In today’s article, we’re going to be celebrating, hitting 5,000 subscribers by answering your questions around YouTube, entrepreneurship, and digital marketing. All of these questions were sent in via email or left on YouTube community posts.
YouTube Questions
- What motivated me to start my YouTube channel?
Honestly, it really came down to a combination of being in lockdown last year to also having just this itch to want to exercise my creative muscles. And this was something that was really hard when everything was shut down. And so it was something that I turned to YouTube for because for years, I had considered making a channel, but I’d never actually taken action. So I finally said upon doing so and trying to answer all the common questions that I had thought of when I was first learning digital marketing, sales, and entrepreneurship as a whole.
We’re at an exciting time period in which I really think the creator economy is growing exponentially and that anyone can be a creator if they so choose.
2. What are my goals for YouTube?
Right now, honestly, my goals are just input based. And so my next goal for YouTube is just to hit 200 quality videos within two years. And so this is something in which it really goes back to what I’ve shared in my earlier videos at my 50 video in 100 video mark, in which my goal, when I started out this channel was not a subscriber goal, but actually just to provide high quality content on a weekly basis for two solid years.
So right now I’m about a year and some change into this process. And so I’m looking forward to just wrapping up those first two years and putting the work in. That said, for those that are curious, social blade thinks that I’m going to hit 10,000 subscribers by April 9th 2022. So you should check to see whether or not I actually hit that or miss that mark at that point in time.
3. How do you speak for so long sometimes without stopping?
Honestly, this just comes down to practice coupled with some helpful and effective video editing by my editors. This is something that simply takes a little bit of time and you get a lot better at, with more repetitions.
After I’d done a hundred videos, I became much more comfortable in front of the camera. And then coupled with my past experiences, I grew up doing a lot of public speaking in school and in competitions and such. And so that was really helpful along with having run a team of 25 people where I was doing weekly presentations to my team. So this is something which I’m really used to and comfortable to just speaking on the cuff about different things.
4. Who do I look up to on YouTube?
This is a great question. I would say Kevin Stratvert is probably the channel that I look to emulate the most. This is because he provides high quality educational content every single week. It’s no frills and pretty much just getting straight to the point and providing value to his viewers so that they consistently know what to expect from him.
It also doesn’t hurt that he’s an early subscriber of this channel. I think he subscribed back when I was first starting out and I was leaving some comments on his channel, but I just really value how Kevin has gone about building his channel over the years.
And personally, I think that I would be good friends with him if we were to actually know each other in really life. Aside from just his quality of content though, something that I think relates closely to me is that he spent the bulk of his career in the tech world when I also come from the tech world as well. And so it’s just having some similarities there and seeing a career that’s a little bit further ahead of you in their YouTube journey.
5. If you could start over, what is one thing you would do differently?
I would say that I would have not necessarily made those Facebook Marketplace videos. It’s something in which I created those topics, because I thought that it was something I could speak to and start to get comfortable with making videos.
But what I quickly realized was that you never really know which of your videos are going to hit it. And in that case, I kind of struck gold on my first few videos. And those actually became a large driver of my views. And so it led me down this rabbit hole where it had to create a ton of Facebook videos to keep the momentum there. And I didn’t necessarily feel all that passionate about that particular topic.
So if I were to start all over again, I would focus on just one core theme of my channel. It is something I’m still working on because personally, I struggled to talk about the same thing over and over again, but I think that that’s really what helps you build momentum on YouTube in the early days.
Entrepreneurship questions
- How would you encourage someone to cultivate their entrepreneurial skills?
What I’d say here is don’t make it rocket science, just think about two or three things that you’re particularly good at and then create a certain offer or service that you think might be valuable to people that aren’t as good at you at that particular thing.
That’s one of the best ways that you can start to hone your entrepreneurship skillset because essentially what you’re going to be teaching yourself are all the fundamentals to what it means to actually create a business of value. Business ultimately comes down to creating value for another person and packaging that in some sort of way that’s helpful and creates a win-win for both you and for them.
I think a lot of times people overcomplicate things. They spend way too much time watching videos about entrepreneurship and they don’t realize that taking a step back a business is ultimately identifying a problem that you think that you can solve for. From there creating a product or service that can help solve that. Finding the people that you think would be finding this particular offer service helpful. And then from there, actually delivering on that product or service.
