this, and I am so glad, you’re like the only person who’s ever asked me this and I appreciate that because you can see the whole strategy in place and sometimes just getting someone to make their first video is as far as we can discuss on the calls, so this is like where the fun stuff is because this is the strategy and this is the first thing you should be doing, before you even create the video, before you even buy a camera, this strategy stuff is the stuff we need to be getting excited and hungry about. So there’s kind of 2 ways I do this, well there’s one and a half ways, I send people to some sort of lead getting page. If you’re a physical product owner, and you’re selling something very inexpensively, like my example would be an iPhone tripod mount that sells for $22, you can send people straight to the add to my cart page, because that’s like a no brainer purchase, they probably came to YouTube to look for a review and they’re ready to buy. But if you are selling something that takes a little bit more time to warm up the lead, you want to capture their contact info from YouTube, so 90% of us, that’s the strategy and that’s what I do. So send people to any type of squeeze page, sign in page, lead capture page whatever you might want to call it, after YouTube to capture their contact details. And one of the most effective ways I’ve done to do this, and it takes more work but if you have the systems down and you have the team in place, this is so powerful. I make what we call irresistible free offers or free gifts or free content that is directly related to the video that I uploaded so I am going to give you an example and in this example I get between 12 – 20 leads per day one this one video, and here’s the best part, that video has been up since October of 2012 and it has not skipped a day. 12 – 20 leads a day, boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! So I put up a video called royalty free music and all I do in the  video is demonstrate what is royalty free music, how do you use it, and where do you get it? Three minute video; and at the end of the video I give away 5 songs that I have master resell rights to, and I give away songs for free. So here’s someone who’s Googled or YouTubed royalty music, they find this video of this goofy kid, they click on the video, they’re learning everything they can about where to get music, how to use it, what not to do, and then at the end of the video instead of saying to learn more traffic click here, it says to get your hands on five free songs click here, and it’s such a higher correlation, it’s so much more of a direct connection with the viewer, and they do it, a lot of people do it, and 12 -20 a day, they click over, they go to a little squeeze page that says fill in your name and details here and I’ll send you the five songs on the next page, and so they do that, then I send them to a thank you page where they can get their songs, so we are going a little bit more advanced so hopefully you guys are with me and stay with me a little bit more here…

James R: I’m with you, this is good stuff!

James W: I send them to the thank you page and I say hey thanks so much for opting in and below this video are your 5 free songs, but real quick, while I have got you here, if you’ve enjoyed these five songs, while I have you here, I have 5 more songs for you, and in order to get those additional five songs, all you have to do is click that big fat tweet button below this video. Now what I did is I installed a little piece of software called Tweet to Unlock and when people click that Tweet button, it tweets out a link to my YouTube video or to the Royalty free music video and it will automatically give them 5 more songs. So now, I am ethically forcing all my people to share or tweet out my video and in exchange I will give them more songs, so now a couple of thousand views that have come just from Twitter that I would not have had before because I added that extra step. But now they are also on my list, and people are doing that every day, and I firmly believe that that strongly helps and looks good in YouTube’s eyes, that someone is sharing my video every single day on social media state from YouTube I think that’s huge, it keeps my video up there and it’s a very competitive keyword so that’s basically the strategy and that’s the drawing out strategy, you don’t have to make it that hard, you can have one generic opt in page or squeeze page you can send them to that, that’s what I usually do for most of my videos but every once in a while I create a very specific offer for a very specific video, and the conversion rate for the opt ins are much, much higher and much more consistent.

James R: Nice, I have got to say James that’s a pretty ninja strategy that Tweet to unlock, I love it! And actually you’ve segwayed very nicely in to my next question, I don’t know if you have planned that..

James W: Of course I did!

James R: There you go, as if we practiced it! Now I’ve seen you using some pretty ninja strategies across your YouTube channel and your site etc., I’d like to in kind of a bit of a quick fire round just ask you about each of the following, so the first one that I have seen you using that perhaps our listener hasn’t put in to play yet is a welcome video on their YouTube channel page, you use yours quite well, tell us about that?

