Teaching CSS to 800k YouTube Subscribers with Kevin Powell
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Brian : [00:00:00] You're about to hear my conversation with Kevin Powell, where we dive into how he built a YouTube audience of over 800, 000 subscribers, teaching front end web development and CSS. Let's get into it.

So I'm about to roll my conversation with Kevin Powell. I was meeting him for the first time. We recorded this conversation on December 7th 2023. And it was perfect timing for me because I got to pick Kevin's brain about how he grew his YouTube channel to over 800, 000 subscribers. And it was perfect timing because at the time and still today I am deep in the rabbit hole of learning and planning and plotting to go deep on YouTube myself.

So I had so many questions. I learned so much just in the time in this episode, in this interview. And it was really insightful and, and I you know, Kevin's approach to just being a teacher first and and crafting an incredible [00:01:00] catalog of both free and premium content. The free content is on YouTube and more on his website and his courses business.

Yeah, just he has such a great approach to to having a you know, providing a really quality product on YouTube. And I really got inside. How he goes about doing that. So I think you're really going to enjoy it. Here is my conversation with Kevin Powell. Enjoy.

Brian : Kevin Powell, it's great to meet you and, and connect with you today.

Kevin : Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.

Brian : Yeah. So, you know, as listeners of this show know I've been going down this rabbit hole of, of YouTube for the last couple of weeks and, and months. We're recording this at the beginning of December in 2023. This will probably release sometime in January or February. And, you know, I'm, I'm currently in this again, like this, this rabbit hole where I'm doing a ton of research and learning and planning and plotting for my own YouTube channel.

And so I'm [00:02:00] really excited to talk to you and, and maybe pick your brain about how you've grown your incredibly successful YouTube channel. Um, uh, so, so why don't we, how, how do you sort of like introduce what you do and, and like the, I dunno, like where do you usually point people first if someone is just meeting you for the first time?

Kevin : Yeah, I, I generally say that I help people fall in love with CSS and if I can't get them to fall in love with it, I'm hoping to at least help them be a little bit less frustrated by it. So it's and just in case, for those who don't know, CSS is one of the languages we use to, to create websites, the visual side of things.

And it's a little bit different from other languages when it comes to programming and stuff. So it does tend to lead to some frustrations, but it happens to be something I really enjoy. So I try and, you know, show people the light and, and help people out with it.

Brian : Yeah, I, I'm also personally a, a front end person, CSS person first before everything else in my stack that I've learned like that. That's how I actually started my career, you know, 15 plus years ago, kind [00:03:00] of banging my head against the wall with IE six and all, all that

Kevin : Yeah.

Brian : stuff. And it's just funny, like since then I've, I've kind of grown to, into like full stack with, with rails and stuff, but it's always been a.

Like a design first approach to learning how to build software. I think that's been an, an interesting pathway into, into building stuff. Whereas most developers kind of come from the backend and then they, they get frustrated with CSS. But,

Kevin : Yeah.

Brian : Yeah, really cool. So your whole channel is, so is your channel really just focused on CSS specifically?

I guess you also go into HTML but do you get into any other, anything else in front end land, like JavaScript or anything like that?

Kevin : So really the focus is definitely CSS. And then as you said, I do, I do sort of, I mean, you have to have some h tmm L or the CSS doesn't do anything, so I do get into that. I touch on accessibility. And when the time calls for it, I will touch on JavaScript. It is something people are always asking for more of in the comments 'cause they sort of, you know, when somebody [00:04:00] likes somebody's teaching style, they're sort of like, can you teach this other subject too?

And I'm like, well, I, I'd rather stick to what I know really well. And you know, there's so many other channels that cover other content that I'm happy to let them let them do it. But yeah, I will sort of diverge if, if for what I'm trying to demo or show or teach or whatever does require it.

Brian : Yeah. Yeah. I, I really I never really liked how the term front end development has somehow come to cover both HTML and CSS and JavaScript. 'cause JavaScript has just gotten so. Complex, and it's, it's really like a backend, like it's much more of, of a programming language, whereas HTML and CSS to me is much more about design, you know?

Kevin : Yeah, there's the, the podcast shop talk show where they sort of coined the front of the front end for, for more of the other side. Yeah.

Brian : Yeah. I like that. All right, so in this episode, I think in, in, we're gonna do two episodes, and in the next one we're gonna kind of dive into [00:05:00] your, the courses that you teach on CSS and front end and everything. But in this one, I really wanna focus on YouTube. That seems like to, to be a, a major focus of what you do.

A week in the life of Kevin Powell
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Brian : Can you tell me a little bit about like a week in your life? Like what, what is your production flow? We can get into the, the, the details of like how you actually produce each individual video, but just like high level, what are you doing with most of your time, like Monday to Friday?

