SPI 824: Quality or Quantity—Here’s What’s Working (Shorts Update)

SPI 824: Quality or Quantity—Here’s What’s Working (Shorts Update)

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he was able to start a new YouTube channel and get to 100,000 subs in just 45 days, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: So, a lot of you might know that I’ve been running this little YouTube shorts experiment. I want to give you a quick update on that, but also talk about some strategies that have been very useful in that experiment. So where are we at with it today before we get to those strategies. Number one, this channel is 60 days old, exactly 60 days old at the time of this recording and it is up to 256,000 subscribers.

Which is bonkers, I mean, it’s gonna hit a million maybe before Deep Pocket Monster does, and if that happens I mean, that’ll be cool, but also, I’m like, I’ve been waiting for Deep Pocket Monster to hit 1,000,000. Deep Pocket Monster is at 934,000 subscribers, so we’re only 66,000 subscribers away. But, at this rate of growth on the Shorts channel, Short Pocket Monster is the name of it.

It’s just been bonkers. We’ve cleared 100,000,000 views. And I haven’t shared this yet. The revenue from the last 28 days, we just hit 28 days worth of monetization YouTube tracks in 28 days or previous 28 day chunks, which is kind of weird, but you can sort by monthly if you want to, but just, I just saw it hit this morning.

It was 28 days ago that monetization was released or unlocked. We are now at $15,000 in revenue, just under. 14,477, I think. Which is crazy. In two months, I’ve been able to generate that much revenue from scratch without linking to any other properties, without sharing that link or that channel with anybody else.

I could have easily done that, but I wanted to experiment and that’s the whole purpose of this. I’ve also generated $2,500 on TikTok. And with TikTok you can generate revenue if your channel qualifies and your videos are over a minute. But YouTube shorts are under a minute. So for any videos, what I’ve done is with any videos that are 56 or more seconds on YouTube, I will reedit those videos and just extend them out a little bit more, not just like with dead space.

I will slow down the time lapse portion, or I will add a few more comedic elements in the middle or at the end just to get it over one minute. And by doing that, not all the videos are monetized, but the ones that are over one minute in length on TikTok have in total generated. $2,500. So we’re seeing about 150 to 200 extra a day on TikTok from literally the same videos.

Instagram is, I’m not making any revenue from Instagram, but that channel has grown from the beginning of this experiment two months ago. 30,000 subscribers or close to 30,000 subscribers to now 196,000 subscribers today. So this is going to be very powerful when it comes to brand deals and just getting attention from certain players in the space and obviously reach for anything that I might be selling down the road and those kinds of things.

So it’s been a wildly successful experiment. I did not think it would generate this much revenue. I am very surprised.

But I wanted to talk about a particular strategy that is counterintuitive. It was counterintuitive to me in the beginning, but now I see the light and I wanted to share it with you. And this is a strategy that can work not just on YouTube Shorts, but with a lot of different platforms from writing to videos, long form even, if possible.

Here’s the strategy. Quantity. Post as much as you can. Don’t sacrifice value. You still want value. But in the beginning, I thought quality was the most important thing. And quality is important. Having more quality is better than having less quality, obviously. But there is a point at which you can focus so much on quality that you you’re just not coming out with enough stuff to get the algorithms to move or to get people to binge watch.

And that’s the whole point here. But beyond that, so technically it’s not the whole point. The other part of the point is that every time you hit publish, you’re learning, you get data, especially from YouTube. You get data, even on these shorts, you get retention data, the average length of watch time, how many people drop off after the first second, all these things.

Like it’ll literally tell you in a video is doing well, and it’s like, Oh, less people are swiping away when this video comes across their feed. I mean, it’s that granular, which is really cool. But there is so much learning that happens when you hit publish and you see the data. There’s so much learning that happens when you are trying to get to that daily or every other day sort of rhythm. And again, it may not be possible for all content types, which is why this shorts experiment is great. It’s relatively little work compared to a long form video. So I can see more data come in. I have more reps. I have more shots. It’s almost like fishing. If you have the best presentation on your bait, right?

