The marketing movement by Refined Labs. But it has been interesting. I'm still able to, I have the notifications coming in, so I'm still able to get over there and engage with people when they do. But those TikToks are getting thousands of views across multiple places, which I think is just pretty cool.
I think, and I think we'll probably get into this topic, and I'd love to hear your take on it. But like, so the big thing that I'm seeing right now that recently, since I've been putting out more TikTok content, is people, especially on LinkedIn, the narrative 99% of the time, is like, this is a waste of time, yes, I see that you can get a lot of views, but those views are junk views, and they're not gonna move any dial. And I know that you especially, have been able to turn a lot of that TikTok audience into revenue, so I would love, just this is gonna be an awesome sound clip of like, why B2B, people, companies, whatever, should be on TikTok now, rather than a year from now, when they realize they made a mistake. Yeah, I mean, I've generated quite a bit of revenue off of TikTok, but the one that blew my mind the most was when a $5 billion energy company, saw one of my TikToks, and it's an entrepreneurial type person who found it, and he's just like, I wanna do that.
And he just reached out to me, scheduled to call, pretty much cut all the red tape that it would take to work with the company like that, because I even told him, I was like, I'm not gonna survive your procurement process. Like, my service isn't set up to go through all of that. I wanna get on a call with you and basically close the deal. Like, that's how I like to do things.
And most of my clients do work that way. And yeah, we just worked it out and hired me. And so now I'm just on a retainer with those guys, and I'm helping them think through strategy, and then we're gonna just kind of see how things go from there. And he, what's interesting about that relationship is they don't even know exactly what they want either.
Like, I mean, they do, but in a sense, they're just like, let's just kind of figure this out. Like, we just wanna start working with you, see how you can help us think this stuff through. And so I think that was one of the coolest, just like proof, I guess, that that that can happen. And then I've had all sorts of other clients that I've gotten as well, which are my more typical type of client, which is like consultants and coaches and thought leaders and that kind of thing.
But you know, the main thing that I realized was, I was just like a year ago, right? I was just flipping through TikTok here and there. And then I was just like, well, I'm doing it. Somebody else is doing it.
And if there's no reason why my content, like there's no reason why I couldn't just put, I'm not gonna dance, although I do a couple dances here and there. I was like, man, if there's no reason why I couldn't just be my piece of content that pops up. And then the other eyeball that went on my head was like, well, everybody that got onto LinkedIn way before me, they took advantage of that. And like, you see Chris Walker, it's like he got on there early enough to really take advantage of it.
And so I was just like, man, that's, I wanna do that. I wanna be one of the early birds to something finally. And then not only that, but there's the whole, it really ups your game in terms of content creation. So you get a lot more creative about how you do things.
You have to deliver the value really fast. Although some people figure out ways of not doing that, I think every personality has their place. But I think that you do have to learn how to deliver the values fast. So you learn how to create content.
And then I think Chris talks about this a lot too, is like it takes a while to learn how to even create content. And so that's a skill in itself. And like TikTok, there's no better place right now to learn how to make content really fast. A hundred percent.
And I think the point you made about you just flipping through TikTok before you even started creating is like the point that everybody misses, right? Like they think TikTok is, or honestly any channel like in its infancy, maybe excluding LinkedIn. But like you think about Facebook, you think about Instagram, all these channels were at one point in the same spot that TikTok is now. I remember when I first started at Well.com and we first started creating YouTube content, that was in the times of insane Facebook organic reach.
And same thing, I was chopping stuff up and putting it on Facebook. And it's like, you don't know how many times I heard from different people that like, oh yeah, this guy's just, he's on Facebook all day. What does he really do? It's like, welders aren't on Facebook, they're on job sites.
It's like, you know, just because someone's not using the product to research like work things, doesn't mean you still can't reach the demographic that you're trying to reach. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think that's where leaders get hung up, is like, they want instant gratification and they completely forget that like, you know, through organic content or even paid content, if you do it right, you know, it's a way to get in front of your potential buyers in a non-hostile, non-sales pitchy sort of way. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've always, I ask all my clients, it's like, so how much time do you spend on TikTok?
And they're like, wait too much. Anybody who has the app is like, yeah, the only problem with it is, you know, I turn it on, like trying to, you know, figure out something to do for five minutes and three hours later, I realize what time it is. Like, yeah. Yeah.
People are going there to entertain, so they're like, their brains are like accepting information. Yeah, 100%. I tell this joke a lot, but I don't know anybody that tells me they're gonna go home and watch LinkedIn, you know, like. Yeah.
100% is true. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think TikTok is just like all around, it's a, I mean, even if things change and, I'm sure they will, but it just seems like it seems like a no brainer to me. But people do have, I think you do have to get out there and just kind of be yourself and go for it, which is the part of it.
And that's the thing too, that I think a lot of people get hung up on, right? Especially in our space, like B2B, like very LinkedIn-centric people, you know, they're thinking about this from a company perspective, and they're trying to sell this to their company. Like, we need to create a company account on TikTok. Like to those people, I would say like, just skip that step completely, go create your own content.
You can say the same messaging that, you know, that would come out of a company account if you were running that company's page. It's just you delivering the message, which on TikTok, you know, I'd argue that's better anyway. So like, figure out how it works, build an audience now, because a year from now, and we already see it starting, right? Like I started my TikTok not too long ago, and I see people following me that follow me on LinkedIn, I see companies starting to do pages now, it's like, it's starting, and you know, this organic reach, and it's even, it's gone down since I started my first TikTok account like a year and a half, two years ago.
Like it's gone down significantly since then. So like, we're not even at the top of when it was, but like, that just shows you that, you know, you need to hop on now, or, you know, once this train has left the station, like you're gonna be struggling to hop a ride, you know? Yeah, my guess is that there will be more and more people coming on board, so like the audience, like there'll be more people, so maybe that helps keep something level, but yeah, it's like you gotta get on there and create a bunch of content as well. Like, I've helped a couple of different people grow pretty fast.
Like one of my clients got up to like ADK and followers in a couple of months, but they were also pretty niche, and they were helping people with something that's, you know, close to the heart. So I think those kind of things help, but at the same time everybody has that opportunity. So yeah, I mean, but you gotta get out there and try a bunch of things. So the other thing is like I know like specific videos like do well, like I just did one this week that I knew would do well and it is.
So you kind of start to learn what videos kind of pop in which ones don't, I still make ones that don't because I just feel like they're important messages. I do find at least for my content, the stuff that does better is the stuff that is pretty practical. Like you can really take it and use it. Some of the more general advice that like might explode on LinkedIn sometimes just doesn't, it doesn't hit for me on TikTok.
I think the other thing too is, you know, and I think you're a really good example of this and there's a couple other people that are really good examples of this that I think the common misconception with companies or people first getting on TikTok or even before they get on TikTok is like in order to hit these massive organic growth, like you have to jump on a trend, right? Which is 100% not the case at all. I mean, if you can relate a trend to B2B, great, but like you don't need to, that doesn't have to be your strategy. I mean, I run an account that it's, at this point it's probably about a month old and I had four videos up that were all like the hundreds of views, nothing great.
The fifth video I put up, it went for four and a half million views. I went from 20 followers to eight or 9,000 followers in the course of like three days. And then every single piece of content that I put out now, so like the same thing I put out content on that channel every single day, every single one, minimum they're getting like 10 to 15K, but like two or three times a week, one goes off for like half or three quarters of a million views. And that is, there are zero trends on that channel, not a single trend with the exception of maybe putting like a catchy piece of audio behind it, right?
Yeah, no, I agree. If there's a trend and it just so happens that I feel like I could do something fun with it and I feel comfortable with it, I'll do it. Like I did one yesterday, that I just thought I was funny, I was just being goofy. But it's probably actually quite dangerous to do that because then people are following you for that.
Yeah. And you don't really want them to follow you because of that. Like there's a lot of people on TikTok teaching you how to do TikTok and they're like, trend alert, like go do this trend. And I'm like, this is like, I think that's a dangerous game to play because like you don't want people to follow you for trends like.
Right, I mean, you're not, that's not something that's, I mean, I could be wrong, but like that's not something to me that's easily monetized or helped your business in any way. Yeah, so. Well, cool. So on the subject of YouTube, this is something that I wanna grow on my YouTube channel.
I really haven't just had the time to devote to it, but like, like you've built a successful when you did that in 2011. I think that's what you said. Yeah, so it started in 2011. I ran the channel up until December of 2020.
