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Total noob trying to drive traffic to my youtube channel
Hey, I’m a musician who has traditionally made half my income in live performance and half in private lessons. With the pandemic, live performance is generally screwed for quite a while, but I’ve upgraded my gear at home to offer a much better remote learning experience, and now I need to attract new clients. I figured the easiest way to do that is to produce some of my own music for the first time and try to raise awareness of my brand, so I have recorded several songs and shot videos, and released one on youtube.
So, here’s the issue. My youtube’s exposure is generally to what they used to call my “natural market” back when I worked sales in the dark ages. The vast majority of interest in the video came from when I shared it on facebook. However, facebook people already know me, and they’re not generally potential students, although I have generated a small amount of business from people who liked the video, so that’s promising.
I started a google ad campaign, but I’m completely ignorant of this stuff. The viewership numbers look good, but they’re basically bullshit, because the campaign is playing my video as an unskippable ad on youtube. 33% of people don’t skip ad right away so it counts as a view. 20% listen for a minute, and 13% listen til the end. These are just people who are afk. I know because the last 15 seconds or so are a “like, comment and subscribe” screen and on my youtube channel before I started the ad I could see that nobody stuck around to watch that, as expected.
Of the 4,000-ish “views” the campaign has generated, I got 22 clicks, which would be ok I guess. I kind of think of it as a mass mailing where you don’t expect a huge return. But those clicks haven’t translated into any likes. I thought there was one, but then I saw someone from facebook liked it on facebook so I think that was her lol. I’m sure there are a few people who actually like what they’re seeing/hearing, but they have little incentive to click through to youtube and like/subscribe since the video plays the song for them already.
Anyway, I’m fairly certain that the money I put into this campaign was worthwhile just as an experiment to learn how this stuff works, but I am stumped as to what to do with this information and how to promote more effectively. Are there other metrics I should be looking at? Is there a way to have google promote the video in search results (which is all I originally wanted) without including it in unskippable ads? Or another route I should go to drive interested viewers to my channel?
[https://imgur.com/rxtdN3p](https://imgur.com/rxtdN3p)
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2 Replies
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> I’m a musician who has traditionally made half my income in live performance and half in private lessons. With the pandemic, live performance is generally screwed and now I need to attract new clients.
Ok, so the goal shift the balance. Less performing. More teaching.
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> I have recorded several songs and shot videos, and released one on youtube.
So you created performer content. Why didn’t you create teacher content? Isn’t the goal more teaching?
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> those clicks haven’t translated into any likes
Is the goal likes or students?
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> they have little incentive to click through to youtube and like/subscribe since the video plays the song for them already
Per above, why are you paying to play / perform songs for people?!? You’re trying to be a teacher, not a performer. And why is there no incentive?
Create appropriate (i.e. teacher) content and give viewers an incentive to engage (i.e. put an offer in the content). Users share their email to get the content. There should be no extra cost to you to send to extra people. For example, a pdf ebook or 10 free music lessons via email (you send subscribers one email lesson a day for 10 days) costs you the same to send to one person or one thousand people.
Once you start building an email list you can try to convert people on your email list to paying student and do stuff like creating lookalike audiences, retargeting, etc.
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I totally agree with tjc4’s comment. Just want to add my take to it less or marketing and more brand strategy.
1) People buy from people, especially those that know what they’re talking about. When you create free lessons on how to play and people watch this, that’s when people invest. They want more content. Put this way, I play online games, I don’t go and watch people just aimlessly playing the game, I watch the top people who analyse gameplay so I can learn and improve. It’s now the point I’m even looking to pay for coaching.
2) Always remember, some just want to learn on youtube and do it free, but some love the one to one support. If those getting it free learn something they will come back for more, and the more that do come back, you may even earn a little money on Youtube. Don’t be disheartened if you’re not always getting a lot of leads from it.
3) Maybe put a little budget to get a few extra viewers, but maybe put some money into Facebook ads for local saxophone lessons.
4) Don’t completely ditch the performance as some people love that stuff, but mix it with lessons like how to write songs, top 10 sweet licks, how to become better at improvisation etc.
Keep going dude! I enjoyed your video! If you ever want to discuss ideas further and how you can grow just message me and we can get on a Zoom call and discuss further.
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