Kevin : Yeah, a lot of planning . I, I use Notion for basically everything, so I have like my content calendar in there and a lot of it is just, you know, usually I have like early in the month or sort of actually probably like the third week of the month, I'll plan out the next month and I sort of just place all the content just as like, here's the ideas I have.

And then it sort of goes through, I try and do as much like bulk work as I can. So you sort of go through like the ideation phase of coming up with the ideas and getting them all in and then going back through and coming up with like [00:06:00] title thumbnail ideas, going through all the different videos and doing that.

Then going into the individual ones to try and plan them out and actually build the demos and research what I need to research for the topics. So it depends on the week and, and the day and things change around a little bit all the time. But yeah, most of my time is spent building demos or researching things and, and all of that.

Yeah,

Brian : You know, it's interesting, the, the more research that I do about being like a full-time creator on YouTube, it's so clear that like 80% of the work is really just in the planning and topic selection and research and all, all the stuff that people tend to focus on, like cameras and, and like actual recording and editing.

It's, it's such a small piece of it,

Kevin : yeah,

Brian : how, how much are you actually producing in like each week just looking at your channel, like you're publishing a lot each week. So like, are you like recording more than one video in a week? Like, what, what does this look like?

Kevin : yeah. So I do two long form videos and one [00:07:00] short every week. The shorts are really easy, when you're limited to 60 seconds. So, usually for those ones, since that's the easy one, I'll start there. Where that's usually I'll find a day in the month when I'm, you know, uh, and do all of them for a month.

Basically, 'cause you can do four ideas. I can write the scripts for them, I can research everything. I can record them and edit them all within a day to get four or five of them done. It's not that bad.

Brian : Right.

Kevin : For the other content yeah, so I'm putting out two videos a week which usually means I try and record three to four videos in a week when I'm actually recording.

Just to try and have a bit of a back catalog as well. It's not always there. Like right now I don't, I have one video I think that's ready for coming up, but other than that , I'm a little short and sometimes I'm playing a bit of catch up. But yeah, that's sort of the schedule for the channel.

Kevin's YouTube origin story
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Brian : Very cool. And so, you know, before we kind of dive into more of the, the process, like. Just looking at your channels today, I think it's over 800,000 subscribers, just in incredible growth. [00:08:00] Can you give us a sense of like, like how many years have you been investing your, your time and effort into, into building on YouTube?

Kevin : Yeah, so I started uploading in October of 2016, so

Brian : Oh, wow. So,

Kevin : been a long time . And, but I did start the channel with no ambitions of it actually being anything. I know other people who have, you know, had the idea of wanting to make it into sort of their business or whatever, and were much quicker at growth 'cause they were much more intentional with

Brian : Mm-Hmm.

Kevin : I was actually a teacher before I started my channel teaching web development. But it was really beginner stuff and I was getting bored of always teaching the very beginner things. And I just wanted to have some sort of outlet where I could touch on subjects that were not the absolute basics of, you know, where's the triangle bracket, key on your keyboard.

Who is your target audience?
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Brian : Yeah, I

Ask that actually. So, so, you know, your developer, I mean, your, your audience are developers learning CSS, how do you define your [00:09:00] audience or your ideal

Kevin : hmm.

Brian : who's watching it? Like, so it sounds to me like they're not quite beginners. And I, and I could see that, like, looking at some of your recent videos, like you're really getting into the, some of the most advanced stuff in CSS that, that there is, you know, just in researching for this episode, like I learned like three new things about CSS just this morning from watching your videos.

So, so it sounds like you're, you're focusing on like more of like the intermediate, advanced,

Kevin : so, yeah, so when I first started the channel because it was just a more of a hobby project than anything, I didn't really have a plan or a target audience or anything like that, and I just made content . And it took forever to get any traction. And then I sort of went through the phases of like, let's do beginner content, and then it's like, okay, that's sort of, you know, I've covered all of that, so now I can move into more intermediate stuff.

And then . Especially CSS as a language has sort of really evolved a lot since I started my channel. Like the timing of starting it was pretty good. 'cause the, the language itself is getting more and more robust and [00:10:00] the new stuff coming to, it's incredible. So I sort of shifted just as I got through a lot of the other content.

I started falling into more of the newer things and more of the advanced things. But interestingly, a lot of my audience is still beginners. So it's sort of trying to strike that balance of, of so I do sort of, it depends on the video a little bit. Some videos are definitely targeting more of an advanced audience and other ones more of a beginner audience.

