Working Through Different YouTube Strategies with Alastair McDermott

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Joe Casabona: How often should you publish? Should you use affiliate links? Do those 30-day challenges really help? Alastair McDermott and I are both relative beginners of our YouTube journeys. And we’re each taking different approaches, hopefully ones that suit our needs and goals appropriately.

Listen in as we talk about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and of course, why. We’ll also tell you why your phone is the best camera for you and your channel, something I covered recently on a previous episode.

In Build Something More we talk about when we’ve each bartered for work. It’s always a great conversation when Alastair and I get together. And I’m really excited for you to hear it because we’re covering YouTube a lot this year.

I am using YouTube, both to monetize my business, as well as separately to build authority in the podcasting space. And so we each talk about different approaches for that. I think it’s going to be really great.

This episode, by the way, is brought to you by Ahrefs and Nexcess. You’ll hear about them later on in the show. And you can learn more about them as well as find all of the show notes and a special offer over atstreamlined.fm/257.

But for now, let’s get to the intro and the interview.

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Intro: Hey, everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

[00:02:51] <podcast begins>

Joe Casabona: Real quick before we jump into the interview, we’ve been talking a lot about content and content planning on this show as of late. And YouTube particularly has been a big topic of conversation. But planning and staying organized with all of this content can be hard.

If you’re not sure how to plan and lay out your content strategy, I have a free resource available for you over at streamlined.fm/airtable. If you go to streamlined.fm/airtable, you can get the free content planners built with Airtable that I actually use to plan the content for both this podcast and my YouTube channel.

This will help you log ideas, stay organized, and keep your content production moving. It creates a schedule for you with various statuses, it allows you to log ideas and everything that I do and recommend if you’re producing a ton of content.

Again, you can find that over at streamlined.fm/airtable. It is completely free. And if you are planning content, no matter if it’s for a podcast, YouTube, or even your blog, this is something that you definitely need.

Joe Casabona: All right, welcome, welcome. I am here with Alastair McDermott. He’s a good friend of mine. He’s been on the show before—a repeat guest—but we talk regularly. And today we’re talking about content creation for authors and speakers building YouTube.

We have different approaches to our YouTube channels. We discussed this at the end of 2021, but I thought it would be a fun conversation for us today to talk about our strategies and kind of how we’re doing YouTube, what we want to use YouTube for either to build authority or make money, and all that fun stuff. So let’s bring in Alastair.

Alastair, how are you doing today?

Alastair McDermott: Joe, I’m doing good. I think this is a really interesting topic, so I’m delighted to be here to talk to you about it. YouTube for me has become more of a focus. I renovated my office and I wanted to make it kind of a little bit more YouTuber style. I did some work for an interior designer, so I got her to return the favor. And so she helped me make the office look pretty cool. So I have what makes for a decent studio if I want to do some video.

Joe Casabona: That’s fantastic. Actually, maybe this is something that we could talk about in Build Something More, the members-only part of the episode for the Creator Crew, which you can get over at joincreatorcrew.com. But bartering for work, I’ve only bartered a couple of times. And members will know, if they listen, what I bartered for.

But YouTube has become more of a focus for you, likewise for me. By the way I see your office; it looks really good. But YouTube has become more of a focus for me as well. Gosh, I guess around the time the pandemic started, I started doing more live streams and putting real effort into my YouTube videos.

And I kind of lucked into… I did one on the Sony a6400. Kind of how to set this 4k camera up if you’re not a photographer. And that is still my top-performing video. But since then I’ve been putting a lot more effort into it. My channel is monetized. But this year I want to kind of get off the hamster wheel of the pressure of publishing weekly and just publish good content.

First, let’s talk a little bit about who are you? What do you do? If anybody missed the live coaching episode, which I will link to in the show notes.

Alastair McDermott: What I do is I help consultants and experts who are invisible, who are not really kind of known to the world. I help them to become more visible to build authority. So I like to say I help them remove their cloak of invisibility. Like, you know, when in Harry Potter when they’re wearing this cloak and you can’t see them? And then you take off the cloak and be visible to the world.

So what it’s really about is it’s really about this journey to authority going from being this expert who’s really good at what you do, but nobody knows who you are, and becoming a recognized authority in your field. And so I have a podcast called The Recognized Authority.

Joe Casabona: I will link that in the show notes as well. You can find, by the way, all the show notes over at streamlined.fm/257 for Episode 257. But yeah, Recognize Authority, I’ve been a guest on that show. That’s one of the few shows I listen to weekly.

Actually, the episode that kicked off this year, not my yearly theme episode, the first guest, Rochelle Moulton, was a guest that I heard on Alastair’s podcast that I knew I had to get to set the tone for Season 11 of How I Built It.

Alastair McDermott: Wow, cool. And she is my only repeat guest so far. And yeah, Rochelle was great.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, fantastic. I read her book. I mean, I don’t want this to be a commercial for her book but I read her book, and it’s great and I love it. So I guess I’ll have to link to her episode too. That was Episode 249.

