Simon is joined by Matt Estlea who has built an online audience of over 150,000. Matt will be discussing how he built his online following, video creation, affiliate marketing and how he made these into a successful career. RECORDED LIVE: 7th April 2020 Matt Estlea – https://mattestlea.com/
Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present.
This is very exciting, Matthew, we are live on Facebook. How do you crack YouTube? How do you make money out of YouTube? And how do you do that thing with affiliates where your viewers can click on your stuff? And then you get paid a commission if they buy something, but how do you do it in a way that doesn’t upset one of the world’s most powerful companies? And I think that’s what we’re gonna get into tonight. Matt, isn’t it?
Alright, I’ll tell you why you’re asking me. Yeah.
Well, we thought you do. I mean, you’re, you weren’t doing anything else and let’s get you on. So what we’re gonna do is we’ll just let this run for a few, a few seconds, a few minutes and hopefully some folks join us with talking about all things video tonight and before we get into the video stuff, talk me through OSB is that like, what is that? What
was spot now right? So OSP is this material, so I made this clock from it’s called oriented strand board. It’s what they bought up windows with. And I have started using it in controversial places in furniture, and stuff like that. And it started stirring up a little bit of hate to the point where I thought I would get it printed on a t shirt with the OSB texture. And start this whole movement around the material. That’s kind of just spiralled, to be honest.
So is it? Where’s this hate coming from? Is it coming from the carpenters out? There they go. What are you doing using this stuff? You should be using proper word or is it something else? What’s going on?
It’s mainly from those people. I think it’s a lot of the traditionalists. The thing is like, OSB is a bit of a hip thing at the moment, if you go into any vegan or Organic Cafe, they will have walls clad with OSB because you know, it’s that kind of reclaimed thing. So I think I just jealous that I’m down with the kids nowadays.
If you’re just tuning into the pop up business school, you’re probably thinking, is this a show about carpentry? Or are we talking about business tonight? Well, I guess it’s gonna be a little bit of both because Matt esli is joining us and we’re gonna post his links in chat. Matt, based in Redding in the UK has taken a YouTube channel from zero subscribers to 152,000. I think that was the last time I looked, which was yesterday, assuming you’ve not had a big lift since yesterday. That’s the sort of number that we’re on now.
Yeah, floating around 150 At
the moment, and that is phenomenal.
It’s pretty mental. I haven’t really sort of put it into perspective yet of how, you know, they often compare it to things like how many people it takes to fill out stadiums and stuff like that. And I’ve never really worked out how many people that is. But it was only when I hit 150. I thought Yeah, I kind of want to do that now, because it’s just so easy to get lost in the numbers with it. And pretty crazy that that many people willingly watch we chat rubbish about word on on camera. So yeah, it’s really
what a phenomenal achievement. So we’re going to get into this tonight. And I think I’m going to ask you a couple of questions about how you started. And there’s a lot of people that are going to watch this video, either tonight or in the recording, they’re going to watch it because they’re looking for some tips and tricks, some advice, some of the practical bits of knowledge, we’ll probably talk about hashtags and how you name your videos. And but I think there’s there’s some more advanced strategies that you’ve learned over the last year or two, which is about your network of videos and how you can link one video to another, I’d love to get into some of that stuff. But I guess it would also be super interesting for people to understand how you started, what your mindset is around making videos and what it was when you first started, how it might have changed. And also like, you know, there’s people that there’s people that have got some amazing ideas that could make some great videos, maybe they haven’t got some of the technology, but I bet they haven’t started because they’re a little bit fearful, a little bit scared of putting themselves in front of an audience. You’ve obviously dealt with a lot of that, because every time you make a video, an email gets sent to a minimum of 152,000 people. And so you must have dealt with some of the fear. And I’d love to know, you know, some of the stuff behind that for you, where you know where those challenges have been for you if you’ve had them and if so how we get over them. But before we get into all that, I guess my first question was going to be like how you started? How did it all begin? You know, when was that?
So I figured this question will be asked first and it’s such a big question to answer because there’s so many things that go into it other than just me picking up a camera and starting videos to the point where, literally, I had to map it out on a bit of paper where I’m going to go with this response. I’m not even kidding. I was thinking about it last night about Stan
a flowchart, your tradesmen, I love this, this is amazing.
This is the thing like I am so still quite uncomfortable on camera with things like this, it still doesn’t come naturally to me where I actually need to plan stuff out. And the thought of this question coming up, was actually keeping me awake last night to the point where I needed to get it on this flowchart.
But you’re a man after my own heart now, Shall I show you the planning that I’ve done for this? Yes, please. Yeah, you ready? There we go. I’ve written two words, I thought I’m gonna be nice and plan tonight, I’m going to make sure I get the most out of it. But what I’ve decided to do is, is I’m just going to put myself into, I need to make videos to grow my business, or I’m stuck at home with all this virus nonsense. There is no better opportunity for me to carve out an hour a day, two hours a day and start making videos. Where do you start? What’s the first thing that you get? Like, when you go? Okay, I’m going to make some videos, you know, what was the moment when you said, I’m going to start making videos and whack it on YouTube? How old were you and what went through your head.
So if I start at the very beginning of my flowchart, the basically, where I started with the whole woodworking thing was I studied at a furniture making school for five years. And that was pretty much for five days a week, give or take Monday to Friday. Alongside that, I also worked at a tools machinery supplier. So essentially, like if you boil it down, it was five days learning how to use the tools at this furniture making school, the remaining two days was learning how other people want to use their tools, you know, what projects they want to use it on, and what processes they want to do. And like those worked hand in hand, so so well, they just supplement each other perfectly. So that’s where it kind of started with the woodworking side of things. But the video came like, years after I’ve got into it. And the video started when I was in my fourth year of the furniture making course. And I had a long term relationship breakdown, which, you know, it’s pretty bad in itself, but it uncovered a lot of other demons within within me that just I had sort of ignored. And it just put me in a really bad place. Essentially, I, I put more effort into the relationship that I did with friends. So like, I still had friends at that time. But I it was like awkward if I went out for a beer with them. Forget all that. Get on me. So like I put more effort into the relationship. And then also, when I was at rocket word, we had rocket wood being the furniture making school, we had talks from industry professionals, most of them sort of talking about how difficult it was to get started how you often made a loss in your first few years. And I sort of had this mindset of, you know, I don’t care if I come out of this without being able to make a decent income because I’ll have this like nice relationships come back to each night. And so when that relationship ended, it was just kind of like everything collapsed. And it was a fair, few months of just like spiralling like really bad this sort of singularity at the end where I just felt like I had a few options available to me it was either, right either sawed off to Australia, and don’t tell anyone just disappear, either join the army and just disappear. Or I flick the offer and forget I mean, or fortunately, the fourth option was, you know, I just do what I’ve always wanted to do, which was actually film woodworking videos. Since I started the course four years prior to that I’d always wanted to film myself, but I was too scared about embarrassing myself in front of everyone. You know, talking to the camera in front of people was weird. It’s really weird. You’re telling me Yeah, exactly. Like it’s just it always scared me. And it took four years to sort of just like break down to this absolute, like, just break down essentially, to make this decision like right, I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m just gonna go for it now. And as soon as I started, it just kind of like all made sense from that point. Because when I was a kid, I obviously was quite crafty, hence why I was doing the furniture making course to start with but also I was quite entrepreneurial in a way I would. When I was growing up, my dad owned a food store and he would take me to the wholesalers. I would go and buy big trays of candy from him or from the wholesalers and then resell it at school based to buy brain liquor for 55 ph and sell him for it.
So I’m sorry what? Before we move on? You bought brain liquors? Re liquors? Yes. That’s a perfectly normal sentence. Let’s move on. So I love that. And I think So how old were you when you can like you first remember that you were sort of, you know, selling sweets to your mates and stuff. How old were you then?
I reckon that would have been around year eight or year nine. I can’t remember what to do in terms of
1314, something like that. 1213 Maybe, yeah,
I always had these sort of tendencies of doing entrepreneurial things. And like in addition to that, when I was doing the furniture making course I would. There was like veneer companies. Veneer is like really thin pieces of wood that’s quite expensive. Those veneer companies that words, they will just chuck away off cuts all the time. And I sort of figured this out and I emailed a few of them asking, can you just send me your off cuts instead, I’ll pay for postage and all that. So I used to get their off cuts and then just flog them on eBay and made a pretty, pretty good money from that. And
I love that. Love that. So look, we’re going to get into monetizing the videos because I know that there’s a bunch of people from the questions that we’ve had, over the last few days people have sent in a few questions and we’ve got a list. But what there’s there’s two things that I’d like to ask everybody watching and it’s great to see so many folks that have joined us this evening so, so Russell from Ken here, Jolene here, lots of folk Rosie Smith, Rachel says Hi, Katie Coombs, God bless Katie from the pop up team says she’s the first one to call it. It’s pop ups answer Woodworks answer to Joe wicks. You knew that was gonna come at some point than I need to go Wix. We’ve got our own Matt esli everybody, and instead of having to get up at nine in the morning to see him, you can tune in and find anything. That’s why I love this. Sandra says, Hello to everybody. This is great. Carrie M McCann, Daniel curry as asked a very technical question about Word. Let’s get that question out. Now, Matt, I’m still unclear on with sizing to their prices, feet for metres and pounds for dollars, or I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what that means. But we might we may get some more technical questions. Keres is watching. Sonia is very pleased to have not missed it. We’ve got loads of fight watching. So the two asks, Is this if there’s someone that you know, that is that wants to make a YouTube channel that has got a YouTube channel, but they’re struggling wants to find out how to make video for business, how to monetize. And an alternative way of spending this time in lockdown. Now is the time that you need to tag them, please tag them and share it. Let’s get them on. Because we’re going to get into the detail of how this stuff actually works. And what what Matt’s learned. And he’s built his YouTube channel from scratch. He’s now got 152,000 subscribers. He makes money from affiliate links, YouTube advertising, and paid relationships with, with some of the companies that supplying the tools and equipment, and so on. So we’re gonna find out how all of this, that stuff works. I think. As we say, Jolene is excited to hear it. That’s all good. We’ve got Chad in USA joined us. I think we’ve got some friends from Morocco that have joined us as well, which is absolutely brilliant. So you’re going to talk and share people share with people that are interested in YouTube. What I also want you to do is to if you’ve got a question about video, now is the time stick it in the comments? What have you always wanted to know how to do? What is it about video editing about hashtags about how you post a video, when you post a video, we’re going to dive into some of that stuff. But if you’ve got any specific questions, please stick it in the comments once you’ve tagged your friends and family who might be interested, and share this video so that we can get this information out to as many people as possible. Because our Matt knows one or two things about video. That like when you when you started and and you started posting videos, one of the things I’m really interested in because I didn’t I didn’t know that stuff. Actually, you know, we’ve met a few times and you came to a few days of a pop up business school down in Bristol. And I, I didn’t know that you’d started that video, business, you know, your YouTube channel and so on. You started making videos at a real low point in your life. And at a time when you face lots of adversity and you were in a bit of a bit of a challenging spot. Yeah. I don’t know about you, but I recognise a few other people in a bit of a challenging spot right now. And that. I think that it’s just such a brilliant way to describe your story and the fact that you were in a really dark place and then you decided that you rolled the dice and thought now’s the time I’m going to take it feels like a brave thing to do does it does it feel brave to you now looking back or did it just feel like the natural thing to do next?
And I think it was Essentially, it was like, the only thing to do it was either I do this, or I go back to what I was before, kind of thing. And it was just really, if I can think of one part in my life that was like a defined chapter it was, it was that moment where I decided to make those videos because it was just, it was one way or the other. And obviously, I was gonna choose this way. And I’m still like riding that wave now. So yeah, that’s where I get most of my motivation from, I’m not going back there.
I know one of the things that stops people making videos, just before we get into the technical stuff, let’s talk about the mindset of videos, because there’s no point getting into the technical stuff of videos, if you’re never going to make a video. So let’s get into the mindset stuff first, because I really want people to watch this, and then get inspired to go, you know what, I saw this guy, Matt, I know, he looks a little bit like Joe works. But this guy really inspired me to start my video channel, I’m going to stop saying it now. And watch this. And this, this live stream could be the moment that we’ve got over 100 people watching live at the moment, this could be the moment where someone goes, You know what, I’m going to do it. So I know that one of the challenges that stops people doing this stuff is fear. And in particular, fear of the negativity either from friends and family, or from from strangers. Can you talk to that a moment, you know how you dealt with that stuff. And you know, when you get negativity on the channel, which I’m sure with 150,000 subs, you’re going to have some comments on there that are less than favourable, especially, we’re going to talk more about OSB I’m sure but, you know, how do you handle? How do you handle the haters? What’s your strategy for, for the trolls, and for the negativity and so on.
So I think there’s kind of two pools of potential criticism you could get, I suppose you’ve got the online criticism, and you’ve got the criticism in person that you get for actually doing the video. And like to put it into perspective, I started my video making by plunking a camera down in a workshop full of about 50 people, I think, or something like that. So like it was instantly just been there in everyone’s way, essentially, yeah, I was pumping it down in the machine shop around my workbench and people were sort of like, looking at it thinking, Can I get in the background and things there was no, there was no way to hide what I was doing. It was just like you had to get it out there. And what I found in doing that, yeah, it was terrifying. Because I don’t like being the centre of attention weirdly, running a YouTube channel. Like when it’s in person, I’m quite introverted. So like, when that happened, it was like, I hate having all these eyes on me. But what I found was actually, in two or three weeks, people just, it’s just normal. Like, people just accept that there’s a guy with a camera walking around the workshop. There we go. Like, it’s just another thing. So when it comes to worrying about people in person, just like don’t worry about that. And if they are giving you flak for it, it’s only going to take two or three weeks. Yes, you might get the odd Jive after that, or something like that. But most people aren’t doing it, at least in person to knock you down. They’re doing it just to have a bit of banter, really, so. So don’t worry about that whatsoever. When it comes to the online criticism that I remember my first hater, his name was Barry Manilow he was, he was awful an awful human being. But at the end of the day, you are going to get it and you can either sort of try and hide away from it and pretend it’s not happening. Or you can just go and attack them by attacking them. I don’t mean I starting an argument with them. I mean, trying to rile them up as much as possible to the point where you turn that hate on them kind of thing. That’s how I try and switch it up either completely ignore it, to which nothing escalates. Or I think there’s something in this that I can take the nick of. So like, for example, my favourite one would be I was in fact, actually in Bristol, I think it’s around the time I met you that time. And there was this guy sitting in a coffee shop and this hate started coming through. And I said to him, you know, if you come back again, or at least three or four more times, I might get enough AdSense revenue to get marshmallows on my hot chocolate. So I kept doing that with him kept coming back and I must have got it like 20 times. And like obviously ad revenue doesn’t equate to that much yet marshmallows, but all that but it was the thought process. The fact that I could see him like start to question what he was doing and it was just hilarious to try and do to the point where I’ve actually started introducing a section on these monthly updates I do called hater of the month. I take my favourite hater. I plaster it in front of everyone who watches that monthly update. Tell him where the video was. And they can go back and respond. I can share my response and it’s just hilarious. It’s like For me, it is the only way I can battle a bad fight against the hate. It’s just put it up in front of everyone and just laugh and just like, you know, if that’s the best thing they can do at the time, then what sort of life is that?
I love it. So humans your weapon. And I, what I really love about that is, you mentioned earlier on that, that, you know, the the emoji version of that, which is the thumbs down, you’ve got a strategy for that, as well as when you see the thumbs downs on your videos, which I found very depressing. Alan and I made a video. I think it was the first Coronavirus support video that we made. And we like we poured our heart and soul into this, like we do everything that we do. And 15 people gave it a thumbs down. I thought, Oh, thank you that like helped us. Don’t give me a thumbs down. What’s your strategy for the thumbs down that
it’s just 15 people from Australia giving you a thumbs up?
It’s the opposite upside.
Like dislikes mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things like you. I like yourself. I did my monthly update. I posted it this morning. And I basically just said, I hope everyone’s safe. I hope everyone’s Well, this is what’s happening with a channel and I got dislikes on that. So like it’s gonna happen. It’s just a statistic, it doesn’t really matter anything. It’s just a thumbs up from the Australians.
I love it. Right, let’s dive into some of the questions. Just some thoughts from you on on what equipment like people want to know what rig you’re using at the moment? What, what specific equipment, I kind of hesitate there, because because you’ve been doing this some time. And I know you’ve invested some of your cash that you’ve made into improving your equipment that you use. But I guess let’s break it down into two questions. What do you really need to start? And should we be that worried about quality of audio quality of video to begin with? And, you know, knowing that it won’t be perfect to start with, you can build up to it? How did you start? What did you first use? And then what are you using now people are interested to know what equipment and specifically you’re editing how you edit the videos as well, Matt?
Sure, yeah. And when I started off, I was fortunate enough to get given a DSLR for the Christmas before I started doing the video. So I started using that. And it was maybe about three 400 pounds worth or something like that. And it was pretty decent. But when you look at the quality of it, it’s not like it’s exactly the same compared to an iPhone. The only difference between a DSLR DSLR. Sorry, for those of you don’t know is something like this. This hasn’t got a lens on it. But you know, it’s a big camera. The only difference between that and an iPhone is this has lots of little things on it, like ISO and shutter speed and frame rates, and a F on SCNH. Fr today, it’s just all these things that I still have no idea what they are. And, you know, if you don’t know what any of those are, you can just use your iPhone, and I posted a video in the master class. That was a comparison between a I think it was a $50,000 camera versus an iPhone, whatever it was. And seriously, To the untrained eye, no one would know the difference between the really expensive camera and just a standard iPhone. And in fact, the monthly update that I posted last night. So let’s put it in perspective. This camera shoots in 4k, you know, like pretty much the highest quality that people are posting on YouTube. Some people are doing 8k But let’s say for argument’s sake most people are doing it in 4k. I posted I post with that most of the time nowadays but last night, I posted my monthly update and that was filmed on my iPhone. The video was a little bit you know, wasn’t the best quality compared to my 4k. And it was a little bit choppy. But not one comment mentioned the quality being filmed from the iPhone. And like, you know, I’ve just spent 7000 pounds on this DSLR to try and get this amazing quality and no one really complained about the drop in quality back to my iPhone. So like video equipment, you do not need to worry about it whatsoever. There is nothing like just use your iPhone. It’s as simple as that. Audio. So talk about audio.
Yeah, talk about audio. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
So at the moment, because again, I set this in the master class at the moment, I’m using one of these, which is a wireless transmitter and then a receiver that sits on top of the DSLR and then it goes into the audio socket. So essentially I can dance around the workshop with this thing in my back pocket and the audio just picks me up whatever this for a decent one, you’re probably gonna want to spend 400 500 quid So in short, it’s probably not worth it to start with it. Just say, get yourself one of these, which is a shotgun microphone. This one’s from Rode, you know, they probably float around 80 to 100 pounds. And literally all this does is attaches to the top of the camera, whether that’s your phone or your DSLR, or wherever you happen to use, and it just makes that audio a little bit better. The reason I put more effort into audio is because that tends to be what people pick up on better when they’re actually watching videos. The example I gave before was like when a baby’s crying, what hits you the most? Is it the sight of it crying? Or is it that horrible sound it makes? It’s like, sound is what really can really like affect us. And
we can be twitchy with that thought, Man, I The memories are still fresh.
How’s that homeschool? Again? Audio if, yeah, again, the video that I did this morning on my iPhone, I didn’t use any microphone for that. And again, I didn’t get any complaints about the audio. So maybe I’m overthinking this, I don’t know. But with audio, if you can just invest a little bit into it, it will make all the difference. And it’ll just make your video seems so much more professional. So if you’re going to invest money in anything, ignore the flashy cameras. Just use the iPhone that’s in your back pocket or your Samsung, whatever you happen to use, and just get some sort of decent audio as a shotgun microphone. I put a few recommendations in the masterclass those, that’s probably the one you want to go for.
Brilliant, right, let’s just mention the masterclass that Matt’s talking about. So over the last few days, Matt has been given up hours of his time. And he’s written a short masterclass for people that are interested in doing the video for their business and getting their videos on YouTube. And that all that side of things. And that masterclass, has been posted on the pop up Business School Survival Guide on our website. So this is the piece of content that we’ve been creating every day, since this stuff began a couple of weeks ago. And the whole thing is designed to support people to help them with money issues, health issues, mental health issues and business so that those that have got businesses have got helped to pivot and make things happen. And those that want to take the opportunity to start a business have got somewhere to go for help, especially in these times that we’re in at the moment. So Matt’s done a whole masterclass for us, which is absolutely phenomenal. And every time I dial in to see you and your housemates now I see you in the background, and I feel a little bit guilty, because you don’t really come up for our you’ve been writing that master class every time I every time I dial in and chat to Liam and Alex. So thank you for all of that stuff. And I know, we haven’t really promoted it that much yet. And it’s already the second busiest page on our website is the second busiest post, which is absolutely phenomenal. So so please dive into that if you want to know more of the detail that’s on our website. And
I’m going to add a another section to that, because it’s a great response. I’m going to do another section on uploading videos, I’ve just seen a comment here, from someone asking about tags and SEO and stuff when it comes to YouTube. So I’ll do another section, sort of between the but after the editing stage in the master class on how to upload videos on YouTube, and how I title and add descriptions and tags and all that sort of stuff as well. So yeah, keep an eye out for that.
Brilliant, I was gonna ask you about some editing software, and then we’ll go into some of the stuff around. We’ll talk a little bit about tags, I think a leader detail for the master class, but tell me about editing. And if you were if you were starting a YouTube channel tomorrow morning from scratch, you know, would you use something like iMovie? Is that good enough? A couple of people were using that. Is there a PC version of that, that you think is a free bit of software that might work? Do people have to invest money to get the editing software? Or is there something that’s out there that they could use to begin with?
It depends how complex you want to go with it. So in the master class, I started introducing a few editing techniques like B roll and things like J cat, so I won’t go into what they are now. But if you want to go into more advanced things like that, then yes, you might need to get paid software. But to just get started. Just for the sake of getting videos out there. You mentioned iMovie that’s perfect for Apple computers. But you’ve also got, you know, Windows Movie Maker, you’ve got all sorts of things. What I’d recommend is just go into Google and type in best free editing software 2020 2020 Bing this year, obviously. So you get an updated article. That’s the way I would go about it. If you’ve got a little bit of money, and you can get software that’s just like a one time payment, which is what I actually started with. I started with a software piece of software called Power Director. It’s made by a company called CyberLink. It was a little bit buggy. but it did the job, I was able to do a few things that I wanted to do on it. And I think I must have used that for at least a year and a half before upgrading to what I’m using now. So I’d recommend starting with free things. And then just upgrade as you start to see the limitations of that software.
Cool. That’s great. And there is, I think it was Justin wanted to know what hardware that you’re using. Like we’re getting really technical now like the laptop, tell us about the laptop, but do it quickly because I, I start to glaze over if we get too techie. Matt, what’s the kit that you’re using to edit the videos? I think people are interested to know, you know, is there a probably a, you know, a minimum level of kit? If you’re editing long videos? Or, you know, could you use a hard drive to store the video separately? And what does that look like for you?
Yeah, so you could get a SSD, an SSD as a hard drive that works very fast. So it’s able to send data back and forth very quick. And that’s kind of what you need for video editing. So you can get yourself an SSD, and just entry level software, most computers should be able to handle anyway when it comes to editing videos. So if you have an SSD, basic video editing software, you should be okay. If it starts getting a bit glitchy, most software has an option to downgrade the preview quality. The preview quality being what you see when you’re editing the video. So it looks a little bit grainy when you’re editing it, but it loads quicker. So it makes it makes editing on cheaper laptops a bit easier. And when you export it, it exports it at full resolution. So you can usually find options within any editing software that allows you to do that. I’ve got a very powerful computer at the moment. I know nothing about computers like yourself, seriously. I know absolutely nothing zero. Liyan told me the other day, well, not the other day, a few months ago, I got this more RAM for my computer. And apparently, it’s just like off the charts. I’ve got no idea what it means in terms of anything. And, you know, I’ve just found ways to make it work on my computer. So you’ll find that dropping the resolution quality. And working off an SSD is pretty much all you need to get started. If that, you know, you might find that you load it onto your computer that works absolutely fine.
You know what’s happening here, Matt, and there’s some people watching here that are going to start shifting uncomfortably in their seat, because with every answer that you’re giving, there is one less excuse to start using your getting your YouTube thing and start using your camera to start making videos and start posting them. And I think I’ve said a couple of times to folk, perhaps on these live streams last week about the very first videos that we made at pop up business school. And I think there’s somewhere on the channel somewhere unless I’ve forced jack into deleting them. But there’s two weird like eyeglasses onto the video. I know Alan was glasses all the time. And we looked like a really odd couple cream leather sofa. I think the sofa was at a slight angle as well and the cameras in front of us and Alan was really comfortable with this stuff. And I’m staring at him. And then I’m staring at the camera going What am I doing here? This makes me feel super uncomfortable. But now I have to say that now that we’ve been you know, I’ve made quite a few videos now for pop up and they still make me feel a little bit uncomfortable. I’m the opposite to you. I think the live stream stuff I prefer. And now I wish I hadn’t told you that we’ve had over 100 people watching for most of the time. Because now that I know that you don’t like the live stuff so much but you like anyway. So Rob Harvey is is been really helpful in the comments. You see your partner in crime. Just you heard of this guy?
Now. He just keeps trolling me from time to time he keeps turning up to my workshop and just getting in a way
that’s no good. Well, he seems to know lots which is awesome. And we’ve got some questions here about Lisa’s Lisa como from from Somerset, as her eyes have glazed over, I think with the whole techie bit so we’re gonna move on from the techie stuff. We do have a few questions from Teresa from, from Lisa from one or two others actually, about the posting shedule. And I think there’s so two hearts to this question. One is when you first started, did you decide on a, that you were going to post a video a certain time on a certain day? Or did you just start by sticking videos on and then the shedule came later. So how did you start with scheduling, if at all? And then secondly, what’s your scheduling look like right now? And then I’m going to ask you a question about the the carpentry school.
Sure. Okay, so, um, with regards to scheduling. I’m still trying to find out now, what my schedule actually is at the moment. On my youtube banner. It says there’s an upload every three days, which To be honest, I, I hit it consistently for a few months, and then things might drop off for a little bit. So when it comes to planning a schedule, I think the general consensus on YouTube is that you should post at least once a week, if you’re starting off, let’s say, some people will tell you more, some people will tell you less, but I think most people will agree that the medium is kind of one video a week, in terms of achieving that, that might seem like a little bit of a little bit of a chore, you know, getting your videos, equipment set up, every time getting the video planned, filming the video, breaking it all down, editing it and doing that every single week, that can be a lot for people to take on. So instead, what I’d recommend doing is just doing batch filming, where you set up the equipment, film four videos all in one, break it down, edit them all in the next day. And then all of a sudden, you’ve got four videos filmed in two days, that will then last you for an entire month. So that’s kind of what I do with scheduling, sort of looping back to the question. And that’s how I’m able to get videos out every three days. But in the past, you know, me and Rob, Rob Harvey, for those of you who don’t know, Rob is my right hand man in all of this, he helps me with videos. And just as pretty much become the second part of the channel. By this point, you really helped me out of the things now some amazing suggestions for things. So shout out to rob there. He was okay with this. I can’t remember that. I always do this. What was I saying? Simon? Oh, hang on you. You’ve gone.
I got used to the mute button yet. That’s what it is, is you’re saying that rubs your right hand man. And then we’re talking about scheduling and then batch filming?
Yes, that was it. So Rob, helps me get videos out when other things are going on at the moment. So like, for example, we’ve been doing a mezzanine floor build for the past few months. And Rob has actually been editing those for me in the backgrounds. And in that time, we’re only getting videos out once a week, as opposed to every three days like my banner says on YouTube. So when it comes to scheduling stuff, don’t worry too much about it to start with just focus on getting videos out there and let the schedule kind of work itself out later. You know, I’ve been on three years deep in this now. And I’ve still got no idea what my schedule is. I started off trying to do it every two days, which was just stupid. I then moved it to every week, I wasn’t really getting enough response from doing that. I’m now doing it every three days. And it just fluctuates. I’m still trying to find out.
Cool, we might dive into a couple of questions, one from Kim. And there’s a couple other questions around, you know how you get ideas for content? And what do you do when you’re not feeling it? And how that that kind of works? I guess you’ve kind of part answered that by like when your energy’s up, you’re not just filming one video, you’re filming a handful of videos and then spending the next couple of days editing. So that sounds like a really smart way of doing it to me. And we’ve got some questions around the business model. And let’s let’s dive into that. So what was the first what was the first bit of money that you made from the videos? And how does the money stuff work? Now, you know, what does that look like? Where does the income come from? Because this is a full time gig for you, isn’t it?
Yeah, it’s essentially a full time income but I only have part time hours to actually tend to it because I I work I teach at the school that I used to study at. So like I am constantly trying to cram hours into make it work. But essentially my income at the moment is deprived of all sort of derived of lots of little things all added together into one. To start with my first bit of income that came from online stuff probably would have been the I’d imagine it would have been the sale of plans for my workbench. So I made this big workbench at the end of the course of this furniture making school. I made an entire video series on it and then did this grand overview video at the end. And I started getting questions from people cannot buy Platt or Yeah, can I get plans to make this myself and I sort of like pawned it off for the first few months it would have been just thinking like yeah, if people don’t really need this, like you can just design it, it’s, it’s just a workbench, to the point where I thought hang on, it’s actually not that difficult to get digital things up on a website to sell. It’s just you upload it as a PDF, set a price, boom, it’s ready to go and like the great thing about the plans that I sold was they were already drawn. Like I used those plans to make the workbench in the first place. So I just dug into my into my hard drive pretty them up a little bit, put some logos on them. And then just putting my website and they are one of my still they’re one of my biggest selling things, just these plans. So yeah, unbelievable.
How did you take the money? Man? What did you put a PayPal button on there? Or did you use a different payment gateway? How did you actually take the cash?
It would have been PayPal at the time. Yeah, would have been picked up just in Paypal button. So yeah, I started with that, that was kind of the first bit of money that started trickling through. And that was sometime in August 2018, I want to say maybe 2017, something like that. So that started coming through. And then in the months between August and December, that’s when my channel started ramping up, because I was posting videos every two days. And I started getting income from Google Adsense and stuff like that as well. Which we can which we can go into one.
Yeah, let’s, let’s talk about let’s talk about that the advertising revenue, because I think lots of people think that, you know, once they getting their videos up there, and people are watching them, then that’s where the advertising revenues gonna come from. But what’s what’s that really like, in real terms, cuz I remember what our first check from YouTube two years ago, was, was phenomenal, actually, because I think we just hit 500 subscribers, and we started getting paid. And we got seven quid. So right, I think we might need to do this a bit longer and get a few more subs. What does the advertising revenue look and feel like based on the numbers that you’ve experienced?
Okay, so the, the app revenue, I’ve actually got it on my pie, I thought I’d get the chart. And I’ve got a pie chart. So my see where’s the assets. So the AdSense revenue is this big orange one here. And it’s a pretty substantial part of the income. But you know, it’s not everything, all of these other income streams. And in fact, within these groups, I’ve actually bunched a few things as well. So in fact, this is probably in reality, about 10 different segments. So AdSense is a big chunk of it, but it’s not everything. And in fact, like, yeah, yeah, a lot of people, that’s the first thing they focus on, how am I going to make money through the ads, and to make enough money through the ads, I still haven’t done that three years later, if I just worked solely off those, I would be very, very poor right now, very poor. So that’s to get to that level, you have to have a lot of views, you have to have a lot of watch time, and you have to start putting two ads in your videos, which starts annoying people. So you’ve got a kind of diversify what you do around that as well. And that’s kind of the beauty of YouTube in that it gives you a platform to get yourself out there and offer these things to people, but also sort of just give you publicity for your business as well. And that’s where the rest of this pie chart and comes from. So yeah, AdSense is just a little part of it. And what I will say about that is, YouTube has recently introduced something where you have to hit a certain threshold of subscribers and watch time, in order to start generating income through ad revenue. And this caused a lot of uproar from people when they first kicked this in, because they thought our YouTube’s sort of, they’re not making it easy for smaller creators to make a living out of this. But when you break it down, in the time that you will have taken to get to that threshold and earn that certain amount of watch time, you would have earned something like 15 pounds, something like that. So effectively, people were getting really annoyed about not having access to 15 pounds to me. So when you find out about that threshold, don’t let it put you off, you’re not really losing a whole lot of money. Just don’t buy coffee for four days. And then you go
Yeah, well, it’s a couple of comments on Thomas said that he got eight videos, he managed to get eight videos on the channel, and then I think lost momentum and stopped. Did you ever think that no one was going to watch your videos? Was that ever a possibility where you went, I might stick these videos up, and nothing, nothing will happen. And what did you do to break through that? Because what I’ve noticed throughout for this, the slow growth that we’ve had from the pop up channel, I think we’re three and a half hours or something, but we we’ve not really focused on it for some time. But, you know, it’s definitely you pick up one subscriber a week for six months, and then you pick up five and then 10. And then there seems to be without explanation, some sort of exponential growth that starts to happen, you know, what’s the sort of time frame? And how did you get through that? What if no one watches my videos? Thought?
So I think it took me about a year to get to 100 subscribers, I think off the top of my head and in that time I went through it was either two or three projects. I can’t remember exactly. I think it was three projects. Three projects being like multi part series that I filmed, lots of editing involved. And yeah, like, there wasn’t a whole lot of viewers with it. But what I found was just by connecting with those core few viewers, it’s, you know, it’s really rewarding in itself. And there’s still viewers from that initial 100, who comment on my videos now who I recognise from back at that time. And it’s just, it’s just incredible, really. So in terms of, like, worrying about people not watching your videos. For me, it was kind of like, what options do I have, you know, I mentioned this earlier, it was kind of, I can either do this, or I can do this. So I was kind of left, I was at those crossroads sort of thing, so I had to do it. But for those of you who are worried about not getting views and stuff like that, it, it doesn’t take you too long to start getting comments through from one or two people in places. And as long as you keep interacting with them, and stay friendly with them, and just tend to their needs and things, they will eventually share that with more people, you will eventually share it with more people, eventually, it just that’s where it starts to build up. But you just you have to take every single viewer for granted at that stage.
So the message is you’ve got to stay in the game. And just keep you know, and I think I love the idea of, you know, committing yourself to when you’ve got the energy, make four or five videos, edit them over two or three days. And then in less than a week’s work, you’ve got a month’s worth of content if you posted a video a week, and then you can spend the rest of the time engaging people promoting and resting and drinking tea, or according to James steam eating Belvita. Now, we might get to that story in a minute. But before we do a couple of announcements at the end of this live stream. So in about 1314 minutes time, I’m going to make an announcement about what’s going to happen on Thursday evening, which I’m super excited about urges. You know, this week has helped us kind of go what other things could we do to help people on the pop up Business School Survival Guide? What Who else could we invite that’s outside of the pop up team that are part of our friends and family and network and so one that can add value to this audience. So I’ve got a very cool exciting announcement about what’s happening on Thursday evening with a with a with another special guest. But before we go, I just go to there I need to get Jack involved. If you’ve got any magic lamps that you can rub the nail or maybe the guitar strings because when when inanimate objects get rubbed, then Jack suddenly appears with a list of things that I’ve missed, or forgotten. So I don’t know if you’ve got anything. No I haven’t. Well, maybe you’ve got a mug. If you got a magic mushroom. That’s it. That’s a very exciting artefact. I think that’s the first of these live streams. We’ve got a magic mushroom, everybody. I’m not gonna ask you to rub that next. Well, dodgy Jack, are you still there? Have you left us? Okay, Jack, what have I forgotten what I missed? I was worried what was going on for a minute? Terrified?
No, it’s been. It’s been it’s been an awesome, awesome stream. It’s actually we’ve had thick and fast questions coming through. We’ve got so many kinds of stuff. So I know that Robin, a few other people are answering those in the questions as well. So we haven’t gotten to it on the stream. We’ll jump in before and around the stream as well. Simon’s going to regret bringing me on as this is a prize for those of you that stuck around till the end. Someone was speaking about his pop ups first YouTube videos, he forgets who’s in charge of that channel. So here’s a lovely screenshot. Oh,
no, you see what I mean? Look, the cream sofa. And we had glasses. I told you that. I told you that.
I can’t comment and they wouldn’t let me You almost got away with it. But you brought me back.
No, do not post that video anywhere or you’re not fired.
Thank you so much for your questions. Matt. We have pie chart love. We have a lot of people loving the pie charts and they asked Can you can you really quickly break down the rest of the pie chart? Yeah, sure. So let’s have a look. I’ve you know, obviously the AdSense one that was recovered this chunk here is affiliate revenue. So that’s what I’ve done the section of the masterclass on recommending products to generate income back from it essentially in that commission you earn back in very anything from let’s say between 1% to 10% Most of the time. So that section there is where I get affiliate stuff and that comes from companies like mainly like Amazon, but also a few individuals as well. Who I promote their tools and there’s a wood store that I promote their material for now because they supply Project packs for this projects that I’m doing. So lots of little things build up into that. But essentially, affiliate income is a fairly big chunk of it, this red section here, which is actually something that I came to these three of the things that I kind of want to grow to shroud the entire business, this one is actually donations, donations literally from people who just want to thank me for putting out free content, just out of the goodness of their heart. Really, the reason I say I want to grow them is because my overall goal with the channel is to essentially make as many things as much content as I can for free for people to be completely accessible to everyone. And I want people to only donate if they want to, to start with it, they don’t want to pay for the plans. And these two big ones here are paid for by Amazon, and Google so like they can afford to pay me it’s fine. These ones here are where people actually pay for my things. So I’ve got one here, which is I called passive income. I don’t like using the word passive income because no income is truly passive. But essentially, this comes from things like the plans that I mentioned earlier for the workbench that I created, plans for boxes plans for various projects that I do. So those were digital downloads, and I also have merchandise such as the RSB T shirts and things like that, that are set up with drop shipping companies. So people buy them, it gets sent straight off to the company, and then they fulfil the order from there. So it’s like nothing needed from me whatsoever. The company that I use for that merchandise is Printful, as recommended by Sam Felder, who’s actually in the comments right now. Hello, Sam. So this is kind of like my passive income that doesn’t really require a lot of input. This one here is the active income, which is things like when I do events and stuff like that. Or when I make tools, or I started making these little knives and things like that to sell to people. It’s when I just do things that require me to actually be there and do things in person, whether that’s services such as teaching, or if it’s actually making things to sell. So like, it’s a very small part of my business. But yeah, I’d love to get to a point where these things just completely Stroud at all, and I just give as many things away, at no cost to the viewer as possible, really. So that’s pretty much everything.
I love it. Couple of thoughts for me just to build on that. So. So case, Hawkins asked, How did you get such a big following? And did it all come at once? So or, you know, was there a video that unlocked it? Or is it just been? You know, because I remember when we were chatting a few months ago, you went from 90,000 to 110 within a matter of a few days. And every time I looked at your channel, it had gone up by another 10k. And I’m thinking what the hell is he doing? Was there a sort of a turning point when when you notice that things were starting to take off? And if so, what do you think triggered it?
Do you know what I think things of fairly, it goes up and down to be honest. To start with I was quite fortunate in that I had a big spike in growth because I was posting consistently and I was doing videos that were quite different to a lot of things out there. And usually with woodworkers, it’s usually an older demographic who do the videos which part of the reason I started I wanted sort of bring the age down a bit. And I’ve got a fair few viewers and subscribers just off that but to be honest offence
taken
ever since is literally just been down to consistency, posting fit, you know, whether that’s posting two videos a week, three videos a week, once a week, once a month, it all boils down to just doing it consistently, because my videos that I’m posting at the moment will be generating subscribers, but then also my ones in the past will be generating subscribers. And so the more videos you post, the more opportunity you have for people to come in, find one of those videos and subscribe. I look back on the videos that I filmed two and a half years ago and they were shocking. The quality was absolutely horrible, badly lit. There was one of them where I had a dirty pasta pot on my workbench where I’d eaten lunch and just put it there in front of me.
Jackie free for a call straight after this.
Yeah, put back on some of my videos. And they were absolutely shocking. But you know what, you can look at the stats and people were still subscribing to them. So it’s right.
Yeah. And I think just to build on that. So Paul, Paul Norman, I think is one of the one of your regular watchers of your content is asking about the snakewood knives that you made. And he’s also interested in why you chose to put your carpentry school stuff online for free. And I guess your you know, it’s linked to the business model around affiliates and the passive income that you talked about and obviously the advertising revenue but Was there a conscious business decision where you went, I could charge for these classes, which I think is very relevant for people right now that are going I want to put my knowledge, my passion into a learning opportunity to stick it online. Why did you go for free? The freemium model versus the premium model? What went through your head?
So yeah, you’re absolutely right. Making courses online now is the thing to do. There’s a huge amount of money on there, out there for online courses. The reason I decided to do it for free, and this is just for my personal view on it is because I am not aiming to get X amount of income in this year or next year, wherever I’m not aiming for a certain amount, I enjoy what I do so much that I don’t really care how much income I get from it, as long as I’m able to buy more tools, because I love doing that, and get lots of food in me because I really like eating as well. That’s literally all I do. So if I’m able to sustain a business model where I just kind of float with where I’m at with things now. I could just give it all to people for free. Of course, I can generate income through like say affiliate links and stuff like that. I don’t earn that money instantly from them paying the upfront cost of signing up for the course. But in three years, let’s say I will have earned that money through affiliate incomes and sale of plans and stuff like that. So for me, it just boils down to there’s no rush to earn any income at the moment. Obviously, that might change in today’s
Have you looked out the window? Yeah. Yeah.