James W: Yes, so this is called the YouTube trailer video and if you update to the new channel, which we won’t talk about here but I have a video in YouTube about it. Upgrade to the new channel design, and what they’ve done is really cool. If you have people coming to your channel for the first time, there is a special video that they get to see that you create that encourages them to become a subscriber. This is exactly like you were to create an About Me video on your website, it’s the same thing but it is more about your channel and what you want them to do. So here’s the basic template for how you could do that:  you talk about what your channel is all about and what you will do for your subscribers. What type of content will you provide, why you provide that content, what do you do for your customers, how often do you put out content, etc. You just give it an intro to like welcome to James Reynolds.tv where we share the best traffic getting strategies that you can take action on today, we upload videos twice a week, every single week. That’s it, that’s fine, I bring you the best of the best traffic experts so you can get more traffic to your website, blog or sales pages. Then you just want to give a call to action and that just simply says, make sure, we  come out with videos twice a week, or once a week, or once a month or whatever, so make sure to subscribe by clicking the subscribe button above, that way you’ll get notified when all of our content comes out. Also, if you haven’t yet, I put free video series on my favorite traffic strategies that you can get started with right now, and to access that, just click the link over on the right and you can get access to that video series now. So what you’ve done you’ve put a video welcoming people telling people what’s this all about you’ve got them as a YouTube subscriber, and believe it or not, that’s really important, I can talk about it if you want, but that just makes you much more of an authority channel and you get them to opt in as well for your free gift, free video, etc. so that’s the YouTube traffic video, pretty easy there.

James R: Nice! And what’s that little one that you slipped in the end there, is that the external links that you’re talking about where they can click on a link to take them somewhere else?

James W: So three places that they can actually click, and this is going to get a little hard without showing it cause if people have not seen the page they won’t know what I’ve been talking about. There’s three places they can click, on your channel page there is a place where you can place your channel URL so you want to make sure you have that. And if you want to go to mine then you can see that you have these three places. You can put it the URL on the channel page, you can put in the description and we can do a James is talking about an external link annotation, now this in itself has almost doubled, I believe it did double, no quadruple, it was something between 10%-15% and now it’s up to 34% so that’s a little bit more doubled my conversion rate from views to traffic so if we’re talking about traffic and getting more people off of YouTube, one of the things that I am loving right now is the fact that YouTube -not for everybody yet, they are rolling it out still so don’t get upset if your channel doesn’t have it but they’re rolling out something called an external link annotation. This is a little button that you can put inside your video, anywhere on your video, top, right, bottom, left at any time in your video, beginning, middle or end, and in your video, you can literally point to it, like click here to get that free video series, click here to get that free report, and if people click on that, it will pause your YouTube video, open up a new tab and send people wherever you want to send them, which is mainly your website or squeeze page or opt in page, etc. and that is really huge, depending on the offer we do and how we do it, we get about 34% – 37 %  of our views to go over that.

James R: That’s nice, that’s killer! And that’s something that they brought out relatively recently right? I mean it’s quite a new innovation on YouTube.

James W: Yeah, they’ve started rolling it out in January and they gave it to most channels by February – March, but from what I have been hearing, the buzz is that only the United States channels have it, but I don’t know that’s just a rumor. I just heard some other people in other countries say they don’t have it yet so we kind of made that assumption but you can assume that you will get it eventually and you’ll want to take advantage of that.

James R: Yeah, well I’ll make sure my team here check that out because that is a very sneaky strategy and I can see how having that embedded right in the video would really increase that traffic that you get from the video itself so we’ll be trying that ..

James W: And once again, you get to have a lot of fun with this, you could do things like raise your hand and be like click on my hand right now to get that free report or click on my face, you know what I mean? And like, because it’s so new, people want to do it and see what happens, that’s the funny thing.

James R: Yeah, cool! One of the things that I have seen you do very well again is use custom video thumbnails. Talk us through very briefly how that’s done and what’s the strategy because I am guessing that is probably increasing the amount of views on your videos themselves?

James W: Well sure, if you look at it this way, let’s look at Google and if you type in something we are looking for, sure, 9 times out of 10 we probably picked the first result but if someone has done a really great job to write great title tags so that they have great copy on their search results in Google, we might click the second or third or fourth results in Google, because it caught our attention because it was exactly what we’re looking for. It’s the same thing for YouTube. If I Google how to do something, and I just see some kind of ugly screenshot thumbnail, I’m like, what is that? Is that what I want? Or I see an attractive young woman and a bunch of text like how to tie a tie, I go, I know exactly what this video is all about, I know exactly what I am getting, this thing caught my eye, I’m going to click on this one even if it wasn’t the first result. So it’s an extra layer of getting people’s attention when we’re doing video SEO. So maybe your video does not rank #1, maybe it’s #2 or #3, but if you have a better thumbnail you might get clicked on when the other video doesn’t. and guess what, here’s the best part, YouTube can actually look at that and say man, everyone is clicking on #2, #3 here and bump that up, so that is extremely important plus it’s great for branding and all that so if you’re a personal brand, you have your picture in there and you have text. But either way, adding text inside the thumbnail is real simple. How to do this, you just go to your video manager, you click edit on the video, and most channels now have the option to upload a custom thumbnail. Otherwise you have to choose from three random shots that they give you on the video.