Alastair McDermott: So that is The Authority Code by Rochelle Moulton.

Joe Casabona: Yes, very good, The Authority Code.

Alastair McDermott: So I’m going to so the advertisement.

Joe Casabona: Yes, love it. I’ll link her episode in the show notes. So YouTube has become more of a focus. You help experts remove their cloak of invisibility. I love that. Because I established my authority in a very different area several years ago, publishing a couple of books on WordPress development. And now I’m pivoting to decidedly not WordPress development.

And making that pivot has been a little bit hard. I didn’t just pick up a new topic and be like, “I’m going to be an expert in this now.” I’ve actually been doing the work and learning the craft over the last five or seven years maybe. And now I’m kind of ready to make that move.

So, when you talk about YouTube, do you see this as an authority-building avenue for people?

Alastair McDermott: I think so. I mean, all of the publishing channels can help you build your authority in different ways. So, for example, you can self-publish a book or you can commercially publish a book. And those have different indicators. YouTube is just another.

The great thing about YouTube is it can really create a connection and help build trust because you’re actually seeing the person on the screen. It’s kind of bit more personal when you see somebody on video like that.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Actually, Jess Freeman talked about that a couple of months ago on this show, how she uses YouTube for that exact thing. She uses it to generate leads and build trust. And she’s a web designer, web developer, and so people see her kind of talk about things that she does.

And they’re not tutorials, right? Because those tutorials—and this was an epiphany I came to during my conversation with her—tutorials are for do it yourselfers. And if I’m trying to target do it yourselfers, then I have these tutorials. But if I want people to hire me to do it for them, I should just tell them everything they need to do and why they need to do it. And then they’ll be like, “Oh, I should hire Joe to do that for me.”

Alastair McDermott: Yeah. I think that there’s going to be some people who see the tutorial and say, “Okay, I don’t want to do this but I know Joe can do it, so I’ll hire him for that.” I don’t really see too much difference between those two different types of video.

I just had Marcus Sheridan on the show, and one example he gave in our interview was, he said, “Look, if you’re a technical SEO person and you’re a technical SEO consultant, and you explain to the client how to do technical SEO, they’re going to say, like, ‘Take my money. They just don’t want to do that because it’s just such a pain.'”

So I think if you display the knowledge of doing something, then people know that they can trust you to do that for them. And that’s enough.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Show people that you know what you’re talking about. Because I mean, there’s a lot of snake oil on the internet. As we record this… Ga, I don’t want to start a controversy or anything.

Alastair McDermott: There’s enough out there already.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. As we record this, there’s a little bit of a controversy going on with Spotify and Joe Rogan. And no matter what side of the coin you fall, what side of the aisle you fall too on that, I guess, Joe Rogan is giving a platform to people that may or may not be agreeable or disagreeable to you. Is that enough of a line to straddle?

I think it’s important that if you say you can do something you need to be able to show people evidence that you can write before they hire you. It’s easier than ever to find that evidence now, I guess, is what I’m saying.

Alastair McDermott: I think for some things, there seems to be kind of lower bars for evidence.

Joe Casabona: Yes.

Alastair McDermott: But let’s just say that for most intents and purposes, it is good to have something out there that shows you know what you’re talking about, you can actually do what you say you do. So I think that YouTube is a great way to do that because people can see you on the camera, they can see you talk, and they can see you demonstrating whatever it is that you do, whether that be a screen capture, or you’re physically doing something in person on camera or whatever that is. So I think that’s a great way to kind of build that trust.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I know for some people, you know, I think the generation behind us maybe is the first generation who have said things like, “I want to be a professional YouTuber when I grow up.” Because there are people who make a ton of money just off of YouTube. I think the vast majority of people are not doing that. My channel is monetized but you know I can’t feed my kids off of the YouTube monetization only.

Alastair McDermott: Talking about that, my take on this: I will be able to monetize my YouTube channel far more if I get one client every quarter than I ever would through ads. So I don’t ever intend to turn on monetization. I can’t right now; it’s not big enough to. But even when it is… You should go and subscribe to The Recognized Authority YouTube channel by the way.

So even when it grows to the point that I can monetize it, you know that you’ll never have to watch ads there because it’s far more likely for me to… I’m far more profitable to bring in one new client. That’s the reality for a lot of I think b2b expert businesses.

If you’re selling something that’s more of a b2c commodity, so that’s business to consumer, if you’re selling something that’s more consumer-focused, then I think monetization may work really well for you. But if you’re doing something that’s more b2b, I think that monetization… I would just look at other options as well and just kind of maybe plug the numbers into a spreadsheet and see what it looks like.

Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting because my channel is monetized. I have ads turned on—something that I probably shouldn’t guarantee. But the way I’m feeling right now, I can’t ever see myself turning on the mid roll or in video ads, where like the video gets interrupted unless I can determine the exact point the ad is put in. And you can’t do that on YouTube. So if I can say like, “All right, now we’re going to take a break so you can watch this ad or whatever.” But they don’t. They just kind of insert it where they think it’s best.