And I still have a bit of trouble sort of like I, I should on my notion documents at the top, probably put something to remind myself who I'm talking to, just because I'm the type of person who likes to explain. Things a lot. Like, I don't like just being like, write this and it's gonna work. I like saying why it's working and going into it, but if you have an advanced audience, sometimes you don't need to bother with that

And I need to remind myself just to like, let's get to the point, show them and they can figure it out. 'cause they know what's going on. But yeah, I, yeah. Sorry.

Brian : like, do you, how do you think about like, the reasons why your audience is tuning in or [00:11:00] seeking out your content? Like do it is probably a mix of these things, but is it a, is it people who are professionally employed as front end developers and they're trying to advance in their career, or maybe they're trying to enter the industry and, and get their first job as a web developer or build their own stuff?

Like, do like, what's kind of like the job to be done for, for your audience, do you think?

Kevin : Yeah. I actually recently poll my audience to find that out 'cause I wasn't, I hadn't done that in a long time. The, I think it's, say 40% of the audience are students or are like, you know, they haven't got their first job yet. 20% were senior developers and then there was sort of this random mix in, in, for the other, the rest of it when it came to like years of experience.

So there was like junior and then a bit of a mix, some hobbyists and, and other stuff in there. Which does also make it a little bit harder for like, making specific things just because it is a pretty wide range [00:12:00] of, of skill levels and, and experience levels that are in there. But the way I've seen it is in, in a sense that makes it harder.

'cause I don't have like this really well-defined avatar or whatever that you can like market towards or, or, or target. But . Because I'm in such like a specific niche, I think it's the reason that it's actually worked out. If I was doing more general front end, like there's lots of channels that are just more frontend channels.

They cover h ttm, LCSS, JavaScript, they might get into React, and then they go to another, you know, they, they get into different languages, different frameworks, different ways of working. They cover all the bases. I think in those cases you need to be very precise and know who you're talking to. Because I'm just like the CSS guy sort of, and that's all I talk about.

For the most part, people just know like, oh, if I'm having a CSS problem, like I can trust if, you know, I look it up and Kevin comes up, I'll probably click on that. 'cause I trust them. I've seen 'em before when I've looked at other CSS things. And so yeah, I took a, I, I guess a little bit of a different approach there.

When it [00:13:00] comes to defining my, my market or my audience.

Staying on the cutting edge
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Brian : And one thing that I'm, I'm curious about you know, because again, your videos are, are, are generally lean more on the advanced side. So clearly you, you are on, you yourself of course are are very advanced and you're on the cutting edge of this stuff and you're keeping up with all the latest stuff. How do you do that?

Like how do you balance the time and effort on just staying up to date on all the, and, and even just like practicing, like working on actual projects and, and things with the effort of, of filming and, and doing the YouTube thing. Like how do you actually stay on top of it?

Kevin : So, yeah, but it's a question I get a lot. One advantage I have is this is my one focus . So I can just spend time researching different things and, and looking them up. Like this morning before we started our call, I was working on a script for a video using something that's basically, you know, it's own it, it's cutting edge.

It's still an experimental feature, but I, you know, I took three hours to sort of go through the doc, the existing [00:14:00] documentation, which there wasn't too much of. Start playing, building demos, trying to understand it, see, you know, play around with it and just see what I can do with it. And then from there it gives me some ideas and like, oh, I could do this, this, and this.

Which I think would make a good video on the topic and, and sort of to be able to explore it.

Brian : You know, that's one of the things that I'm really excited about, like why I'm, why I'm getting into YouTube in the upcoming years. It's a, it's an excuse to learn more.

Kevin : a hundred percent.

Brian : You know, like, 'cause I, I've only been working on one or two products at a time, Mo mostly one product for like the last three years.

And so I'm just constantly working on the same project and it does not push me to expand into learning new tech or learning the latest features or anything like that. But, but now, like when I have an excuse to have to teach something or, or share a tutorial or something, you know, yeah. Very cool.

Kevin : Yeah. And it'll just be like, sometimes I'll see somebody, you know, I follow a lot of people that are on like the, that work for the browsers. So like they'll tweet some cool upcoming feature [00:15:00] or something and show a quick thing and like, oh, I'm gonna spend the next couple hours just learning about that.

'cause that looks cool. And, you know, most people don't have that opportunity to be able to do that. So it, it's fun that I, you know, it's an easier for me to be able to keep up with it all.

Content ideation and maintaining a calendar
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Brian : for sure. So I want to go back to choosing topics and planning topics again. You know, we talked about how, how much of, how important that is, and it seems like it, it takes up a lot of your time as it should, so. How do you think about this? Like, first of all, like how do, where do, where do like ideas for new topics even come from for you?

And then how do you choose which ones are worth creating videos for? Another maybe related question there is search based intent versus topics that maybe it's just the algorithm will serve up because somebody's interested in that area. Like how do you, how do you kind of balance all that stuff?

Kevin : Yeah, that's a great question. The first thing I do is I, I always focus on just making sure it's things I'm interested in talking about . I don't think I could be [00:16:00] going on seven years of making content if it was topics that I wasn't excited by. And so, like, first and foremost, I, I just find things I think are interesting as topics that I write down on my list.

So like I said, I have my content calendar. At one point when I'm getting close to the end of the month, I just go through and plug in ideas and, or actually I have one file where I'll write all my ideas down and then I sort of just plug those into the calendar which is the first step that I do.

And usually I, I'm be trying to be a little bit more intentional also with like having a bit more beginner content. So I sort of make sure I have some, I. beginner stuff in there. 'cause a lot of my early content was, and then I just completely stopped and I'm like, well, there's lots of beginners around still, so I should be, you know, and things have changed.

So I'm trying to be more intentional with that. And then I,

Brian : with CSS and like really so many frameworks these days, I, I often think about like somebody who's just learning for the first time today in 2024. I mean, you're missing out on so much history, you know, like it was so much harder

Kevin : yeah, exactly. [00:17:00] I'm, I'm so jealous of people that start now 'cause it's so easy.

Brian : right.

Kevin : Yeah. The once I've done that, and I, so I go through like ideation phase of just, here's stuff I'd like to talk about. And then the next step is going through and giving all of those, or finding titles, basically that would work for a YouTube video.

And that sort of lets me know if I have an idea that would work or not. Because as, and again, it does depend if you're doing a search based video or, or not search can be a good way to grow the channel long term just because the videos often start really slow. you won't get a lot of traction. But start really slow.

you won't search. It just brings the most to my videos. Were definitely search based ones. And was probably partially why the channel was very slow to start and then slowly built up momentum.

Brian : Hmm.

Kevin : Um,

Crafting the perfect video title
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Brian : Uh, you, so you mentioned like the title and I, and I guess you're thinking, you're also thinking about the thumbnail up [00:18:00] upfront before you even like, get into scripting and everything.

Kevin : Exactly.

Brian : Can you tell me more about that? Like how do you, how, how do you craft titles? Do you, do you have like a certain formula or things to look for or anything like that?

Kevin : um. I mean, it really depends on the , the topic without, I try not to be too, like clickbait just 'cause people get turned off by that. But it's sort of finding that if, if, if there's certain topics where you can sort of straddle that, I think it's veritasium called it legit bait where it's like if you can peak their interest but actually deliver like valuable content, then that's fine.

So it's sort of trying to like straddle that thing. And it also depends, like if it's gonna be something that I think is more of a search result one, like I did one on background images where I knew it would do well long term because I'd had a really old video on background images as part of a series.

It was one of my first videos that I ever put up and it was like the one video in that series that consistently got views and it was just pulling in tons of views from search. I'm like, well the video is six years old now. It, you know, my recording's [00:19:00] better. Everything I'm doing is better. I should probably redo it.

And also sort of, I talked about a few new, new things that I didn't mention in that video. But I knew it would be a search based video, so I didn't worry about, I just made the, you know, a very searchable name, a very searchable thumbnail. And it did terribly for the first six months and now it's just constantly getting views and it's doing well.

So, and I knew that would be how that would work. Whereas with other videos that I want to do better, sort of as they come out I'm looking at my notion document now 'cause I did it one, like one of the topics I wanted to talk about, and the topic doesn't matter so much, but it was it had to do with layout basically.

And when I came up with, like, I had the idea of what I wanted to cover in my video, and then when I started writing down titles, I'm like, nobody caress about this . Right? Like it's so I had to like find a way to frame that in a way that would be, that would show people that like, oh, that, what is that?

Or That's cool or I need, I wanna learn that because that's sort of what I'm trying to [00:20:00] accomplish, or whatever it is.

Brian : Yeah. So

Kevin : And that

Brian : necessarily like angling it toward a search term, but more just like a, a general interest that might, that the algorithm would probably show, show

Kevin : Ex. Exactly. Yeah. And then by doing that, it's important I did that first because that completely changed my plan for the video that I had, like originally in my head and goes, okay, I'm not just doing like, here's, like the general tutorial, I'm putting it in this specific thing that matches with the title that I came up with.

And, and that lets it perform a lot better. So usually I try and, like in my notion document, I have a spot where it's write your, you know, titles and thumbnails in my template. And then I aim for 10 titles just to get 10 different ones down. And then from that I'll pick what I think would be the best one.

And then I choose thumb, I write down thumbnail ideas that would work well with that. With that title. And I've even, I've abandoned videos in the past 'cause I said, you know what? There's nothing here that,

Brian : to package

Kevin : there's no way to package it. So I'll figure it out maybe another [00:21:00] time, but I'll switch it out for another idea or something.

But yeah, the packaging is so important.

The YouTube analytics rabbit hole
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Brian : Yeah. Wow. You know, you mentioned that like, you, you looked back on like these videos that, that performed well in the past. It. What, what are you looking at in terms of stats or, or like optimizing or like checking on metrics. Is that part of your normal routine? How often do you look at it?

At it and, and I guess really more of a, what I'm asking is like, which key metrics are you paying attention to that actually inform what you might choose to do next?

, I get lost in the analytics. It's one of those things where they give us so much information and I don't know, . What to really glean from some of it. I know like there's things that they say YouTube cares most about. Watch time is like the number one. It used to be click through rate that changed a watch time and then there's, you know, different, different factors that come into it all.

Kevin : But you can, I can look at a video that has amazing watch time, that gets terrible views and I can see other ones that have really [00:22:00] bad watch time that get tons of views. And that also plays into like, if YouTube starts pushing a video, it's going out to a broader audience. More people are watching it, but then leaving.

So, you know, they know more there on that side of things. But it's hard from our side with the analytics we have to really, I find anyway, draw meaningful things from, so I try to keep it simple. In terms of that one on the background videos, I just, I, I don't look too much at my analytics just 'cause again, I get lost in them and I start just, it becomes a rabbit hole that I never glean anything too meaningful from a lot of the time.

Brian : Yeah.

Kevin : But like there, I was just noticing, I was sort of looking at the videos that were performing well. and just noticed that it was this super old video that was actually getting views and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And then noticing that it was actually part of a series, but it was the only video in that, like, it was like a 20 part series basically that had one video that was just outperforming the other ones by 10 times.

So that's sort of jumped out and was, was pretty obvious.

Brian : Interesting. Yeah, like for me, with, with analytics on like business stuff or website stuff, it's, [00:23:00] I, I look at it, but it's, it's so much less about actually getting insights from, from the graphs that I'm looking at and more about, like, people are talking about this one thing a lot, or I'm receiving a lot of contact requests about this thing.

That must be important, you know?

Kevin : And I've definitely, I've, I've had videos that, you know, I get requests a lot in my comments or I have a discord too, where people ask for stuff. And one of the topics I got asked a ton about was tables. I'm like, this is a small niche. Nobody, like, not many people are using them anymore. I. But the people who are struggling or getting frustrated with it, so it's like a vocal minority.

But eventually I got around to making the video and it did super well, and I'm like, oh, I guess I should have done this a while ago. I guess, you know, I should have listened a little bit more. I was wrong on that one, but I've done it before too, where I've made videos based on requests that seem popular and it just, it doesn't take off.

So I don't know.

Scripting and planning a video
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Brian : Believe it or not, tables are still a thing in HTML. Um, so, okay, so let's, so you've got your, your [00:24:00] topics all kind of organized and queued up in, in notion you, you've decided on, like, this is a, your next topic to go forward with and you've got a, a pretty good idea. Or if you've got a bunch of options for, for a title and, and thumbnail.

How do you get into like, scripting and planning the video? And, you know, the other thing that I'm kinda curious about is you're teaching code. So how, what, what, what does your workflow look like in terms of like preparing a, a project to show and, and and like demonstrating code and making that all look kind of clean and concise on video.

Kevin : Yeah, it depends a little bit on if, how familiar I am with the topic. If I'm doing something that I know really well, then it's a little bit faster and easier. 'cause I sort of will have an idea right off the bat and I just, I'll build a demo to make sure everything's there and then dump, jump into it basically.

The, as I said, I was working on a video or I'm planning a video for a couple weeks from now. And for that one, because it's a new cutting edge thing, [00:25:00] I'd never used it before. So I'm doing a lot more research. I'm reading the docs on it and I just have like my script area open and I'm just jotting down sort of the different points that I'm coming across.

And the whole time I'm getting ideas like, oh, I could do this with it, or I could do that with it. And trying to think of like, what are the ones that would actually be of interest to people? Like what, what of this is something that would be, someone would want to, like, glean from it or, or use a use case for this type of thing.

And then I'll build a demo or a couple of demos around that. Just so I'm, you know, just writing code on my own, making sure it works, planning everything out, and then trying to also like, just take that and like, then go back over it basically. And do like the logical steps in point form usually my, my scripts.

My intro is really well scripted, so like the first 30 seconds where I'm, I'm saying hi I, I script that out basically word for word. And then after that I just have bullet points to make sure, like, don't forget to talk about these things as I'm going through the video. And that's, yeah. And then [00:26:00] I base it all on usually one demo or multiple little demo files or something like that, that I've already built ahead of time.

