Category Archives: Strategy

Business and life strategies from a disclaimer tag

I bought this new rug for our family room and I love it. It came with this disclaimer slip which reminded me of a crucial strategy in business and life:

This company wants to combat returns and replacements — it’s expensive to return rugs, they’re awkward to ship. So they’ve taken the flaws in the rug, the “irregularities and variety of shades,” and reframed them as advantages: “unique beauty” and “natural.”

The lesson is simple: Figure out how to make any weakness, flaw, blind spot or disadvantage into an asset and nothing can stop you.

Free, Editable Google Slides Conversion Funnel for Sales, Marketing and Social Media Presentations

I love to use conversion funnels to help structure and organize my consulting presentations. I find that funnels can help describe everything from marketing plans and social content strategies to casting actors and hiring talent.

I almost always keep my presentations simple by doing them in Google Slides and I’ve built a really basic funnel template that I use over and over again in the program. I thought it would be worth sharing because the first time I needed one of these, it was in a time crunch and I couldn’t find a simple enough template. Here it is for you to swipe and use in your own presentations! You can customize the colors and text to your subject.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK IT OUT

Here are the instructions which are also included in the link:

Go to File > Make a Copy… because this funnel is in view-only mode

Edit the text in each layer of the funnel — you can add types of content, audience estimates or percentages

I like to color-code presentations to help people follow my slides — you can do this by starting with a full funnel as your “table of contents” slide then using the colors from each section of the funnel when you explain each layer in more depth; you can also switch the funnel colors to grey if you want to de-emphasize them during your presentations (see next slide)

An Outrageously Common YouTube Watch Time Misconception – The Real Definition

Watch Time is the most important metric that YouTube uses to promote and drive audience to a video. In a way, it’s the most important metric on any platform. Netflix uses very similar information to decide on the shows it renews, greenlights and licenses. Snapchat, Amazon and Facebook have been known to use a similar engagement metric too. But there’s one secret side of watch time that most creators completely miss.

The “basic” definition of Watch Time is how long people spend watching your video. Cool. It’s not how many people watch your video… it’s how long all of those people watch it for. And this is fine, colloquial way of looking at Watch Time. It’s a proxy for how engaged your audience is with your content. And that’s about all the information YouTube provides you with in the Watch Time section of your Analytics.

But it’s missing one, extremely important distinction. One critical precept of the definition. So many people miss this and it’s fundamental. Watch Time is not about how long people spend watching your video. It’s about how long people spend watching other videos, after they’ve watched yours. That’s right. Your video’s engagement only matters to the extent that it gets people in the mood to watch more content.

Don’t believe me? Read more about when YouTube announced this! It’s also defined in the YouTube Playbook like so:

YouTube optimizes search and discovery for videos that increase watch time on the site.

How could YouTube judge me based on something the users do after they watch my video? It would seem like you have no way of controlling what people do after watching your content. But that’s not true! Think about this from a psychological perspective. Your job is to engage viewers. If you’re successful at that, you should be able to increase watch time on the entire site of YouTube.

How? Firstly, you can just make “binge-worthy” content that hypnotizes people into watching subsequent videos in your series. Make sure you’ve got never-ending “rising conflict” to keep people hooked and subscribed. Or you can make videos that are incredibly effective at framing or promoting other videos that aren’t yours. In that way, you can actually boost watch time by simply being an outrageous curator.

You can also avoid things that are apt to get people out of the content-consuming mood.

For instance, don’t drive people off YouTube… it’s unlikely that they’ll come back. Don’t tell people to search, donate to your Patreon or go to your own .com.
And don’t make extremely short videos because it just opens more opportunities for people to get distracted. Short-attention-span content begets short attention spans — flakey users who will leave YouTube.com.
Another common misstep: pushing commenting and “liking” and sharing at the end of a video. In my experience, those actions are very low weight to the YT algorithm compared to watching more content. Asking people to be contribute in the comments or respond to a prompt will kick them out of consumption mode and into productivity mode.

Of course, there are reasons to break all of these rules in the name of your business model or goals… but you have to be aware of how they’re impacting watch time.

Reframe how you think about engagement and it might inspire you to address watch time in completely new ways. Remember this common misconception and you’ll have a secret edge compared to Creators who have no clue.