- What's up guys?
Pat Flynn here with my good friend Thomas Frank
and we're gonna be talking about his workflow
for his YouTube videos.
He has a channel with over a million subscribers
and we even talk about some resources
and tools he's been using that I've never even heard
of before so make sure you stick around, let's get to it.
What's up, Thomas? - What's up?
- Glad you're here today.
Let's talk about YouTube, man, you've grown
a YouTube channel to over a million subscribers,
just first of all, how does it feel to have
that many subscribers?
- There's a lot of pressure.
- But you had said something recently
on our recent Tesla video which you should all check out
if you haven't already that the subscribers and the views,
that's not what's most important to you.
What is most important to you when it comes
to your YouTube channel?
- Helping people.
Are you asking about overall or business wise?
- [Pat] Just like why do you use it?
Then why do you keep creating videos?
- It's fun and people need help with the things
- And for people who don't know Thomas,
tell us really quick, what do you create videos about?
- So I create videos about how to be a better student
and how to be a more productive person overall.
How to be more effective in your work
and how to achieve your goals.
- And like I said in the hook, we're gonna go over
Thomas's workflow for how he gets an idea for a video
all the way through production and publication
and even marketing of those videos so let's start
with the ideas for the videos, where do these ideas
come from for your channel?
- Yeah, so I'd say there's a few different sources,
there is questions from readers, whether they come
in the comments or emails, we save basically everything,
we've got kind of a capture process to put all kinds
of reader questions into trollow.
Otherwise, I'll just get ideas from random sources,
maybe I read something really cool in a book
or I see a study that's really cool or I just get
a question in my own head and I wanna make it.
- Do you any validation for some of these ideas?
Like the ones that you come up with?
- Very few, sometimes I will, sometimes I'll search it,
see is there something already on YouTube
that did really well, can I make a better version of this
and then sort of kind of crush that one.
Sometimes it's just I wanna make this video
and I think it'll do well, sometimes it does,
sometimes it doesn't.
- Do you do any other things to research,
so you said looking at other videos about the same topic,
do you do any keyword research or anything kind of ninja?
- I do some keyword research.
I will look in ahref sometimes and I think
this more affects articles on my site but sometimes
for videos, I will look on ahrefs because,
actually I don't think I'm saying it right,
is it h-refs?
- A-H-refs?
- A-H-refs?
Something like that.
- We'll link to it 'cause I don't know.
- They've got this cool tool where you can put in
a keyword and it will show you the parent keyword
but it'll also show you synonym keywords
so you can sort of look in there and I just find that
it's a good brainstorming tool because like we just saw
at lunch, I made this whole hydration video
and forgot to put the word water in the title.
Sometimes you just get so laser focused on one idea
that you miss something obvious.
- What are your best performing videos?
- The best performing video is the one on
the Feynman technique, so that was this whole video
on Richard Feynman and how he explained things
of how you can learn things better if you try
to explain them to somebody else.
There was one on multiple choice exam questions
which did weirdly well.
- [Pat] Why do you say weirdly?
- I just didn't think it was gonna do that well
and also it did okay for the first few months
and then it just exploded randomly one day
and became one of the most popular videos on the channel.
- Noe for me, with my YouTube channel,
sometimes I create videos that I think are gonna go
very well and they don't and then sometimes I just kind of
randomly put together a video and they just explode.
Does that happen with your channel, too?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So I made this video recently on essay questions and exams
and the logical thought process was well,
the multiple choice video did so well,
clearly people want exam tips
and essays are another part of exams so I'll make
another video on that and that video bombed.
- Really? - Yeah, so I think
if you look right now, as we're filming,
the videos on either side of it have 300,000
or more views and that one was 35,00 so 10%
of the other videos. - Wow.
- And I don't know what happened, maybe I timed it wrong,
maybe the thumbnail was bad, there are so many variables
that it's hard to tell what really causes it to happen.
- How long have you been on YouTube for?
- Well we made our channel 10 years ago I think
or 11 years ago but I've been doing this seriously
for four years, just about.
- And since you started four years ago
getting serious about it, how long until it kind of like
clicked for you, that you kind of got into
the rhythm of it all?
- Seven videos.
- Seven videos?
- I think, I think it was seven videos.
- How do you know that so specifically?
- Well the seventh video was the one that kind of went viral
and then I started thinking of myself as a YouTuber
rather than a vlogger who made random YouTube videos.
- And what did you do differently after you thought
of yourself as a YouTuber?