2. How do you know so much about a variety of topics like digital marketing and sales?
Well, the honest answer is I had to learn it by myself. It was at a time in which I was working in a business where we had no customers and no revenue. And so we had to find a way to generate that, and we didn’t have all that much money to find these sorts of new prospects. And so I had to dig into different books, blogs, and so on to learn everything by myself and then get those experience points.
And so I spent those first few years literally talking to a ton of prospects, pitching multiple times over and then generating the first few million in sales before then scaling up a team of 25 people that essentially helped me scale that business as well. And so just from having that experience, being open to experimentation, coupled with outside learnings and things like that, allow me to know what I know today.
3. What do you think makes a great entrepreneur?
This is a really good question. And I think my answer would be that a really good entrepreneur knows themselves really well. And they doubled down in the areas where they know that they excel. And then what they’re good at is identifying other people that they can bring into their team to bolster the areas where they’re weak at.
In other words, it’s by doubling down on their strengths, that they’re able to create immense value for their customers. And this is just a skill that different entrepreneurs have different varying levels of ability and identifying. But I think that the great ones are always really good at this. These entrepreneurs know that if they just provide a world-class experience, that everything else will follow in terms of those traditional measures of success.
Digital Marketing questions
- If I use a free WordPress theme and never do changes on my site because I’m not good at coding, is there any possibility of the website theme owner will automatically update my website theme?
The answer to this is yes, but what you need to do is log into your WordPress admin dashboard and then setup checking automatically for updates and then installing those updates. That way, whenever the theme is updated, then your WordPress instance is also going to update that theme.
2. Can someone ask my site? If yes, please tell me how we can protect from this attack.
There are tons of different ways that you can protect your sites. And yes, hacking is always going to be risks that you take when you create a website. A good place to start though, as Cloudflare, they have some free tools that essentially allow you to prevent some brute force attacks or DDoS attacks on your site that will filter through a number of the attempts there.
And then on the other side of things, if you’re using WordPress, I like to use the plugin WP All In One Security. They have a ton of different features that you can go through to essentially make your site more secure. It will lock down certain things like common vulnerabilities that hackers will use in order to try to access your WordPress admin panel.
The other thing that I’ll do in addition to that is I will also limit the log-in attempts on my admin dashboard. That way it’ll lock out that particular IP address for a certain period of time to prevent brute force from happening into your particular site.
3. I’ve seen people take backups to their website. Can a whole website get deleted? If so, how can you secure your website from this happening?
This really goes back to the prior question around prevention. It’s about taking the steps before it happens to actually protect yourself. Again, combining just Cloudflare, coupled with a firewall plugin and some other things would be helpful here for you in terms of protecting yourself.
4. What is keyword cannibalization and how you can find it?
This is a great question. Keyword cannibalization is essentially when you create content around a particular topic and they are very similar to other content pieces that you’ve already created.
And then what happens is Google really struggles in figuring out which page to prioritize. So it actually prioritizes just one over the other. And that one starts eating away at the traffic of the other clusters. The best way to check this out for yourself and find it is to identify clusters of URLs that have similar topics, and then see how the date that you introduced that particular post has impacted or potentially impacted the other posts that you previously released at the same time.
And then also what you can do is you can log into a paid SEO tool, like an Ahrefs or SEMRush, or you can use a free tool like an UberSuggest, and then essentially look through your pages rankings to see exactly which pages are actually getting picked up more prominently than the other pages that might be getting cannibalized.
5. How many keywords should you put on a page?
There’s really no hard and fast rule here. It used to be in the earlier days that there would be a lot of keyword packing into particular content pieces. And that’s something you do want to avoid. My general guidance here is just do what seems natural and incorporating primary keywords coupled with latent semantic indexing keywords into your particular post.
I don’t follow any of the particular ratios that people talk about. In my opinion, that’s just a bunch of pseudoscience. And so what I really focus on is training my writers to write towards intent and fully fulfilling the intent of what is being searched for. If you want my advice on how to learn SEO on a budget, you can check out my five steps to do so in my recent article over here.
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen.