👋 Hey, welcome to the new subscribers. Blah blah blah, it's been a while, but here's my excuse in case you're recording absences: I just moved to NYC and am very tired and sitting in a camping chair in an empty apartment.

Ok, video:

You may have joined this newsletter because of this post.

This was my most popular LinkedIn post ever, with more than 48k impressions. I had some respectable people engage with it, so I guess that's why:

I can't take credit for all of this. My former boss and pal Luke Thomas at Friday.app really turned me on to this, when we had a couple of video hits early on.

We nailed on a really big keyword at the time -- online daily planner -- and were able to rank a normal blog post for this + a YouTube video.

Friday shut down (sold the site to ClickUp) about a year and a half ago, but the videos still live on.

The views are somewhat more than what they were, but you can tell it worked b/c the video has way more views than the subscriber number.

Here's the view vs subscriber count for a video titled Online Daily Planner.

68k views with only ~403 subscribers.

Here's the view vs subscriber count for another one titled: Daily Planner App.

18k views.

This isn't huge, especially when you look at some of these people running Notion tutorial videos on a regular basis.

For a brand, it's not bad.

We didn't do this the normal YouTube way, by building a YouTube audience. Instead, they found us through search.

Specifically, they often found our blog posts or articles through a Google search first, and then watched the video. Some also found us through YouTube search (productivity is a fairly popular YouTube topic).

So go back to my original LinkedIn post, and you can see the bones for the strategy:

Publish on YouTube
Link to the blog post from your YouTube description
Add the video to the same high-ranking blog post
Watch the views increase

Now, the videos above were more product-oriented, and I put them on landing pages and my middle funnel lists (the playbook goes over this!).

I'm attempting something slightly different at Tettra.com, where I currently work.

I made some broader educational videos and then am putting those on several blog posts. They're almost like ads in the middle of a post.

Here's an example:

This blog post is about the benefits of a knowledge base, so I added our video called "What is an Internal Knowledge Base?"

This is a little more niche with lower interest than a planner, which is what Friday was solving, so the views are going to be lower IMO.

After 2 months, we've hit 132 views and 58 subscribers to Tettra.

Not great, but it's better than other videos we have on YouTube that are not in any blog posts and have yet to crack 100 views even after a year.

As I add this video to more posts we will hit 1k views within the year.

Guess what? That's how many views Monday.com has for their video about knowledge bases after a year -- and they have more than 74k subscribers.

So for the level of interest that is in the topic, I feel like we're on the right track.

What about multiple positions in the SERP?

Snagging multiple positions in the Google SERP is a rare feat in this exercise, but is completely do-able. The Tettra DA is in the 60s and we've grabbed a landing page and a video in the SERP for a short period of time.

I'll keep trying. I don't have a lot of tactics or suggestions to make this happen (feel free to send them my way!) but I do think frontloading with the keyword is probably the way to go.

The closest I've gotten at Tettra is with the search query "Google Docs Wiki" which is a pretty specific long-tail keyword.

We used to have both on page 1 and now if you click through, we're the first video after the click.

SEARCH FOR GOOGLE DOCS WIKI

CLICK...

AFTER THE CLICK, WE'RE AT THE TOP

The problem now is that the video is almost 6 years ago, so that's hurting us. If I took it down and re-loaded it, it would probably snap back into the original SERP. (that's a theory).

Google Search Console is Looking for Videos

Google is now indexing videos via Google Search Console, so this lets me know that they're actively looking for videos, just like mobile-friendliness and breadcrumbs.

ONE LAST THING: PRE-ORDER -- HOW TO MAKE BRIEFS WITH AI

OK, I saved an idea for last.

I am thinking of doing a very short course (45 min to an hour?) about how I do briefs now with AI and some of the changes I'm making to my workflow.

This would be $13 right now for the first 30 people, and then I'll probably max it out at $25.

If you trust me to do this (at some point! before October 1) then go ahead and order it here and I'll let you know when it's ready.

PRE_ORDER_HERE

If you're not comfortable doing that, just hit reply to let me know you're interested.

I'm trying to validate this thing, ya know?

OK THAT'S ALL.

Thanks!

-Josh Spilker

PS: You're receiving this because you bought one of my products on Gumroad (How To Scale Traffic...playbook or the on-page SEO checklist or b/c you signed up.

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