Outsourcing editing and post-production
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Brian : Very cool. So I've got a bunch of like other like, kind of like, maybe like quick questions. I, I hate the term like rapid fire questions 'cause there there's no such thing as that on a, on a podcast. But but I, a couple like, smaller things that I wanna touch on. Well, first of all, I just wanted to ask about your editing process and post-production.

So like, you finished recording the, the footage. Do, like, do you outsource the editing to someone else? What does that look like?

Kevin : Yeah, I, I hired an editor, I'll say six months ago for the first time. . So until recently, yeah,

Brian : yourself, huh?

Kevin : And it was one of those things where like, I was like, well, the editing's simple enough that, you know, and it's pretty straightforward, so like, is it really gonna save me much time if I'm getting someone else doing it?

But after talking to a lot of other people that were like, the first thing you should do is hire an editor, and you should have done it five years ago. I finally said, you know what? I'll give it a try and I should have done it five years ago. My, even though I'm doing coding [00:27:00] stuff, I like, my editor knows nothing about the code, but because it is tutorials, basically it's like, here, you know, you're just following along with me or I'm showing something.

Like, it's pretty obvious if I make a mistake and I'm like, or you know, if I do something and I muck up, I'm just like, oh, we'll just take out the last like two minutes or whatever. And then I keep on going.

Brian : it's almost better that the editor is not technically experienced because the, if the tutorial like somewhat makes sense to him, then, then you know, it, it all makes sense. Right.

Kevin : Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And yeah, and sometimes he writes back, you know, he'll send me a thing being like, I have no idea what just happened here. Can you, like, where should I make the cut? Or what do, like, what's, 'cause I just fumble around for a little bit and he's like, where should I splice it? And I'm like, oh yeah, sorry about that.

But most of the time it goes really smoothly. 'cause again, the editing for, I don't have like, it's not like I'm doing vlogs or something that have intent.

Brian : hmm.

Kevin : You know, those tend to need some pretty good editing these days or whatever. Like if it's day in the life or anything like that. Like the production quality of [00:28:00] so many channels is so high now that I think in those to be able to like compete, you need to be up there.

Whereas if it's just a screen recording it's a little bit easier

Brian : Yeah.

Kevin : on that side of things. Yeah.

Long form vs short form content
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Brian : So I also wanted to get into long form videos versus shorts. I, I noticed that you're, you're definitely doing both. And so again, I'm sort of like researching and planning and shorts are pretty new to me as it's just as a consumer on YouTube. I almost never watch shorts. I always watch long form stuff.

And I've been thinking and, and sort of learning from folks, like if that, like if you don't really intend to be super strategic, strategic with YouTube shorts, just don't do them and just focus on long form. Don't try to do both. I'm, I'm curious to know, like your thoughts on, on the two and like, are there differences in the type of audience that consumes shorts versus your long form and Yeah.

How do you think about all that stuff?

Kevin : Yeah. I was really, I started doing shorts just to see and because they were easy to create, I kept doing them. They can [00:29:00] perform really well, they can take off and explode in ways that regular videos tend not to be able to not to say like I've had videos sort of take off, but if I'm with shorts it's more common that the algorithm picks one up.

So

Brian : And are, are they like separate topics, separate recordings from your long form

Kevin : yeah, I, I know some channels can be successful with like, just repurposing content. I find I can't do it 'cause it's just, it's a lot of work to take a six, you know, try and clip together 60 seconds of a long form tutorial, whereas just I can take the idea that I did there, condense it down into something really small and record it and it's, it's so much faster just doing it that way.

And I record it vertically and I make sure the code's big enough and, and all of that. So I definitely can, can be a bit more, you know, and, and it makes it easier to find like topics that I think work better with shorts. The one thing that surprised me actually though, was, I'm trying to find it in my analytics now.

I can't, but they actually give us, so, yeah, what the one thing with shorts is you don't really get a lot of subscribers from [00:30:00] it.

Brian : I was

Kevin : so

Brian : just gonna ask like, do do, so even if something goes viral on shorts, does that convert into subscribers?

Kevin : it doesn't, but at the same time, subscribers are really like a vanity stat on YouTube. They don't mean much these days. It used to be like you needed subscribers 'cause most views came from your subscribers, whereas these days that's not necessarily true. If you're getting, if somebody watches a couple of your videos, you end up on the home feed for them when you put out something new or to start showing old videos that were popular of yours on their home feed, that's where you want to be.

'cause that's where most views are coming from on YouTube. So if somebody's watching your shorts and then, you know, if they watch enough of them, then all of a sudden you're showing up on their home feed for long form content. So it can. , they won't be directly subscribing through your short feed, but they can be discovering your channel through the short feed, which is where I think the value is.