And mine’s monetized partially because… I mean, it’s a fine revenue stream for me. But I feel like that gives me a little bit of extra authority because I’m teaching people how to create consistent content, and how to make money doing it. And so this is a little badge that like, Okay, I make money through podcast sponsors, I make money through affiliate links, and I make money just from my YouTube videos.

Alastair McDermott: I think it makes sense for two reasons there actually. Number one, to show that you can do it. And number two, is because you’re continuously learning and experimenting with the system, which I think is important if you want to talk to people about it, that you’re actually doing what you’re talking about, so that you can learn and show, “Hey, there’s something new here. Here you go.”

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Alastair McDermott: I’m giving you a free pass on this one, Joe. You’re okay.

Joe Casabona: Thank you. I appreciate that. Now, similarly, I have another channel called Podcast Liftoff. The main goal of that is to get more podcasting clients or podcast consulting clients. I can’t see myself monetizing that channel for the reasons you just said.

Alastair McDermott: I’ll give you one other example. In my podcast interviews, usually I ask the guests—Actually, I think I’ve done in every episode—I ask the guests at the end for business book recommendations and fiction book recommendations just because I’m interested in what people read and I’m a big reader.

But I’m never going to have an Amazon affiliate link on there. Because the amount of money that I would make off of book sales would be so negligible. I think it kind of would cheapen it a little bit. So I’m just not doing that. I’m just not putting in affiliate links there. Again, it’s just the same kind of idea.

It also allows me to say, “Hey, there’s no affiliate links on my site. So I have a free eBook on how to set up your video and microphone to sound better look better. So I have that, and I don’t have any affiliate links in there either.” It just allows me to say, “Hey, look, this is pure, unbiased information. There’s no affiliate links or anything like that.”

I’m not saying that you would be biased if the word affiliate links in there, but you’re definitely not if there’s none. So it just allows me to say that. I think it just allows you to stay a bit more premium, to be slightly up the ladder in terms of how you come across.

Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. This is, I think, where our approaches differ a little bit. Your sole purpose is helping other people establish their authority. My purpose in my content is to monetize the content and then to show people how to do it.

But again, I don’t ask people specifically what books they read. I feel like if I did that, then it would be like a thinly veiled excuse to have at least one affiliate in all of my show notes. But I don’t. If a book comes up and… Well, actually, more often than not now they’re not because my VA puts together my notes, and I haven’t instructed her to just use… Like, she’ll just find the title on Amazon. I mean, the point still stands, right?

I do have a bunch of content with affiliate links because my mission is to help people monetize their content, and I want to show them the ways to do it. I guess I can’t say this definitively, but most of the time in my premium content, there are no affiliate links. Or I should say it’s not only affiliate links. Because I have these toolkits and you’ll see people put together these lists…

Actually, here’s a perfect example. I was looking for a good hammer. The first link I clicked on was basically just the top 10 hammers when you do an Amazon search. And I’m like, “This is not the best hammers. This is just the hammers that get bought the most.”

I went to I think Bob Vila’s website and the first hammer I saw was a hammer I’d never heard of. So you know, he has the authority. And even if he is using affiliate links there, that’s just content being monetized, but he’s already established as authority. I hope I made that point well.

Alastair McDermott: Yeah. I think one example of where this is done the wrong way is if you look for any kind of website hosting company and just look at the article’s affiliate links. You’ll find all these articles, you know, the top 10 hosting companies. They are never the top 10 hosting companies. They’re the top 10 affiliate commission-based company. So don’t trust anything that you read about hosting online. That’s the problem. And that’s what I’m trying to move away from.

And look, I know that a lot of people make money and make a good living as affiliates. I’m not saying that you know that… It’s not like it’s every affiliate out there who’s doing this. Some people are just trying to monetize what they do. I think there’s just like this line that you have to tread.

And I know that one thing that some people do is they say, “Okay, I’ll never give an affiliate link for something that I haven’t used myself, that I stand over, that I can recommend.” That’s one way to go, you know.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. That is more often than not my approach. I’ll always put in my affiliate link for my recommended hosting company. Oh, actually, they’re a sponsor of this podcast. So Nexcess. So actually, the link here is not going to be an affiliate link because that’s another thing I don’t do. If they’re giving me money for the sponsorship, I’m not going to double dip.

Alastair McDermott: Right.

Joe Casabona: I tell people, and if you’re listening to the ad-supported version of this episode, you’ll hear me say it, I host all of my important sites on Nexcess. That’s the God’s honest truth. I don’t feel any qualms about using an affiliate link there.

The same thing with ConvertKit. I run all of my email marketing stuff through ConvertKit. So I’m not going to throw a MailChimp affiliate link in there because I don’t really use MailChimp, or I’m not going to throw an Active Campaign affiliate link in there because I don’t use Active Campaign.

I think you’re right, putting your money where your mouth is that way. But I think you’re right, especially about the hosting company articles, right? It’s like you’re basically selling that article to the highest bidder. And that’s not the best way to do it.

