Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about what we learned by spending $11,000 on YouTube advertising.

Neil Patel: Funny enough, the eleven thousand is an arbitrary number. I couldn't figure out what Eric spends, and I spend. But I know we both spend way more than eleven grand. Chances are we both spend more than a hundred, two hundred grand?

Eric Siu: Uh-mm-hmm (affirmative).

Neil Patel: What do you think?

Eric Siu: Well, I'll tell you, I'm about to drop like another forty or fifty on it next month or so.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and right now I'm spending a thousand to a thousand two hundred a day on YouTube. But, nonetheless, we'll talk about what we learned by spending $11,000 on YouTube ads.

Eric Siu: Yeah, you know what's interesting, when you started looking at Social Blade, and I was looking at it, and here's the thing. A lot of people are like, "Well, you know, when you rent YouTube ads it doesn't really do anything." And you can see in AdWords it doesn't help you gain a lot of subscribers. But the difference is, I mean, when you're using a tool like Social Blade, which shows you kind of the growth of your channel, I could see that at least when I started running ads my subscriber count actually started to double and go beyond that. I don't know if that's the case for you, if that's what you've seen?

Neil Patel: Yeah, I'm trying to find out how many subscribers I have, but I think I'm at like forty, fifty thousand already. Something like 57,000 is the current number.

Eric Siu: But it accelerates, right?

Neil Patel: It accelerates really fast. I went from adding a hundred, two hundred subscribers a day. Technically, I was under a hundred and then I started cranking all the way up, and now I'm at four or five, six hundred a day. My ads are still on but I did an interesting test. Eric can see cause I have my computer in front of me. But there was a time where I turned off my paid ads. So, as Eric can see my screen, in all of December I was running paid ads. For the early part of January, I stopped running ads and then I cranked them up again. Cause I wanted to see what happens after you stop running ads.
And here's what's interesting. So, if you exclude the YouTube ads, and I just look at suggested video count, my suggested video count still maintained and kept growing after I ran ads. And I would've thought, "Oh, it's going to die down because I turned off my ad budget." My browse video's all over the board but didn't really see or notice a dip when I stopped doing ads. My YouTube search, which is the best one, kept climbing. It's just been going up, and up, and up even though, if I stopped ads in between, I did see a little bit of a dip but it rebounded and it climbed back up. And more of the dip was related to New Year's Eve. But, in general, it was higher than before I started doing any YouTube advertising. So I've just kept cranking in all my advertising. My goal is to start spending a hundred thousand dollars a month and I want to reach two million organic YouTube views a month without any paid ads.

Eric Siu: Right. So right now you're just trying to boost kind of the viewership and the brandability of your channel, right?

Neil Patel: Yeah, and it's worked really well. So, if I go to YouTube and I type in the keyword SEO, for example, I'm already number two. So it's not bad.

Eric Siu: No.

Neil Patel: And it made change for people, depending on the country they're in, but I'll still take number two.

Eric Siu: Yup. I think it just depends on your goals, because when you messaged me awhile back, you were like, "YouTube ads don't do anything for me." But once you kind of recalibrate your goals, now it's like, "Oh, YouTube does something."

Neil Patel: Correct. So I recalibrated my goals to get subscribers versus getting views on my videos. Most people run YouTube ads being like, "Oh, we want tons and tons of views on our videos." And we're just like, "All right. Let's just get subscribers." Think of it like a well. When you build a well, you can keep going back to it to get more water. When you build up your subscriber count, you can keep going back every time you publish a new video, notify them, you get a lot of traction the first 24 hours and it helps the video do way better.

Eric Siu: Yeah, we talk about being omnipresent. We've talked about it a couple of times in other podcasts. I think Ty Lopez is a really good example. He does an incredible job with YouTube, Snap Chats, you know, Facebook ads as well. He's just all over the place, right? And this is part of it. I mean, growing your YouTube subscriber base. And, the fact of the matter is, you're listening to us right now. This is one way of us being omnipresent. And audio is very, I'd say it's a good way of building a relationship. But then, when you can see the person, that takes it to the next level.
I've had people come up to me, and I'm sure this is the same thing for Neil as well, at conferences or events, where they're like, "I feel like I know you already cause I listen to you all the time" or, you know, "I watch your videos." And for me, I mean, my YouTube channel is what, like six thousand subscribers or something like that right now. And it's amazing cause I had lunch with somebody the other day and he's like, "Yeah, I watch all your videos man." And it's just like, with six thousand subscribers you would think that not many people watch it. But, you know, as you get bigger and bigger proof is in the pudding. People are coming up to me and for sure people are going up to Neil as well.

Neil Patel: Yeah. I also did something really interesting or I learned something interesting from Ty Lopez. I was talking to him the other day and he ended up mentioning to me that he has one of the most popular iTunes podcast. And it's on Crypto, I believe it is. I don't know what the exact topic is but, if I go into the business [inaudible 00:05:21] on iTunes right now, [inaudible 00:05:23] indicator, I don't know where it is. But he pretty much says the Ty Lopez Show, he says he has one of the most popular Bitcoin podcasts or Crypto podcasts. I don't even know what it's called, but ... oh, it's called Bitcoin Crypto Mentor Mastermind.
And I asked Ty how he got there. He was like, "Dude, I've just built up a brand. I didn't really have to do anything. I went out there. I've been doing YouTube ads, Facebook ads, creating good content, being on Instagram, and doing all this omnichannel stuff." And anytime he releases anything new, like let's say Crypto related stuff, or any type of podcast, or any channel he's like, "I just automatically dominate because people know who I am." And that's a good example of someone who just dominated mainly from YouTube ads, which was his primary channel.
So it just shows that, if you build up a brand, whether it's for your business or your personal self, you can end up using that to continually grow anything in the future.

Eric Siu: Yup. And nowadays everybody's becoming a brand. Why not you? So before we go, we have some marketing goodies for you. Just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more, and we will see you tomorrow.

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