YouTube algorithms (or what we know about them)
---

Brian : so you do find that there, that at least in terms of how YouTube works, there is some like integration in terms of how, like if, if your YouTube shorts are [00:31:00] performing well with a particular person, then YouTube is going to promote your long form stuff to that person. And I mean

Kevin : It, it's, it's a bit,

Brian : that direct, but

Kevin : yeah. It's not that direct. I know YouTube has said in the past that it's two separate algorithms but an anecdotally, from my own experience and talking with other people through having watched some shorts, all of a sudden I'm seeing that person's long form content showing up.

So I, and I know other people that get the same thing. And I've seen

Brian : it the other way around too. Like I, again, like, I don't, I don't go for shorts very often, but I notice that the people that I actually subscribe to their, their shorts are showing up for

Kevin : Exactly. Yeah, exactly. But just for some context, like my channel, 65% of my views are from long form and 35 about are coming from shorts. But I'm getting 10 times more subscribers from my long form than the shorts. But again, I'm not too concerned there. And the one thing here, I found it finally, I have , 53% of my audience only watches long form [00:32:00] 27%, only short, only shorts and 20% both.

So there isn't that, that, that was interesting to me that there was like that 27% of people only watching the shorts. I'm like, that's way more than I ever would've expected. So maybe there isn't as much crossover as I was expecting or hoping for, but

Brian : Wow. Yeah. Super interesting. I feel like shorts is the, that thing that, like, again, like I don't tune into it enough personally, so I, I'm, I'm like just not up to speed on, on that whole game. But yeah, it seems interesting.

Kevin : Yeah. The

Subcribers to customers!
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Brian : wanted to ask about is I mean actually just speaking about like subscribers, 'cause we'll, we'll get more into this in the next episode here, is kind of converting a YouTube audience to newsletter subscribers and course consumers and things like that.

Um, uh, but yeah, like, it, it, I guess it, even though like subscribers on YouTube might be sort of a vanity metric, I wonder if it still has like a business impact for you.

Kevin : Yeah. I mean, definitely [00:33:00] the, I mean, I think pe, well, especially my audience, I tend to get a lot of return viewers and Mo, I'm, I'm in the rare place where a lot of my audience is actually subscribed to my channel. I'm trying to find it now, and I, as I said, there's too many analytics , I can never find stuff when I'm looking through it.

But I know, like most channels, you even, you'll be listening sometimes to a, a video and they'll be like, you know, only 20% of people watching my videos are actually subscribed, or something like that. For me, I just found it, it's 48% of my watch time is coming from people who are subscribed,

Brian : Oh, wow. Yeah.

Kevin : which is really, really high.

And I've had periods where it's actually over 50%. So obviously there is value in there or people are finding enough value to subscribe to the channel. So yeah. But it's about keeping, you know, even once they've subscribed the trick is to keep them watching. 'cause I've, I've subscribed to lots of channels that I don't watch anymore.

they're, I see them in my subscription feed and I'm like, oh, maybe I'll watch one one day, but sort of got past that phase. So

Engaging with the YouTube community
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Brian : Interesting. How are you, are you, so [00:34:00] how, how do you think about the YouTube community tab? And again, that's, that's like a whole ar area of YouTube that's sort of new to me. I've, I've, I've been very active on Twitter for, for so many years. That's basically my go-to social network. But it seems like the community tab is almost like a Twitter within YouTube. It's like a posts. Yeah. How are you, how are you using that? How are you engaging there?

Kevin : it's interesting. I find I've seen some channels that use it a ton and other channels who don't. And not specifically within my niche, just like channels that I follow. And I'm always curious to see how other channels are using it. 'cause it seems to be a way that you can drive views to videos. I use it primarily 'cause they added a quiz feature, so it's like a poll, but it actually has like a correct answer on it.

So with an educational channel that sort of seemed to make sense. So I've been doing that a lot. I haven't done it. This, I think two or last week was the first time. I didn't do it in a long time. But in general the community responds super well to those people. Love it. And in the answer then I can also link to a video that's like, if you wanna learn more, [00:35:00] like here's the video where I cover the topic.

Brian : that's cool. Yeah, that I could see how that would work.

Kevin : Yeah. I find that like, 'cause it gives you the option to just post a video. Like you can link to a video and it's like in the post at the bottom, I find that doesn't really drive that much. Just 'cause I think the engagement on those is pretty low, so YouTube doesn't end up spreading them too much.

Whereas if you do a poll that also links to a video just with a text link, or you do an image that has a text link to a video other things that actually get more people like interacting with the post it tends to do better. I experiment.

Brian : it makes a lot of sense. Like that. This is one of the things that, that excites me so much about YouTube is that like every, every like way to grow and to reach more people and more exposure is, is about quality and about connection with people. You're not like trying to game a system.