Let’s say you’re fishing a jig and it has the most beautiful skirt It’s the perfect color for the weather conditions. The water temperature is perfect. You are absolutely in prime season for this jig fishing that you’re doing. You cast it out there and you give it the best presentation. You jerk the rod a few times and give it that lifelike feel. You still might not catch anything, even though you did everything perfect.

So what are you supposed to do? Put it away and go home? No, you cast it out again, and you cast it out again, and you cast it out again, and every time you get better at casting, every time you’re getting more used to the muscle memory of twitching that rod where you don’t even have to think about it anymore, and every time you’re getting yourself in a position to potentially get that big strike.

And sometimes you’ll get a bite and you’ll miss it. Sometimes you’ll get a bite, bring it in and it’s a small fish. And every once in a while, boom, you get the lunker. And that is exactly what’s happening right now on the Shorts experiment, the TikTok and the Reels that I’m doing. I’m posting all the same video minus the extra addition for TikTok to get over a minute.

When that makes sense. I’m not going to extend like a 30 second video to a minute just for that purpose, but the reps, reps, reps, reps. So. quantity is in fact quite important when you are starting out. And I remember when I started out with my blog back in 2008, I was writing three to four articles a week.

And they weren’t perfect. I was very excited about it, which is what I think drove me to hit publish despite them not being perfect. But, little did I know that every time I hit publish was after a writing sprint and I learned from that. I got better. I understood how to tell a better story and format my blog posts.

I understood more quickly each time how to set the metadata for each blog post and you do something a hundred times, you’re going to get much better and faster at it. And so if you come out with one podcast episode a month or one epic blog post a month I mean, yes, the hope is it’s so epic that it gets pushed out it gets shared and that can happen but you risk the bait that is perfectly presented in a pond for a bass and it just not hitting. But it’s not The more casts you take, the more chances that you’ll get a strike.

And you know what? Sometimes with these shorts, to continue the analogy, I’ll put a not great presentation out there. I think that it could be better, but I want to hit that daily posting schedule. And that’s what is a win to me, by the way. The win is that I posted daily, not whether or not these things get views or not.

Because if I post daily, it is another toss of that bait out there. And many times, which is where I was going, that bait that wasn’t perfect, the big one still gets it. The big one was hungry that day. So they found it because I put it out in front of them. Imagine if I just was not confident in my baiting or my jig fishing that I didn’t put it out there.

The big fish that was hungry probably doesn’t care as much as the ones that maybe had just had a snack. I can tell when I do these analogies that I’m like taking it a little too far and it just starts to not make sense. But hopefully it’s making sense so far. But getting those reps in is so key. And the part of this that’s important when I teach this to others, and I’ve talked about it with others, especially since this experiment has gone live, is to not sacrifice the value, excuse me, you can sacrifice a little bit of quality, but still have some value in there.

Now, another interesting thing while we finish up here that has been happening since this experiment has taken off is in the space that this shorts channel is in, which is in the Pokemon space, at least a dozen other people who I know and knew already have copied me. Now they didn’t, they haven’t straight up plagiarized, they attempted to do it in their own way, which is great. I think it’s important to see what somebody else is doing and see if you can do something similar and I, I’m not mad at them for that. I’m more disappointed that they are almost not even including any of their own personality into it or any of their own spin or twist into it.

There is a format that works that I found. In the kinds of videos that I’m doing a fun jingle in the beginning that opens up a question and then I go through the pack opening and then at the end there’s a sort of reward for you know in the form of a jingle whether that is a good pull in that pack or not.