I have a page like that but it’s basically like, “Use this host if you do this. Use this host if you do this.” And they’re not even all affiliate links. Again, they’re affiliate links for the hosting companies I use.

Cool. That was a nice discussion about monetizing and YouTube and affiliate links. Let’s talk about our approaches to creating the YouTube videos. I try to publish on each channel fortnightly. Opposite weeks. So this week, as we record this, a video on Podcast Liftoff will be coming out. Last week a video came out on my main channel. This is up from a video on each channel every week.

Alastair McDermott: Right. I’ll kind of give the high level overview of my thinking on this and then we can kind of break it down from there. So I did a training course with Video Creators, that Tim Schmoyer’s company. So what we did, it was an eight-week course. It really was very much for established YouTubers. I was very much the newbie in the room. It was fascinating. It was really interesting course.

What I took from it, and I’m going to boil it down, I’m just going to give you the 80/20 because I kind of ignored 80% of it, that I felt okay, “This is not for me right now. I might go back and implement some of it,” and things like that.” But I didn’t feel like it was right for me right now.

What I took from it was the content that I create is educational content. That’s the type of content. And it’s business focused. In fact, it may even come across as boring if it’s not absolutely perfectly for you if you’re not in my target market.

But what I took from it was I need to make my educational content more interesting and more entertaining. So what I need to do is I need to bring in more storytelling into it in particular. And I also should look at bringing in like elements of the three-act structure or the hero’s journey into how I actually plan the videos.

Also, I want to raise the quality of the videos that I’m making, so keep them high quality. And I’m not just talking about the actual image quality. I’m talking about, you know, the whole thing should be put together well. It should be well planned.

I’m kind of thinking that these should be almost, not quite, but almost TV ready documentaries. I don’t know if we get the same discovery channel over here as you guys get in the States. But on the Discovery Channel, there’s these some quite terrible garage shows or garage shows where they take cars and they rebuild them or they’re building motorbikes or whatever.

Usually all of these TV shows, the premise is the same. They start out with or a motorbike, or something to build or repair or fix or do up. And whatever the show is, they’re all very similar. By the end of the show, they managed to get put it all together, and they show that before in the after, and it’s all great.

But during that show, there’s always some tension. There’s always like a deadline or a budget. Or in the case of the motorbike guys, there was usually true chairs at each other and had big, big, big arguments or something. I think everybody knows guys I’m talking about.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I am from where that show was shot.

Alastair McDermott: So you know what I’m talking about. There’s always some tension. There’s always something going on in the background. Like it’s not about the actual building. It’s not about screwing bolts onto a motorbike or painting a car. It’s not actually about the process of that. There’s always a story around it.

And I’m not saying those shows are perfect. They are not. But they’re really sticky. And what I mean by that is they hook people. You kind of you’re flicking channels and you start watching one and you kind of just… And again, they’re not for everybody, but I find that model works really well.

And so I’m wondering what elements of that, how can I make my videos more sticky in that way to get people to keep watching, to be interested, to add a little bit more attention to them? A lot of that is true story and storytelling.

So that’s something I really want to bring in. I’m kind of looking at doing less videos, but making them better quality. So that’s kind of my approach.

Joe Casabona: I have a point on that I’m really excited to make. But just to drive home your point about the tension and the stickiness, I try to relate things back to Star Wars whenever I can. One of the reasons that “Rogue One” got kind of lampooned as a not very good movie is because there’s no tension. It’s a movie about how the Death Star plans were acquired.

I was super interested in that because I like the Star Wars lore. But there are no stakes. We know they get the plans. We know the death star gets blown up. We know that these characters that we’re seeing don’t make it into a new hope. So we know what happens to them in the end, more or less. There was virtually no tension because we knew already how the movie ended.

If you’re into Star Wars and you like the standard kind of Star Wars telling mold, that doesn’t work for you. It’s kind of another reason I think “The Book of Boba Fett” is not working for a lot of people. There’s more tension, but it doesn’t feel as sticky unless you’re like my type of Star Wars fan where I like Star Wars stuff. I am not a Star Wars fan who hates Star Wars. But I’m also not like a casual fan of sci-fi. I’m like in the middle. I will just like any canon Star Wars story.

Alastair McDermott: Okay. You and I are not going to get on Trek for life.

Joe Casabona: I’m sorry. My dad’s a Star Trek fan as well, not a Star Wars fan. I live in harmony with Star Trek fans. So about the quality over quantity, by the time this episode comes out, I think this piece will be available on my blog. But I am working on a 30-day challenge called One Good Thing or One Thing Well. I forgot what domain I was able to pick up.

But you see all these challenges on Twitter, right? Tweet 100. Matt Ragland is doing… I’m putting out a podcast episode every day in January. Dickie Bush does the Ship 30 for 30. And I don’t think any of these challenges are good or healthy for creators because what you’re basically just doing is telling them to churn out whatever they can churn out. Maybe they get a process in place, but it’s definitely not a long-term thing.