- I think the only difference was I put more focus
on the video content whereas beforehand,
I thought of myself as first and foremost a blogger
and then I was making videos to kind of go along
with vlog content and I almost viewed YouTube
as a hosting service at that time
and then once the first one went viral, I went oh,
this algorithm is much more powerful than my other,
my other forms of content, my other mediums
so then I started focusing on that.
- That's awesome.
Okay, so you get an idea for a video, what's your next step?
How much research do you do into what the content
is gonna be in that video?
- This is very dependent on the topic and also how much time
I have so if I am very crunched for time,
we might pick a topic that I can talk about
off of personal experiences and stuff like that.
If it's a topic like hydration or how to write
an essay or stuff like that, I will do lots of research.
- You mean water?
- Or water, yes.
Gotta keep that in mind.
Or sleep or any sort of scientific or science based topic,
I'm gonna do a lot of research.
- Do you come out with your videos on a regular basis?
- Yeah, it's every two weeks, every week,
I'm moving towards weekly again so right now
it's every two weeks with the occasional weekly.
- And when you say you are crunched for time
meaning you have a deadline coming up.
- Yeah, so at this point, I have a sponsor
almost every video and my videos are booked out
I think through the end of the year actually
so I basically am on a schedule.
Yeah - Yeah.
That's cool.
Okay, so research, what kinds of research do you do?
Let's take the hydration/water video for example.
- So hydration, I looked up as many scientific studies
about all the questions, actually I think it first starts
with all of the questions I can come up with
so do you actually have to drink eight glasses
of water a day, how much do you need to drink,
how much would you have to drink to get water poisoning,
what is water poisoning, do athletes have to drink
a different amount of water than the normal person,
what about geographic location, altitude, temperature,
all that kind of stuff and then I'll just go try to find
the most journalistically, I don't know, what's the word
for it, credible, sources, with journalistic integrity,
there you go, that I can preferably peer reviewed
scientific studies and I will just start building out
a script, building out lots of notes, go from there.
- What do you use to create your script?
- Evernote.
- Evernote? - Yeah.
Well it's a duel workflow, Evernote first
and then Google Drive. - Okay.
And then when you're working in Evernote, is it from start
to finish or how do you actually piecemeal
and put that thing together?
- It's very haphazard and very chaotic and messy
until it starts to come together so usually with
a complicated video like the water one, it will be a bunch
of research in Evernote and I actually have
a template document that I start out with
so there's kind of dividers and the sections are,
I believe, titles and keyword ideas
and then I've got a very basic outline script area,
a notes area and then an area for B roll and links
to images that I want to talk about or use
so the script area usually is not the final script,
it's just like here are the points I want to hit
and eventually that document will get so long
and so messy with research and links and all kinds
of stuff that I will move what I know I want
to talk about into Google Drive and in a document
in Google Drive, it will either be an outline
for a simple video or a full script for a complicated video.
- Now in your script, and one thing I really love
about your videos is you do a really good job
of engaging the viewer and little tricks and things
you do to move from one scene to another, cut scenes
and little elements here and there, to keep that going,
how far in advance do you plan that, does that ever come out
while you're filming, you know, it would be cool
if I added that or is it all done as you're writing
the script?
- Some of it happens during filming.
If it's a video that has a lot of scripting then some
of the jokes may be planned in advance.
I film with my business partner in the room
so sometimes I'll say a line and one of us will think
oh hey it would be really fun if we did this
when we said that line.
So for a recent one, we were talking about
how Sherlock Holmes is very observant of his environment
and how we aren't so I said the line and then Martin said,
"You know what would be really funny
"is if I had something coming into the screen
"and you didn't notice it while you were talking
"about being observant."
So we re-shot that and people really liked that joke.
Otherwise, after I edit what I call A roll,
I'll watch through it and I'll think okay what would be good
for a joke here or a piece of B roll here?
- Nice.
How important is that to you to have those kinds of jokes
and elements in your videos?
- Very important. - Why?
- The real reason is because I have to be entertained
by the video for me to be proud of it,
for me to want to put it out but it also just increases
watch time and it makes it more fun to watch.
- Cool.
Yeah, watch time obviously being an important factor.
What, other than watch time, is an important metric
for you to keep track of since starting your...
- For videos? - Yeah.
- I mean watch time is kind of king if you want your channel
to explode then watch time is what you really need
to optimize for but at the end of the day,
you can't be only optimizing for watch time
because then you are going to incentivized
to make videos that go on for far too long
so what is useful, what needs to be said
versus what can you say?
- You film your A roll and B roll and have all the jokes
in there and everything, what do you do next?
How do you go from all the raw footage before
you publish it, what tools are you using
to make that happen?