Nice. So how are you thinking about building a YouTube channel today like in 2021, almost 2022? It really depends on what your, what your content strategy looks like, right? So like the way I look at it, there's two categories you can be in.
One of those categories is you are creating YouTube specific content. Like that is the piece of content that you're creating as your foundation for everything else that you cut up and build, which obviously makes it a whole lot easier because you know exactly like you're shooting this for YouTube. The other thing like what we're doing now with what I'm doing at Refine Labs is you have something like a podcast that is your foundational piece of content and YouTube is one of those mechanisms that you use to stack the growth on that content, right? So either way, I think the most important thing, and I talk about this a lot, is you really have to, and I know Chris talks about this a lot too, is you really have to understand who is watching your video, or this is any content really, but who's watching your video, why they're watching it?
And then the secret is to get them to engage with you. So I talk about, like I talk about trolls a lot and like how one of the things that we really use to our advantage is people that dislike our content. So I think YouTube is notorious for people dropping down into your comments and telling you what was wrong or why your content sucked or whatever. And yeah, those are the most ones I get on YouTube.
Honestly, like if that's what you get the most, like that is the best possible comment that you can get, and I'll tell you why. So there's a couple different scenarios, right? When you get a non-believer or troll or whatever you wanna call it. So one is like the constructive piece of feedback, right?
So like if you put something out on YouTube on how to automate your content process, and someone came down into your comments section and was like, I tried this, this is absolute bullshit, it doesn't work, like whatever. Okay, so most people's reaction to that is, I'm gonna go down to the comments section and tell them that they're more on and it absolutely does work, like I do this every day. Which I mean, I will admit, like when I first started YouTube, like that is your gut reaction to just like defend your piece of content. But at some point, and we can go into the story if you want, but like at one point, I realized, okay, instead of like fighting fire with fire with this guy, let me go down into the comments and see what his thoughts are, like where in the process did this not work for him?
Like in the content creation case. And basically, you've got a couple options. The best option is find out the guy's information and like have a behind the scenes talk. And if you can logistically manage it, like create a piece of content with this person.
So like in this example, like, hey, I'm here with, you know, Joe Schmo, he tried to use my automation process to completely fail for him. So I've got him on the channel today and like we're gonna go through this and we're gonna work on his automation process and we're gonna get it working for him. And then, I mean, that's best case scenario, right? Because at that point, you already know it's gonna work because you do it all the time.
And you turn this guy that is a, you know, complete naysayer or non-believer in what you do. And you completely flip the script. So one, you put him in a piece of content. Like, I don't care who it is.
They're gonna love you forever. Like if you showcase them, right? Especially if they're talking negatively about you and then you come over and like you put them in the spotlight. Like they're gonna love you forever for that.
And what I found happens when you do that is instead of this person just like leading and, you know, I leave a bad comment, I never come watch your content again. That person will come and they will literally, they'll watch all your content and then they will go down into the comments and they will be like the biggest evangelist you ever had in your comment section. So like, they're gonna go down there and they're gonna be, they're gonna be the exact opposite as before. They're just gonna be singing your praises.
There's gonna be other people leaving comments. They're gonna, if it's a negative comment, they're gonna tell the person why they're wrong. Like they almost become like the bouncer of your channel, right? So that's best case scenario.
Worst case scenario is they don't really, you reach out to them, either they don't respond or they, you know, get snarky and they don't want to work with you. And they just go away, right? So like my biggest thing is I would much rather have a troll that shows up every single week and tells me I'm an idiot than a troll that shows up once and then like, I don't like this channel, I'm leaving and never coming back. Cause one, when they leave and they never come back, you lost that view, that watch time, whatever your vanity metrics.
But when they come back, they tell you you're an asshole every single week. What happens is, and some people get a little upset when I tell them like this is what I used to do cause I think it's wrong or whatever, but you know, I don't feel bad about it because I always try to work with the person first. But like if they continue to just like troll everything, it's not constructive, it's just like you're an idiot type of comments, then what I generally would do is instead of deleting the comment or banning the person or whatever, disliking it so it goes to the bottom, I would pin it to the top. Wouldn't engage with it, wouldn't comment on it, but I would pin it to the top.
So what happens is like when you have the other guy that that trolled before, but you turned him and now he's coming back, he's patrolling that comment section, right? So like your die heart followers, the first thing they do is they drop down into the comments and they will go back and forth in your comments section for you. I've had threads of people like battling it out between them that are 150 comments long. And like what better for your channel is to have all this engagement in your comments section.