You're just like a quiz. Like people wanna see where they're at, they wanna test themselves. So, so it's like engaging for them so they can come for the quiz and then stay for an extra video while, while they're at it, you know?[00:36:00]

Kevin : Yeah.

Brian : I love it.

Kevin : And I did experiment for a while, just like linking off to older videos. I was doing like two or three posts a week to be, and I tried like doing it with images and polls and different stuff just to see if I could like drive. It, it was less to get like immediate views and to see if I could like resurrect older videos.

And it would give a little pop, like, you know, you'd get a little rise in that video for maybe two, three days, but nothing substantial. And then it would sort of just peter back out to whatever it was doing before. So, but you know, for stuff like that, there might be better strategies that I haven't leaned into yet.

But I, I do think it's actually like the, I'm always surprised with how much interaction I get on the posts and like the amount of comments people will leave and other stuff. Just 'cause I guess in my own YouTube experience, like I don't really interact with posts too much, but my audience seems to like them.

Yeah.

Separating content avenues
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Brian : Yeah. Amazing. All right, so like one more sort of quick one on this episode and then in, in the next one we'll get into monetizing YouTube and, and selling courses and the whole business side of it. [00:37:00] But one thing that I noticed is that you have a podcast and and then I, I, I cut the video on your channel where you announced that you created a second YouTube channel, I think, for your podcast.

Kevin : Yep. Yep.

Brian : This is something I'm really interested in because in, in my little channel that I haven't even started really building up yet I, I've been posting these videos for this podcast just to my YouTube channel, and there's a bunch of them on there. They don't, they, they get almost no views, but they're, but I think it's good to have the video version of the podcast available.

I think that listeners of the podcast do watch the, they're, they're like the few views that they do get. But they're like, I never even like optimized those videos at all. There's, there's like no thumbnail work on them. It's just like throwing up the, the episode there. So I've been wondering about like, should I take those down or maybe make them unlisted or maybe just create a second channel just for the podcast.

And I guess [00:38:00] my main question is if I, if I intend to grow my Core channel with, you know, really strategic videos like, you know, creator content on YouTube would having all these extra like podcast episode videos sort of like muddy the waters on my channel? So I'm curious to like, how, how you came to the decision with your podcast and how you think about all that stuff.

Kevin : Yeah, the main reason, because I, I was, I sort of went back and forth on whether I was gonna put it on the main channel or not. I guarantee it would be getting a lot more listens and views if I did have it on the main channel. But the main reason I decided not to was just because the topics of my newsletters aren't the same as my regular content.

It, it's still front end related for the most part, but it's much more of like general advice and talking about other resources and, and things that my audience is interested in. But it's, it was different enough that I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna keep it separate. Just, I don't know, the, the sort [00:39:00] of the, like the, the final reasoning that I had and I'm like, but over time I'll be able to sort of, by mentioning it and telling people that I have it, I'll be able to push enough people that would actually be interested in it over to the second channel.

. So, and because I what the other reason is because I wanted to keep the podcast a really low effort . I, the only reason I started it was because I thought that I could do it with like minimal, minimal effort. Since it's basically just my newsletter that I email out, I'm using that as my script to then I, I make some modifications to make it work better in audio form.

Kevin : But it doesn't take me that long to do. And then, so I wanted to be able to keep it low effort and not worry about optimizing thumbnails and titles and all those other things. And I was just like, I just didn't want it to like, muddy up the main channel. I've seen, I've seen other channels that use, that have podcasts on them that do really well, and they just add it in there.

And, you know, YouTube has the, you, you just do it as your podcast playlist and it works, it works well. So I don't think there's any harm in doing it. It was just because I sort [00:40:00] of, yeah, I didn't want to have to put much attention into it, so I decided to split it off.

Brian : I always wonder about like if, if there are people who are sort of discovering my channel through some of the new like. Actual actually good videos that I, that I'm making would ha would having all these like older, like mediocre videos,

Kevin : I don't think it matters. I mean, I know sometimes if I find a new channel I will like them, like, oh, I've watched a couple of their videos and they're really cool. Like, I'll go and look at their, what else they have. But I think if I, you know, as long as I'm seeing like regular stuff that I am interested in, even if there's other stuff mixed in there that doesn't, like, I'm not gonna be like, oh, I won't watch any of his stuff again.

Yeah.

Brian : Interesting. Well, I, I mean, I already learned so much just in this episode. We're gonna, we're gonna get into the next one. So, for those listening, like stay tuned, we're gonna get into monetization and building a business through your courses and everything in in the next episode.

Kevin : Awesome.

Brian : Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin : Thank you.