- So I will say B roll is usually not filmed
until after I've edited a full cut so typically,
I'll end up after a filming session, I'll have maybe 35
to 50 minutes of footage, most of that is me
screwing up takes over and over and over again
so I'll take that, I'll cut it down and I should have
an editor do this, I will in the future.
- 'Cause you're doing everything yourself.
- Doing everything myself right now and that'll cut
that down to a 10, 12 minute video and that could
be put up on YouTube, it is coherent at the very least.
So at that point, I watch through and I just ask myself
all right what kind of B roll do I want at each point here?
And I'll make a giant list, I turn the chronological list
into a bash style list in Todoist so filming,
what needs to be done in the overhead,
what needs to be found online, what needs to be bought
in stock footage and I'll try to do those as efficiently
as possible so everything's filmed during one batch session,
everything that needs to found online
is found during another and then I have one giant
manic B roll editing session.
- So essentially your A roll is one layer
that's already there and that's the talking head video.
- Mm-hmm. - And then,
what editing software are you using?
- Premiere Pro and then I also use After Effects a lot.
- After Effects.
Are you using your B roll just as layers on top?
- Yeah. - Or you're not actually
cutting then inserting, right?
- Well. - I'm just getting
a little bit technical here. - If I'm gonna do
a skit, then I will cut and insert.
So the last video actually that I just put out,
as we're recording this, there's a tiny skit
of me building an extra set so we did that
after the fact and then put it in
but for the most part, it's just layers
on top of the A roll.
- Okay, 'cause that's what we do, too to try to get
as efficient as possible.
- And that lets you send off the A roll layer
for captions ahead of time so they're ready
when you want 'em published.
- Oh, that's smart.
- And then for B roll what I do is anything video
is done in Premiere and then anything that's just graphics,
pictures, texts, that's all done in After Effects
because After Effects has much more powerful motion blurring
and using curve capabilities.
- What does that mean?
- All right so motion blur, basically if I move
my hand right now, you're probably gonna see motion blur.
In Premiere, you can do that but it's kind of janky
so if you want to move, like say a picture onto the screen,
it's gonna not look as good, you're not gonna have
that smooth nice motion blur.
In After Effects, you can easily put that in there.
- So you really get into the details of how things move
across the screen? - Yeah.
I'm very keen on animation quality.
- Where does that come from?
Why are you so...
- I think it's just me watching really good channels
and not being able to let myself do work
that's not as polished.
- What are some of the channels that kind of inspire you?
- Crash Course was the big one and I'm guessing you've
seen them, they do like educational videos on science,
math, literature, basically like school a YouTube channel
but it's really high quality.
In fact, I actually did a series for them on study skills.
They were my main inspiration for getting
into YouTube in the first place.
- And that was when you were in college
you were watching them?
- Actually it was after. - It was after?
- Yeah, also your channel believe or not,
your podcasting tutorial was a huge influence
not only on my podcast but also on the video itself
and let's see here, Sean McCabe and Fizzle
were big influences and then a lot of
the video game reviewers like John Tron
and Categorist, those kind of people.
- Yeah, I've heard of them. - They do lots.
- For sure. - Of just crazy animations
and images coming on screen and stuff like that
so I took inspiration from them and I was like
I'm gonna be at that level of quality.
- Now besides your popular videos
that we've talked about already,
what one video are you most proud of?
Like, with all the things that you put into it?
- There's two.
There's the hydration video which didn't do so well.
- The water video. - The water video.
But I'm very proud of that one.
That was the one where I finally was proud
of my sound editing.
I've always felt that my ability to match background music
to the feeling of the scene had been my most lacking skill
and in that video, I kind of got it
and then there was some other editing in that video
I was very proud of and then the flash cards video.
- Why the flash cards video?
- There's just some really cool edits I did in that.
- Well we'll have to link to those in the description
for everybody to check out.
- And then the Sherlock Holmes video because we went
and got costumes and did full skits for it
and they were just fun to make.
- Nice, okay. - Basically any video
where I come up with a new technique
or a new idea I've never done before
and it's difficult, that is my favorite.
- That's cool, it sounds like you're making movies almost.
- Sort of, yeah. - With all the work
that you're putting into it.
- Yeah and that was kind of the initial inspiration
was I looked on YouTube and for study skills content,
there was a video camera in the back of the classroom
at some random university just filming a professor
for an hour or it would be high school aged girls
who had beauty channels and they'd do like one video
on how they study, that was kind of the landscape
and I thought why isn't there something
that's super high quality, fun to watch,
like vlog brothers or Crash Course
but for how to do well in school.
- Nice, I like it.
Okay, so you have your video, it's filmed,
it's exported, you put it up on YouTube,
is that the end of that video for you
or do you do any marketing to help push that video out?