So the challenge that I’m working on that I want to do is, hey, take something, work on it for 30 days, release what you have at the end of those 30 days and maybe tweet about the progress you’ve made each day. I didn’t prep Alastair on this either. So I’m curious to know what you think about that.

Alastair McDermott: I’m going to go ahead and disagree with you.

Joe Casabona: All right, yes. Here’s the tension. This is a cold open for the podcast.

Alastair McDermott: I’ve got no virtual chair that I can throw at you. So the listner is just going to imagine that, you know, these folding chair making its way through the ether towards your face.

Joe Casabona: Have to put a sound effect in there.

Alastair McDermott: Right. The thing is I think you have to put the reps in at some point. I think a lot of people are just going to procrastinate. And so if you say, okay, work away in the darkroom for 30 days, and then come show us what you got. And I know you talked about saying you’re making progress into that. But most people are just not going to do it.

Joe Casabona: Okay.

Alastair McDermott: I think if you say, “I’m going to work in public,” then you’re actually going to put the reps in, and you’re going to put it out in public. By the way, I’m not saying that you leave all of those videos open. Like I have deleted and removed a lot of my older videos that just don’t meet the standard.

What I want is that when people go look at my YouTube channel, and they watch all the videos, I’m hoping that I’ll have more as time goes on, but every time if they watch all of them, that none of them stick out as, “That isn’t very good quality in terms of content or production or anything like that.”

I want them to all be like at a… I’m going to say like a B standard. And by that I mean like the grade system like A, B, C, D. Most of my old videos are like a D or an E. So I want to get it up to like a B or a B+. I’m not saying it has to be like Hollywood levels of production quality but I do want them to be decent.

But I do think you have to put in the reps. I think you don’t learn how to swim by reading a book. You got to get into the water at some point. And so I think what those challenges do is they force you to get into the water. And that’s where they’re useful.

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Joe Casabona: So does the mindset matter then? You’re not going in saying, “All right, I’m only…” Because like, okay, Jay Clouse, I did his Tweet100 Challenge. Felt like work, but it did work. My Twitter following increased dramatically over that time.

And then on the 100th day, he said, “Let’s do Tweet365.” I think that felt like… I’m not going to say a bait and switch because it’s definitely working for me. Like charges some amount of money per quarter to have a Tweet100 community now. So he’s obviously monetized it in a way that I have been unable to do so far. But is it the mindset? Okay, well, I’m doing like Dickie Bush’s Ship 30 for 30. I know, I’m not going to publish daily in perpetuity.

Alastair McDermott: Now, one thing is if you do train yourself to work that way, working daily… I mean, if you can publish daily, you’re incrementally going to improve so much over time. It’s going to be massive. When you go from the first day to the last…

It’s like going to the gym. If you work out every day, and uh, okay, there’s issues there with talking about working out. But let’s say you go to the gym every single day, you’re not going to see results after two weeks or three weeks. Well, you might see results after three weeks. But after a year, you’re going to be a totally different person than you were when you started.

So there is the equivalence. No matter what kind of content you’re creating, you’re just going to improve over time by doing it and doing it and doing it. Now, it’s good to do that in some sort of supervised manner, where, you know, people are saying, “Hey, you could improve by doing this, you can improve by doing that,” which is I think where the guided part of the challenges comes in. But I think there is just something about putting in reps on a regular basis. I think there is an advantage to that.

Joe Casabona: Okay, all right. I agree that you need to get your reps in. The thing maybe I’ll have to… maybe this is like I’m workshopping the copy for this challenge right now. But for me, I think about the long term. Let me tell you. What started this whole thing off was another guy talked about how he… Dickie Bush retweeted this guy. I forget his name but I’m going to check out one of his books.

He said he published four books last year and this year he wants to publish eight books. And I’m thinking, “Now it just seems like you’re publishing for the sake of publishing because writing a book is hard. And it’s not something that you could… You know, not everybody’s James Patterson where the guy puts out like 100 books a year. I think it’s unreasonable to be like, yeah, you could publish a book every six weeks.

Alastair McDermott: I’m just thinking of Alan Weiss, who is a consultant. He wrote the Million Dollar Consultants. And he’s written 63 other books. I think he’s at 64 books right now, which is just insane. Like they’ve been translated in a whole bunch of different languages. That model has worked so well. And he is a machine.

So it works for some people, you know… How do I put it? The super frequent publishing model, let’s say. I, like you, wrote a book about WordPress back in the day. Mine was more aimed at business owners and I self-published it. And I moved away from that niche long time ago. But at the same time, it was good to write and to publish something.

And I did see an improvement when I started writing my next book, which is about niching down. That’s actually with the publisher at the moment. Have niche down.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Alastair McDermott: I haven’t got a working title for that but that’s kind of what the topic is, how to specialize your expert business. So it was so much easier to write the second time after having gone through the first process. Like I just had an idea of what I was doing.

Joe Casabona: This is a really good point, right? Because I don’t want to get my point misconstrued. I write every single day. I think there is a lot of value to writing every single day. Where I worry about the, let’s say mental health ramifications, is by glamorizing the need to publish every day.