James R: And they’re always bad aren’t they? They’re always down or … I think someone inside of YouTube handpicking those thumbnails to make us look bad, I think that’s the case.

James W: Yup!

James R: Ok, the last one in this quick fire round is a piece of software and I’m sure our friend Clay Collins will thank us for mentioning this, and I have seen you use it, and it’s a piece of software called Lead Player which you are using on your site, tell us how you’re using that.

James W: This is very exciting because I have a screenshot that I have shown people that just blew my mind where I had my assistant go in and install this thing called Lead Player on all my videos that are on my blog so it does not work on YouTube, it works on your blog. I’ll tell you what it does in a second, but basically, we checked our stats about a week and a half later for AWeber to see if it helped increase our list, and I had a 400% and something increase on my daily email subscribers or opt ins, so I quadrupled my daily intake of new leads just from my blogs just by having my assistant install this thing, and I was just ecstatic! So I have been a big fan ever since. It is a real simple, simple tool; there are a couple other software companies that do this but Lead Player I like because it does just this. And anytime you get a piece of software that’s very specific on one thing, it ends up doing it really, really well and that’s what they do with Lead Player. So you can be watching one of my videos on my blog, when you watch the video, you press play, I start talking and then 10 seconds, 15 seconds, whatever, the video will pause, and will ask for an email address to continue the video, now there is an option there that you can skip it, because some people are going to be like, I have already given you my email, I just want to watch your video, but you put that up there and people opt in, people give you their contact info. People want to keep watching the video, so that’s extremely powerful and all I can say is that we tested it and it worked and I love things that work and if you have not figured it out by now, we are talking traffic but I could care less about traffic, I care about leads, traffic is just the means to get the leads and so that’s really the ultimate goal for me and it should be the ultimate goal for everybody else. We should not think about traffic as much as possible, because if it’s bad traffic, if the traffic does not take action… but if we can be putting actions and systems in place that are building your list, building your audience each and every day, you can see a direct correlation with growing your business in there.

James R: James, absolutely cool! I think we are going to draw this to a close now; I’ve got a heap of notes from today that I’m going to try to implement in my own business from what you’ve shared. Before we wrap up, tell us a little bit about your products and services, what do you do and how can you help our audience?

James W: Cool! So this one really went fast and there is a lot of stuff that we did not get to, I put a lot of stuff that I know about 5 and a half years of doing this in a very simple but proven video SEO strategy, how to create a video, optimize it per keyword, and get it ranked in YouTube and all the cool little ninja tricks that you’ve talked about today, and there’s countless more in a product called Video Traffic Academy, that’s my flagship course, and that’s where I teach everything about what we’re discussing today, and that thing is only a $100; it’s $97 and it’s been incredible because we’ve had that course for about 2 years now, we’ve had about 7,000 people go through it and it’s been an exciting journey so, yeah, that’s my main thing, but I definitely also want people to head on over and check out my YouTube channel, that would make me extremely happy if you go to my YouTube channel, youtube.com/jameswedmore and subscribe to my channel and leave me a comment there’s a lot of stuff in my videos that I share I give away in free video tips and I invite you to visit those videos when you get a chance.

James R: Awesome! We’ll make sure that each and every one of those items are linked off to in the show notes beneath this podcast, so whatever device in this interview you are listening on head on over to TrafficJamCast.com, look for James’s page and you’ll find all the links to James’s YouTube channel, his blog, Traffic Academy product, etc. So that’s your call to action today listener. James thanks for joining us today, I really appreciate your time and I had a lot of fun today.

James W: Yeah, me too. I really appreciate it.

James R: Awesome! See you!

James W: Take care.

This week’s news in traffic, well, let’s kick off with some Facebook news and the first news is that they’ve reduced the number of ad units available to advertisers by approximately half. Now we don’t know all of those ad units which are getting shoved off of Facebook lists but we do know 2 ad units that have been confirmed as redundant and they are the questions product and the offer product, Facebook said. They said that we noticed any ad units accomplished the same goal so we’re cutting out these redundancies. This includes removing the question product pages because marketers can simply ask a question in a post and get answers in comments. They then went on to say that it also means removing the online marketer product because marketers have found that using a page post link ad is a more effective way to drive people to do their deals on their website, we’re going to start making these changes as early as July.

