Eric Enge: Hi. I’m Eric Enge of Perficient Digital. I’m here today with Greg Jarboe, co-founder and president of SEO-PR and author of the book, “YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day,” and we’re going to have some fun talking about some things that people don’t really necessarily know about success in video marketing, and YouTube in particular.
Greg Jarboe: You want me to give away the secret sauce?
Eric Enge: I do.
Greg Jarboe: Oh, man. OK.
Eric Enge: (Said with a smile) I mean, I invited you to our facilities for that explicit purpose. So, let’s dig in. You were telling me just a moment ago about this guy – I apologize, I forget his name – that has this really unique spin on marketing on YouTube. Why don’t you tell me that story?
Greg Jarboe: The guy is named Ray William Johnson, and if you don’t know Ray, that’s OK, you should find out about Ray. Part of the reason why I use Ray as an example in the courses that I teach at Rutgers, for example, is Ray made a million dollars last year in selling advertising on YouTube next to his channel.
Eric Enge: That sounds like a pretty interesting sum of money, and I think you mentioned to me that he had this really unusual insight into how he got people to respond to the ads.
Greg Jarboe: Right. So, Ray has done a number of things right. First of all, he’s funny enough that people watch his videos (and let me put the emphasis on “funny enough.”) They’re also interested in subscribing to his channel partly because he does two new, original videos a week on Tuesdays and Fridays, and he’s got 5.8 million subscribers.
Eric Enge: Wow.
Greg Jarboe: People who say, “Please send me an e-mail the next time one of Ray’s new videos goes up,” so that’s a following. And then what Ray figured out ahead of everybody else is that if people were watching his videos, laughing at his humor, and then going on and doing something else, Ray would remain a poor, starving comedian for the rest of his career. So Ray’s innovation, the one that I show in the classes that I teach that wakes the students up, it’s like, “Say what? He did what?” is Ray has got a couple of things in the middle of each video called “Cool Transition.”
So he does a video that is broken into three parts. And between part one and two, and part two and three, there’s this quote, “cool transition,” and the cool transition is anything but. It’s actually quite boring. It’s actually quite monotonous. It’s actually quite predictable. It’s the part of the video where you start glancing around and seeing what other things are there.
Eric Enge: Right.
Greg Jarboe: And oh, by the way, among the other things that are there are advertisers, and it’s either next to his video, or underneath his video, wherever they have decided to advertise. And what Ray discovered is that when he was slightly boring for a couple of seconds, people would glance around, the click-through rate on the ads next to his videos or superimposed on the bottom of his videos, would go up, and Ray would make more money.
So, as he explained it, it’s like, “If they’re all rolling on the floor laughing, I stay in the poor house.”
Eric Enge: Right.
Greg Jarboe: “If I’m slightly boring… If there’s a speed bump in-between the episodes, where they glance around, that’s money I can take to the bank.”
Eric Enge: So this is where we pause for a second to be boring so people will click on the ads. Oh, wait. I’m actually not running any ads for this video.
Greg Jarboe: Why not? You know, in the old days it used to take a certain threshold before you could become a YouTube partner. It was hard to do.
These days, all you have to do is fill out a form. YouTube is really interested in monetizing more and more of the videos. You could become a YouTube partner this afternoon.
Eric Enge: There you go. That’s great. So the insight, if you are trying to make your money by advertising on YouTube, is to allow the opportunity for the person to get distracted, because if your content is continuously compelling from end-to-end, they don’t click.
Greg Jarboe: That’s right. And so it’s like the equivalent of the bathroom break in television.
Eric Enge: Right.
Greg Jarboe: You’ve got to give people a moment to come up for air, look around, and that is a programming discovery I don’t think most people understand.
Eric Enge: That’s awesome. Well, great. Thanks, Greg. I appreciate the opportunity to get that great tip from you, and we’ll shoot another video real soon.
Greg Jarboe: OK.
About Greg
Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR and author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day. He is also one of the 25 most successful online marketing gurus profiled in Michael Miller’s “Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus”, published by Wiley in 2008.