I want to bring it back to your point about you’re publishing your YouTube videos, right? Because there are people who publish every day or multiple times a week. Sara Dietschy and MKBHD come to mind. But these are people who make nearly all of their money in some way, shape or form off of their YouTube channel.

Alastair McDermott: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So when you say you’re looking for quality over quantity, do you have a publish schedule? Or do you just-

Alastair McDermott: I’ll tell you what. This is really important to clarify. For me, YouTube is very much a secondary channel. So it’s not the primary thing. The podcast is first and foremost for me. My email list is super important. LinkedIn is more important than YouTube, for example. Twitter probably is more important right now as well.

So YouTube is like a… “support” isn’t the right word. But it’s like a place that I can send people say, “Hey, I did a video on this topic, go check that.” And they’ll go there and they’ll see that I have four or five other videos right now and they’ll have a look at those.

Maybe in a year’s time, I’ll have 12 good quality videos on various different topics. I might have some live streams on there as well. That’s the other thing. With YouTube, it’s very easy to hit Go Live and just kind of riff on something.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Alastair McDermott: But I think those are a bit different than produced YouTube videos.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Alastair McDermott: So yeah, that’s kind of like what I’m thinking. But if you were to say like, what’s your publishing schedule? Probably something like one video a quarter, maybe two or three videos a quarter, but that would be it. I can’t ever see myself doing more than one a month.

That said, we’ll see what happens. But that’s kind of my thinking right now. And by the way, I know that there’s people out there thinking, “Oh my God, he really needs to make more videos than that.” But there are channels out there with 5, 10, 15 videos and each one of them has two or 3 million views.

So it is possible to do it that way as well. I know because I looked at a lot of stuff while researching the course. So there are different ways to approach it. Maybe I’m dipping my toe in the water more than you would be in terms of using YouTube.

Joe Casabona: I think that’s a really good point. Like I said, I’m cutting back my publishing schedule because it was too much. And I think I would publish videos just for the sake of publishing and the quality went down because of it. Where now I have a pretty clear pipeline. And now I have two weeks to make a video. And that’s plenty of time for me. Because that’s my style.

And I have an editor. That’s the other thing. I have somebody edit my videos because I hate, I hate editing. I think, you know, a big it depends on a lot of things: what you want to do, what your goals are.

And if you’re looking to establish your authority on a few topics, maybe you do have a few really highly produced videos, optimize those thumbnails and titles because that’s where like 80% of clicks come from. And then you don’t have to publish every month or every two months.

CGP Grey, I mean, he made his bones like early in the YouTube days, but he doesn’t ascribe to the I need to publish a video every Tuesday or whatever. He publishes about one a month, one every six weeks. And they all do really well.

Whereas Joel from RoomieOfficial, he’s a music YouTuber—I love his videos—he publishes every day. And he tried experimenting with other things, but his daily videos are the things that do the best. So it’s all about experimenting. Maybe that’s another place where these daily challenges help you is can experiment and iterate more quickly.

Alastair McDermott: Yes, absolutely. So I think that if you want to go do those challenges, go do them. You can learn so much. And I did do a video challenge with a company called Clock Wise. It was a 30-day challenge. I did it last year sometime. And I did a video every day. Some of them I put in YouTube, some of them on LinkedIn, various different places. But I did learn a lot.

This was a paid guided challenge. I think once a week we did a kind of a check-in call. Nina from Clock Wise would actually review the videos that we’ve done and give us some feedback.

Joe Casabona: Oh, wow.

Alastair McDermott: And the biggest thing that I got from it, and there were lots of different things, but one of my videos, by the way, I’ve included on my YouTube channel, I’ve included clips from my older YouTube videos so you can actually see over time how my setup has improved. Like in the oldest video, I actually don’t recognize myself. I don’t sound like me and I don’t look like me.

Joe Casabona: That’s so funny.

Alastair McDermott: Yeah, it’s not. But I did change how I approach it. One thing I’ve gotten much better at is I have trained myself to look at the lens. That is a big deal because when people are looking at the video, they feel like you’re making eye contact with them. And now if you’re in a call, like we’re on a call right now, you do need to look down and look at the person’s face. But it’s good if you keep looking at the lens as much as you can.

And then if you’re actually doing each video where there’s no other person, you’re not in conversation, you really need to look directly at the lens because then the viewer feels like you’re making eye contact directly with them.

I think that that was one of the biggest things I got from that video challenge that I did. And it wasn’t that I didn’t know the information because she told us the first day. It was that I needed to have 30 days of me being reminded every day, “Hey, you need to look at it more. Hey, you need to look at it more. Hey, you need to look at it more.” And I eventually got it by the end now. And now I’m much better at it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, it can be habit-forming in that way, right? That’s a really good point. I know a friend of mine, Brian Richards, actually set up a teleprompter and has his Zoom calls on that so he can look at the camera and at the person at the same time. So not everybody’s going to go through those lines-

Alastair McDermott: That’s next level. That’s really cool.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Brian’s a professional virtual summit producer. This is the thing that he does and so he spent a lot of time doing that. I tried for a while but I hate clutter on my desk and I already have like multiple arms until the teleprompter just gave me agita.