And it's not just for like the vanity metric of number of comments, but like think about it. YouTube cares about watch time, right? If I show up on your video and I drop down to the comments cause like believe it, think about it. Like people will go into the comments before the video is even over.
Like they just go down there. If I'm going back and forth with a person, I don't care about what's on the screen. Like it's just, it's just playing and playing and playing. And YouTube cares about click through rate and they care about watch time.
And then after that, they care about session time. So if I can get into the next video, if they're commenting for that entire video, they, in YouTube's eyes, they watch the whole video and it's gonna get suggested more. And someone else is gonna see it. And that's gonna let somebody else who actually can use that piece of content to see it because YouTube's suggesting it now outside of my normal subscribers or people that wouldn't normally show the content to.
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, and the same thing happens on TikTok too cause like you drop into the comments, the video's just sitting there and they're looping in the back. 100%. And to your point, like going back to like our original automation question about engaging with people, I think this is like, it highlights that, right?
Cause like look at like the minutiae you're talking about in terms of how to grow some of these things. Is like, like how do you handle trolls, like pinning specific content to the comments to the top? It really gets into the weeds to make some of this stuff tick off. And I think honestly like what, when it comes to, when it comes, and this is not just for trolls, but this is really with anybody who's engaging with your content.
People always do it in the beginning. They start out like, I'm gonna comment on every single, respond to every single comment and like all that kind of stuff. But what they don't do is like, okay, that's cool. Like if I go on a channel that I really like in the creator comments back, like yeah, that's cool.
But that's not gonna make me come back every single week. What people need to do, and this goes to learning about your customer or your viewer, if you're a YouTube creator, and that's like your thing, your customer is your audience. So what people don't do, and I attribute this to a lot of our success to this, is we would go down into the comments and then literally create like a spreadsheet or we did it on a whiteboard, but like a list of content videos that we're gonna create in direct response to people's questions, comments, whatever. And I don't think that's uncommon, but what is uncommon is the creator never gives that person credit for it when they create that video.
So like if I'm trying to think of a good example, but like let's say I'm gonna use welding just because this is like where our channel was, but like let's say we're welding on a piece of aluminum and someone says, you know, that well looks great, but I'd love to see like a piece of content before that, how you set up your machine to get those results. Like, okay, let's do that. And a week or two from now, whenever we have the capacity to do that video, Joe Schmo commented back in this video, we'll take a little screenshot of his actual comment, close it up there. So this one's in direct response to Joe's question.
And here's how you do it. Joe, drop down in the comments below. Hope if there's something we left out that you still need, let us know, we'll create something else to answer that question. And like engaging in your actual content and not just in your comments is how you take somebody who is interested in your topic and they see your videos every now and then to someone who's like, I'm gonna go back and watch this every single time.
And whether it's on the piece of content that they created or not, I'm coming to ask my questions. I mean, that's what people do with demand gen live every single week. Like we have an agenda, we have topics that we're gonna talk about on demand gen live. But I would say 80% or more of those live events are dedicated to people asking their question.
And nine times out of 10, it's not directly related to what the agenda item wants. They come there because they know Chris will answer their question. Not because, I mean, sometimes it's obviously, we've got like a core group that will show up every week. You've got people that see the agenda items like in an email and they're like, I'm interested in that.
But a lot of these people, because we've built out that following, they know if they run into a question that they don't know the answer to, like in their everyday job, they can write it down and Tuesday night at 7.30, they can come to demand gen live and they can ask like Chris Walker, who is like, where can you get that type of advice for free? You can't. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, it's really cool.
Yeah, he's always had a really, just a cool way to learn about things. Especially like the way he just like jumps on any podcast that people reach out to him. Whereas like some people that are much smaller than him, like they're like super picky and he's just like out there doing stuff. So this is like one of my weaknesses actually, it's like I kind of obsessed about process as you can see in my automation stuff.
Like how do you keep these insights that you have top of mind and like make space for them? So like go ahead. What we did is we had a, we had like a 30 day running content calendar, right? And like we had sponsors and stuff.
So like we, sometimes it was sponsored content that like we had to do about 90% of the time. It was just like having to work their equipment into our, the content that we were already going to create. So like we would have 30 days of content that like we plan out, right? But it would generally take us six months to get through that 30 days.