Well, in summary, what I can see them doing here is really just making everything a little more simpler and that includes both the ad creation process and the actual offering which seem to make sense because many users on to the ad platform as possible and in doing this it simplifies things and makes it more accessible to the average advertisers.

Also out of Facebook this week, we have the news that they’ve added hash tags, a little bit more similar to Twitter and more recently Google+. Now what effect will hash tags have on traffic is yet to be seen, all we know is that Facebook have indicated that they want to push conversations surrounding public events to the top of news feeds and this is really their aim with hash tags.

Now here’s a quote from them. They simply said, to bring this conversation more to the forefront we will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people having about public events, people and topic, and as a first step we are going to be rolling out hash tags on Facebook.

A small bit of news out of Four Square, and that is they’ve been testing paid promotions and started doing so by working on a small geographic area of New York City. Now we don’t quite know when it’s going to be rolled out more globally but watch this space and we’re going to report on that when we know more.

Finally in this week’s news roundup, Ezra Firestone, our special e-commerce expert from episode#3 of Traffic Jam has just released his training product, Brown Box formula which you can get over at BrownBoxFormula.com. Now inside that product, you’re going to learn how to build a profitable drop ship physical good store. Ezra does this stuff day in day out and has built up multiple six-figure, even seven-figure e-commerce stores using the knowledge that he shares inside this product. I have been hanging out with Ezra for the past few days here in Australia, and I know how much effort and energy he’s put in to this training. He’s already getting a wealth of support and I know the quality of stuff that he shares there is extremely high that if you are looking at getting in to e-commerce, or you already have an e-commerce store that you want to leverage further, this training product will undoubtedly be the go to resource for you, so head on over to check that out, it’s at brownboxformula.com.

Traffic Jam reviews and comments: Well I had a nice comment about the site this week from Amir Anzur who was listening in to the podcasting episode with Pat Flynn who said, James and Pat, really enjoyed the content, great work, and as always, thanks for the tips. The best education people can get from real life experts. Thank you – Amir. Well, thank you Amir! For taking the time to head on over to the site and leave a comment, I really appreciate your feedback.

I have also had some really great comments in person this week, of course I am in an event here in Sydney and one of the people I have caught up with was Andrew Pototschnik from Marketing expert who said Traffic Jam is one of the very few podcasts he listens in to regularly and knowing that Andrew is a very high level marketer who knows his stuff, that’s a really nice endorsement, so thank you Andrew for listening in.

I also had a nice comment from Ashwinth who said that he too listened in to Traffic Jam Cast regularly and really enjoys the content and again it’s one of the very few podcasts he listens to all the time so really nice in to

be getting the feedback that we are, if you too have a comment, or some feedback, either positive or negative, I would love to hear from you. Head on over to TrafficJamCast.com and leave a comment beneath the episode that you are listening or of course log in to iTunes and leave us a review there. I really do appreciate all the feedback we get and it really helps to make a better show for you. So whatever your comments and feedback, I would love to hear from you.

The one minute traffic tip, well I’ve got a super, super, super simple traffic strategy for you this week, but hey, it may not be that sexy, but simple is always the most effective and I know that when you apply this week’s tip, you will get great results. As marketers, we do know to look out for hungry, passionate crowds who just literally devour whatever products or services that we offer. Online, some of the most hungry passionate crowds tend to hang out on forums and Facebook groups, perhaps a community that builds around a particular interest or vocation, or whatever it is that you perhaps offer as a service, so as I said, not particularly sexy stuff; all you’ve got to do is find these groups, sign up to them, deliver value by answering questions and solving problems within those forums and groups and then over time what you’ll be able to do is build up trust and pull people away from these communities to your own products and services and that’s simply by telling people what you do and perhaps adding in a link to your website in your forum signature or just literally posting about it in those groups on Facebook. Super simple traffic strategy, go try it out this week, and let me know how you get on.

Ok, so that rounds out episode #11 of Traffic Jam, of course, I will be doing it all again next week so stay tuned for episode#12. Rounding out this week’s episode is an old school track, one that’s quite topical for me because so many friends have been going off to see this band in recent weeks. The track is A Fools Gold, and the band is Stone Roses. So enjoy the track, I’ll see you back next week.