Now, we’ve been talking for a while, nearly an hour at this point. I want to talk quickly about gear because you did mention that you want to look more professional. But that’s easier than ever these days. I have a blog post that is being turned into a YouTube video called “Who is The iPhone Pro For? Because Apple has these commercials like Michael Bay or Stanley Kubrick would use the iPhone to make movies.

I understand why they’re doing that positioning but that’s not who it’s for. It is for creators like you and me who can’t spend $6,000 on a red 8k camera or 4k camera but want to have professional-looking videos. The iPhone 13 Pro is absolutely perfect for that. So what is your gear? Are you using a 4k camera? Are using 1080p? Do you think it matters?

Alastair McDermott: Okay. I’m producing video in 1080p HD. So I’m not producing in 4k. I’m not editing in 4k. I’m taking a 4k picture and down-raising it. In fact, what I’m doing is I’m bringing… so I have a Sony a6100, which is a couple of tiers down from the 6400. You made that video that you’re talking about. I have that with this Sigma 16mm lens.

Joe Casabona: Same lens as me.

Alastair McDermott: It’s a fantastic setup. Again, if somebody’s buying that over here, that’s dropping €1500. That’s nearly $2,000. It’s significant cost. Right now I have that going through an Elgato Cam Link 4K. I also have… because I have a second camera, I have Blackmagic ATEM Mini-

Joe Casabona: Oh, nice.

Alastair McDermott: …which I can take two camera feed off and I can switch back and forth. And I do that sometimes when doing a live workshop. I want to have a two camera feed. But I did share on a call last week and I just plugged it out and plugged in the camera just to get up and running and I haven’t bothered to plug it back in since. So maybe I don’t need that. So that’s what I’m recording.

But I’m actually using OBS. It’s a free piece of software that you can do some really cool things with in terms of changing what’s on your screen or putting up like lower third graphics and things like that. It’s really powerful.

So I actually have it zoomed in. So I have the original 4k picture is actually coming in at 1080p now and then I’m actually zoomed in. So really it’s not even a 1080p image. It still looks amazing even though I’m zooming in a bit. And I just want to do that because I want it to be a little bit closer. Because I think when it’s not zoomed in like that I’m too small in the screen. So I do that, particularly for zoom calls and things like that.

I have been doing some YouTube videos just straight to camera like that. So if we’re recording this and you put a clip of the video from this somewhere, people will see I’m just like a regular person in the Zoom call but I happen to have a nice background. But that’s how I do some of my YouTube videos.

So I’m doing Zoom calls and YouTube videos and everything in the same place. That for me was important because I didn’t want to have to do something else. I didn’t want to have to move and set up a camera and put up a tripod and get my lighting right and move the microphone and all that kind of stuff.

I just wanted to hit record. And I’ve got a great setup here already for that. So that was really important for me was that I can just hit record and make it happen.

Joe Casabona: I think that’s a really good point. You want to reduce the barrier of entry to do a lot of these things. I don’t want to keep hitting back to this but I’m about to publish something counter to this thinking. But maybe that’s what the daily challenge is also for, right?

Just like you can’t automate things when you don’t know the actual process, you can’t make something easier if you don’t know what’s hard. So I think that’s really important. We have very similar setups. I’m not running my current camera through Ecamm Live as we talk. But for all of my YouTube videos and when I’m presenting, like when I’m presenting in a virtual summit or something like that, I will run through Ecamm Live because I can add the lower thirds, I can switch cameras.

My camera is on a movable arm, so I can change the background. And I have like a pull up green screen when I want to do stuff like that without having to move anything. But as we established early on, we’ve been doing this stuff for a lot of years.

If you’re starting today and you have like a new iPhone, most of them shoot 4k. And you don’t need 4k. I like shooting 4k because… I don’t know. I don’t really need to, especially when I’m live streaming. Nothing can live stream 4k at this point as we record this.

Alastair McDermott: Yeah. And if you shoot 4k, then you can zoom in quite a lot and still have great quality 1080p video. I think that’s important because then you can clip, you can zoom in, you can just use one section of the screen, you can cut it like if there’s a radiator or something that you want to take out of the picture. There’s lots of stuff you can do like that.

Now, I was in the States for Thanksgiving. It was in Portland. I went to buy the iPhone 13 Pro Max. I wanted to get it because I’m ready to upgrade and the camera is great. Wasn’t able to get one. So I actually bought myself a helicopter trip to Manhattan instead. But that’s a different story. I’ll tell you about that another time.

Joe Casabona: Oh, my gosh.

Alastair McDermott: So I’m still using my trusty iPhone 8 Plus.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Alastair McDermott: It is absolutely fine. The only thing is the battery is down to 82% or something. But I use this heavily and it is still working. It’s in perfect condition. I’m on my fifth or sixth case. I’m probably my 10th or 12th screen protector because I actually choke it around. I know I shouldn’t admit to that but that’s what I do. I’m not very careful with it.