I mean I know it helps that you have
a million subscribers now so kind of things can happen
on their own at this point but when you were starting out,
what were some of the things you were doing to...
- When I was starting out, I took advantage of Reddit
and Reddit's a tough nut to crack
but what I found is if you can become involved
in a smaller subreddit and become part
of the community there then they're quite willing
to let you post your content.
- So you did that with the college related studies.
- Not r/college, it was our r/getstudying is the one
that I was a part of so I spent a lot of time
answering questions in there and then when I'd kind of
become a a part of the community, I started making videos
and I would post the video itself,
I would post a text post where I would summarize
the entire video and then say hey if you want
to watch the video, here it is, eventually I moved
to posting the full video but I would always put a summary.
So basically I wanted to not look super self promotional
and I wanted to be the kind of person who was giving advice
on the platform, no friction, and then if they wanted
the video, they could watch it as well.
- Yeah, that's cool, that's how I got started
with my lead exam website.
- Really? It was actually on a forum
related to architecture, answering as many questions
as I could and people were asking
if I had anymore information and that's where I dropped
my website and my guide. - Okay.
- Forums are completely underutilized.
Reddit though I've heard of people going in there
and getting banned right away or the mob kind of turning
on you kind of thing. - Yeah.
- Any advice for people who are looking into Reddit
and want to do well on it?
- I mean I think the philosophy is what you've been talking
about for years, give, give, give, always be trying
to give and try to give people as much as possible
on the platform.
Don't be so concerned with getting people back
to the thing you created because what you really want to do
is become a known quantity in that community
and it can be very tough to do that in a bigger subreddit
so I think it's good to get into a smaller one.
People are often less cynical, they're more accepting
and if you can get known, then they might not care
if you post your own stuff.
- Nice.
Cool and I know that you're not making primarily most
of your money from AdSense.
- Nope. - How are you
generating income? - So for the most part,
we have sponsors on every video and actually
with the company I work with to get my sponsors,
we disable monetization on the videos for the first 30 days
because we found that sponsors, our conversions do better
when you don't monetize the video.
- For the sponsor? - Yeah.
So it's, you know, I don't want to say a favor,
it's like, it's what we should do.
- Right, so how does it work, what do they get from you?
- The sponsor? - In the video, yeah.
- At the end of the video they get maybe a one,
two minute pitch for their product
and I work with probably like four sponsors total
and they just keep buying ads 'cause they do well.
- Nice, do you do any other kind of monetization?
- I mean there's monetization on my website
so affiliate stuff just like you do.
I sell my book in print and on kindle
and when is this going out, July-ish?
- I think so, yeah.
- So I think in a couple months from when this goes out,
an audiobook version as well.
- Nice, so what are your longterm plans here?
You've got a million subscribers now,
I know you're gonna increase that number just naturally.
- Two million subscribers. - Two million subscribers,
yes.
Bigger longterm goals for you, Thomas,
what might they be?
- Write a real, published book that will be
on bookshelves, that's the first big longterm plan.
- Why is that important to you?
- I've just always wanted to do it and I have
a really cool book idea and I just want to see it be real.
- Fiction, non-fiction?
- Non-fiction. - Non-fiction?
- Yeah, I mean big longterm plans, personally,
I wanna do music, I've always wanted to do music
so I'll do stuff like that but the book is an idea
and then I'm gonna be opening an office and moving
from being a home based entrepreneur to actually,
you know, having a real business with an address.
- Sweet, man, any final tips for the YouTube audience
watching right now, no matter what size
of their subscribership, one thing they can do
to help increase their results,
not necessarily get more subscribers
but just do better on YouTube.
- So I don't think we talked about,
what I think is the most important marketing thing,
which is title and thumbnail.
So there is the website that the people at Standard
who is the agency I work with for my sponsorships created
called Thumbs Up.TV and it will show you
what your thumbnail looks like at every single size
on YouTube and you can also put in your title
and it will show you if it's getting cut off or not
so I think that is very important and I use that
in conjunction with Coschedule's headline analyzer
so that tool gives you a score on your headline
and I don't take it at face value but I do use it
to brainstorm lots of different titles.
- Thumbs Up.TV and Coschedule's headline analyzer.
- Yeah. - Nice, thanks for that.
- Yeah. - Appreciate it, Thomas,
thank you for being here, congrats on all the success.
- Absolutely. - And for helping us
be successful, too. - For sure.
Thank you, man.
- Check out Thomas's channel and also the other videos
here in the end card where you can watch us
and the Tesla video and podcast, we'll link
to all the things so thanks again, guys.
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