Reconsidering now, like just rename it. But yeah, that that was basically what made the decision. For me, it was just I was no rush for me to make a certain amount of money, I just want it to, I just want it to help people with it. To be honest, without sounding cheesy. I just wanted to put something out there that was a bit different. So
I’m getting some messages that are coming at me from various different media that coming at me from all sides here. So I’ve got my phone just to the left of the screen. And there’s that someone called Liam Sibley tells me that he’s concurring with your food love that you eat your breakfast out of a saucepan. I’m not going to ask you to confirm or deny that. But I may or may not have seen that recently. What happened with Belvita.
So Belvita falls into this section of donations here, I char. So what happened is in a video of mine, Rob decided to give me a Belvita on camera, and I ate it. And in doing so he challenged me to eat more to the point where it dried out my mouth so much, I started laughing and I just couldn’t even swallow it. And he decided to keep the camera rolling on me the entire time and keep the entire video uncut. So it’s just this entire segment of video of me struggling to swallow this bell v. And it just became this thing ever since. Where we worked out that you could open an Amazon wishlist that you would normally send to your friends and family for Christmas. But we made it live to viewers and just round it full of Belvita. To the point where I would turn up at the workshop. And there were, I think at worst, the worst point there was I say the worst point the best point, there was four bolt boxes of these biscuits stacked up that people had ordered from my Amazon wishlist and sent straight to the workshop. I shocking. It was absolutely shocking. If you’ve got the left. No, we got through them all. But the best thing was the most found that sorry, yeah, the mice found them at one point. And they started nibbling away at them. And Rob actually opened a drawer to find a mouse in a in a minute terrified him so much. And we caught it on CCTV, which was hilarious,
outstanding. I look forward to seeing that. I guess, you know, if if you do think that you need to start making cash quickly, I reckon if you took a chainsaw to all of the items of wood in your house, and then did a pay per view thing. I think your audience would probably pay to see that so. So if we need to get to that point, I’ve got lots of ideas like that you probably won’t like most of them, but I’m sure we can come up with something. So look, Matt, this has been absolutely phenomenal. So for people that want the detail and want to find out more Jax is going to post the link if he hasn’t done already to the pop up Business School Survival Guide, which is extended, but we’ve pinned at the bottom brilliant to Matt’s posts that he’s done for us where he’s going to go into much more detail around around the income around affiliates in particular. So click on that link. Enjoy. Please share it with people that you know that you think might be interested in doing that. I think this the key my key takeaways from everything that you’ve said. Yeah, I think you’ve just blown me away to be honest because you’ve made your channel from a lowest point in your life outward for adversity. When you weren’t quite sure which direction to go. You’re even thinking about doing something drastic. And then you decided to launch the channel. And you made videos, and you didn’t really care if anyone watched them because you were doing something that you love to do. And I think that, to me is more important than any hashtag, than any strategy of scheduling than any post of what you call your video and so on. I think I think it was done that said that the quality of your videos is high. And what I’ve taken from that it’s perhaps less about the the image quality and the edit and more about the quality of the message, the content, the ideas, your enthusiasm, your energy, because that’s the stuff that people really want to see. And that’s the stuff that’s much more engaging. So, and I think your income has come about because of that. And yeah, I guess those are the things that are in my head. Does that sound like a reasonable sort of summary, Matt? Have I called it right? Do you think,
yeah, you hit the nail on the head, it’s his quality and consistency. But don’t want Don’t worry about the quality to start with, just worry about the consistency with things, just get it out there and just go for it, you won’t get it perfect to start with. So there you go.
I love that make video, post video, tag pop up business school, we share video, we can help accelerate your channels. That’s what this stuff is all about. So I look forward to seeing the videos that get posted. I’m sure that you’ve inspired some people and given some people inspiration this evening. I love all of that stuff. Thank you so much for your time. And I think this has been so interesting. I think that when I finished reading your your articles that that you’ve kindly posted on our on our site, then maybe there’s going to be a second round. We’d love to get you back to answer some of the deeper questions, especially those people that that start posting videos. I bet they’ve got all that they’ll have new questions. So thank you so much for all of that stuff. We’ve almost we’re almost done. One final thing for me, which is an announcement for Thursday, I said that we’re reaching outside of the pop up business school team. To get some more interesting folk, we have lined up the next four weeks of live streams and I can’t even speak I’m so excited. We’ve got some, we’ve got some of the most influential finance bloggers on planet earth that are coming on our live stream to talk to us about money. We’ve got Sunday Times bestselling authors coming on to tell it’s all about mental health and how to think differently. And it’s the complete opposite of what you’d expect them to say that I honestly I’m so excited by this stuff I can’t even tell you. But let me read this out. This is our guest on Thursday 9pm. We’ve got the author of four of the highest rated five star reviewed business books on Amazon. We’ve got someone that mentors, sole traders, small businesses, large corporates, delivering sessions, all about public speaking and book writing. He’s a coach, he trains teams and corporates, he does training days. And this is the thing that I didn’t know, this guy is ranked number 29 motivational speakers in the world and is the UK number one motivational business speaker, the founder of for networking, which is the UK is largest joined up National Business Network, they have just had to reinvent their business model because their business model was all about live events. So they’ve been going through a very similar process to pop up. And the founder of that business, who’s an incredible guy, very interesting, very challenging. And he’s going to challenge us and everybody watching on Thursday. And I can’t wait to get an insight to how he’s been thinking because he’s been cooking up new ideas he successfully pivoted for N for networking into an online thing, and they are growing unbelievably fast. And if you want to find out how to do networking for business, if you want to find out how to leverage the people that you know friends and family, and business connections and and build trusting relationships with people that are outside of your network, to accelerate your business and to help each other accelerate businesses, then we will see you at nine o’clock till 10 o’clock on Thursday evening on the Facebook, live on pop up business school, where we’re going to chat to Brad Burton. And I literally cannot wait for that. And we’ve got one or two funny stories to share about that as well. So really look forward to that. Thank you everybody for watching. Thank you for your questions and comments. We’re going to carry on this conversation in the thread. Please tag someone that you think needs some help with our YouTube channel. And from all of us. We look forward to seeing your videos. Matt, you’re a legend in your own OSB t shirt. Thank you for that. And Jack. God bless you. Let’s have a conversation afterwards about the picture that you’ve shown the internet Goodbye, everybody.