Joe Casabona: I just started sweating.

Alastair McDermott: But it’s still in perfect condition. And this has a 1080p front-facing camera and has a 4k back camera. So I’ve just got two cameras in the back because it’s the plus model. And so that’s a five-year-old iPhone, and it is perfect. All of the Samsung Galaxy and all of those, they all have better cameras than most professional photographers would have had 15 years ago.

So, for the most part, I know they have bigger lenses and things. But practically speaking, the camera quality is so good. So I think everybody has a great camera in the pocket. I would definitely say don’t go out and spend 2k on gear before you’ve done a whole bunch of shooting cameras on your phone or whatever. Start it that way.

Don’t start out by getting the expensive gear. You’re going to be like the guy who wants to get into cycling and goes down to the shop and buys like $10,000 titanium frame bike or whatever. You don’t need to do that. Go and get an $800 secondhand bike or whatever first and get some experience before you go into spending too much money.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. I have a story about this. I used to play paintball a lot in college. And my school would do trips to this big paintball field called Skirmish. And one time this guy was dressed in… So there’s a difference between paintball where you’re kind of in the woods so you’re in camouflage and speedball where you’re like two teams and it’s like capture the flag style.

And speedball, you’re wearing bright colors so you can tell who’s on your team and who’s not. And this guy is wearing full-on speedball gear, he has a very expensive paintball gun, where he’s like, “I can fire like 10 or 20 paintballs a second,” or something like that. And I was like, “Dude, you only need one to get the person out. You don’t need to fire that many.” And we called him Pro Shop because he looked like a professional paintball shop threw up on him. And he was so bad. He was so bad.

Alastair McDermott: It’s always those guys, right?

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Good gear is not going to make you good.

Alastair McDermott: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: My brother and I were the best people on our team because he’s like small and mousy and fast. So I would be his anchor and I would provide cover fire and stuff like that. And our kill to death ratio was way better than Pro Shop’s was so. And we had like the Titman, you know, like the standard… the one that everybody gets when they buy their first paintball gun. So good gear does not make you good.

Alastair McDermott: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: I want to end with this question. Who are your favorite YouTube creators?

Alastair McDermott: My answer is going to be probably a bit off the beaten path for y’all. So Alzay Calhoun is probably my number one. I actually had him on my podcast. I’ll send you a link so you can include it in the show notes. His channel is called CovetedConsultant.

What I love is just the simplicity, the frequency, the quality of information that he’s delivered. And he has built a massive following on there in the consulting niche. So it’s not big but he’s got a great channel.

Apart from that, I’m not really a YouTube consumer. That probably feeds into it being a secondary channel for me, because I don’t go and spend a lot of time on there. I think that if you are creating videos, probably the most useful I did on that course that I did, apart from the information which… okay, so not the most useful, but a big part of it was they got us to watch a lot of videos. And so watching a lot of YouTube videos over and over again, particularly from the good creators.

Like there was one Casey Neistat and everybody knows him. There was one video he did where he loses his drone and he has to go and rescue his drone, which is on the roof of another building. So if you lose a drone in New York City, it’s hassle to get it back. So this video was about that.

And the interesting thing was, if you watch that video—I’ll find it so you can link to it—you’ll see this three-act structure. You’ll see him telling the story. It’s about the story, it’s not about the drone. And in fact, the really ironic thing is he doesn’t actually show how he got it in the end.

This is kind of weird. It’s like the Star Wars movie you were talking about. He doesn’t even show really how he got there. He doesn’t have footage of it. But he shows all the ways that he was stopped by security, there was locked doors and all of this kind of stuff. So he showed loads of different barriers that he had hit. But he didn’t show him getting the thing in the end. But he also shows the after shot. As a story, it works really well because that’s what people are focusing on. And he’s a brilliant storyteller.

So I think it’s possible to take pretty much any business topic and turn it into a story and introduce that tension. And just making it make it more… Again, go back to the word sticky. It’s not the perfect word, but just kind of make it so that it kind of… I think in YouTube where they talk about the retention graph. And that’s what you want to focus on is having people stay watching all the way through.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. That is fantastic. Well, we’ll leave it at that. Alastair, thanks so much for joining me again on the show. I really appreciate it. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?

Alastair McDermott: You can go to therecognizedauthority.com and you will find my email list, my YouTube is all linked up there, and check out the podcast.

Joe Casabona: Fantastic. Thanks so much for that. And all of the show notes—it’s going to be a show notes rich page for this episode—you can go to streamlined.fm/257. If you are not a member of the Creator Crew, you should sign up because Alastair and I are going to talk about things that we bartered for doing work, web design work, or whatever work. So definitely check that out. Again, you can sign up over at streamlined.fm/257.

Thanks so much for listening, and Alastair, thanks so much for joining me today.

Alastair McDermott: Thank you.

Joe Casabona: And until next time—thanks so much for listening—get out there and build something.