Because every single time a person had, every single time a person commented that it was a question or something that we had the capability to respond to, it went ahead of everything else that we already planned. Interesting. And like the plan stuff like it just got, you push it out and push it out and push it out. Yeah, that's something that I could be better about.
Cause I will say those automation videos, like people just want more of that. They want more and more and more. But it will help me out this. Like, but at the same time, like that, it's kind of interesting though, cause like that isn't the, the people that end up buying my services, I don't end up doing much of that with them.
In fact, when they ask me to do automation, I'm like, you can't do that. You know, we gotta get your podcast left. We gotta do this first. We gotta do that first.
So I guess I, I guess I, I guess I, I stumble there a little bit. I'm like, which should I, should I do more automation stuff? Should I answer all those questions? Even though that's not necessarily, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, like it's gonna vary for every, every use case. I would say like that is the, that is the strategy to, to create that like core group of people that will just like, sing your praises. Not necessarily the same people that are going to buy your product, but like, I'll go back to the Refined Labs, Chris Walker example. The people that show up to demand gen live every week and they're answering all these really good questions that we can use to, to put out on LinkedIn and YouTube and TikTok and all these other places.
Like those people are likely never going to become a customer. Sure. We're doing the same thing that, that you just brought up. Like we're, we're responding to them and they literally, they sing our praises to everybody.
And those are the people that recommend us to somebody else who may be in our ICP or become a customer. Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, I think I need to, sometimes I have a hard time slowing down and just being thoughtful about some of that stuff. I think that's probably one of my biggest weaknesses.
Yeah, I think a lot of people they, the hot topic has always been like, you know, subscribers or views or likes or, you know, these are all vanity metrics, right? To me, those are only vanity metrics if you're not doing a well enough job to evangelize those people because like, I'm sorry, but like eyeballs on my content is not a vanity metric. If I'm providing really good, valuable advice to that person, they're going to go share it with somebody else. Like who maybe like, that's my target customer.
So like, how can you, how can you call views or, or even likes, like it's a similar, similar concept, right? Like if I have 10,000 views and, you know, 8,000 people like it, like that tells me something. I'm doing something right there. And like, yes, I can't map that straight to like a dollar amount, but like, it's not vanity.
You know what I mean? Right, yeah, that's interesting. Well, cool man, this has been insightful for me too. Like we should do this again.
Appreciate you being on. And I look forward to seeing you on TikTok, LinkedIn and interacting some more, man. This has been great. I can't, man, it's been a lot of fun.
We gotta, we gotta figure out how to do a TikTok collaboration. Yeah, for sure. There's not a lot of collabs in the B to B space yet. So we gotta do it.
No, I mean, I've always been trying to interact as much as with the refinance as possible. You guys just have your own tracks. So I have to figure out how to weasel my way in there. But yeah, I mean, I would love to interact with you guys and do something cool.
I was just about to stitch one of Chris's videos. But I, so that's, I know we're like nearing the end here, but like that's the other thing too. Like when I say collaboration, and I've since I've been posting TikToks on LinkedIn and people are like, like, you know what? Screw it.
Like I'm gonna download it. Like my go-to response is like, like message me when you do, and let's collaborate on something. Like let me help you get started. And like nine times out of 10, it's like, it's like, well, cool man, I'll create something and stitch me.
It's like, that's kind of a collaboration in the sense that like we're both on the same piece of content. But like a collaboration to me is like, we are working together to create one piece of content that either you or me or whoever can post. Because in that sense, there's that, I think it was a Peter, I don't know if you know, who Peter McKinnon is, he's a YouTube filmmaker. But like he, he says like your greatest asset as a creator and especially a film creator, is to always keep the audience like, guessing what's going to happen next.
So like if you show up on my TikTok, you know, that's, I don't know, shocking to the right word, but it's definitely like it's not something you see every day. So like it gets people to like, see like, I wonder what's gonna happen next, you know? So. Let's do it, man.
Where do you live, by the way? I'm in St. Petersburg, Florida. Gotcha, cool.
Yeah, well let's do it. I'll hit you up and we'll figure something out. Yeah, 100%. All right, Todd, man.
So nice to talk with you finally, and it's been awesome man. I really enjoyed your content. I'm looking forward to it's been great and more out. I'm going to a lot of fun.
I'm gonna create that.