And a lot of the other creators that are in the space that I’m in are doing basically the same exact thing. A jingle, and then a payoff at the end, and it is so obvious to people who have found my videos, and many people have, I mean, it’s millions at this point, so much so that these creators who I love and I want them to succeed are getting hate from my viewers saying this is a Short Pocket Monster ripoff or hey way to copy Pat Flynn exactly or things like that. And i’ve had a lot of these creators reach out to me and go, Pat, what do I do? I’m trying my best to create something original. And i’m just getting hate for it and i’m like I like that you’ve put your own spin on this. But this format seemingly, I’ve been able to create sort of a claim to it. I don’t think people should not do it, but I think for the sake of creating something original, you have to come up with a different idea, but use the principles of why this works in it.

And it’s like, it’s really sad because a lot of these creators get deflated when they see they’re trying something like. You know, I don’t want to call anybody out, but yeah, I’m not going to say what the names are, but some of them are a little corny, right? Because they’re just trying to come up with it and almost force a jingle.

And again, I’m not saying that I own this space. I don’t, I’m new to the Pokemon space, relatively speaking, but I’m not new to how to package a piece of content so that it gets viewed, so that people binge listen or watch it. I’m not new to creator world. I’m bringing my creator experience into this world.

And I think that that’s where a lot of these other creators in the space struggle because they are almost in a way too afraid to take a risk. Now that I’ve proven this, they’re just doing the same thing and they’re always going to be second at best. And they’re going to get these comments from people who’ve already seen something like it before.

But bringing your originality is hard. Trying something new is difficult. And this is why I told myself in the beginning, I’m going to do this for 30 days. It’s brand new. I haven’t seen anybody do it before. And no matter what, I’m just going to do it for 30 days and it might bomb. This time it didn’t. And so, you know, I’m grateful.

Yes, there is a new revenue stream in the business now through these Shorts. It’s a lot more than I thought. It has lasted. It’s not gone below $400 in a single day. It has gone above $1100 one day, that was a peak day when one of the videos, and that’s the other thing, one of these videos just not even like a new video.

It was an older video that was like 13 days old Just decided to just take off and then the revenue started coming in from that video because monetization was enabled. So anyway a little bit of just stream of consciousness here for you as I chat about what’s been happening. It’s been very interesting I’ve been happy to share and answer questions and I will be sharing even more I do have and I think I’ve mentioned this before I want to try this again In a space outside of Pokemon using a very similar format and mostly just the same principles.

I want to run it for 30 days, see what happens. I want to see if it can unlock a new audience on its own without even sharing it. So you might’ve seen in a recent newsletter that I created a logo for some experiment. That’s what the logo is for. And I, I hid the logo under a confidentiality stamp or confidential stamp.

So you haven’t even seen it yet, but I promise once this experiment is done, I want to, again, not just think that I got lucky. And that’s been a interesting thing for me as I’ve grown as an entrepreneur in the beginning with my exam prep material for architects. A lot of people planted the seed in my head that I was just lucky.

And so it was only through continuous refinement and experimentation and trying new things and seeing those things work too that I eventually, years later, gained the confidence that, hey, I kind of know what I’m doing here. And I can own that and I have reps and I have experience and a track record. And now I know when people say, Oh, you’re just getting lucky.

I know that’s not true. So I know that I didn’t get lucky here because I put into this Shorts channel what I know was likely to work. It’s a bet. Did I know it was gonna work? No, but I gave itself the best chance. I gave it the best chance to succeed knowing what I know from the past. And this is why this podcast is great because I can share these things openly with you and hopefully help you fast forward that success.

Now these results are not typical, but they’re also not accidental. They’re also not lucky. And so I’m happy to share as much as I can with you. And I will share this new experiment, a new shorts channel that I’m gonna create from scratch. I already got the username for it, got the logo created, got the jingle made.

Yeah, we’ll see what happens. So stick around, hit subscribe. So you see what happens next and more updates coming. But next week we have a very important announcement coming on the Friday episode. It’s not just myself on the podcast as well. So be sure you subscribe to hear that too. It involves the future of SPI and don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere, but things are going to change a little bit and I want to share those changes with you with a couple of special guests.

So we’re coming soon. Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!