Erik: Man, it would be cool if I could invent like the bionic eye and get my friends their vision back. That was 

Spencer: That would be awesome. 

Erik: That was the like grand goal. About 65% of my audience watches my videos on a TV. 

Spencer: That’s why I think there’s a lot of theories or myths out there because people are in different niches and different things work. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Creators Uncut. I’m super excited. Today I am here with Erik Soderborg from The Retirement Nerds. 

Erik: Thanks for having me, Spencer. Hopefully we can do something fun for your listeners and your watchers. 

Spencer: Yeah, appreciate you being on and talking with us. So let’s start off to get to know you a little bit better so our listeners know who you are. Maybe tell us where you’re from and some of the things you like to do for fun. 

Erik: Sure. Yeah, I was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, just living in suburbs of Salt Lake for my entire life with the exception of a couple of years outside the US, but that’s where I’m from. So we get the snow that we get to experience every year. And then in terms of what I like to do at this point in my life, it’s chasing around the kids. So I’ve got my wife, we’ve got three kids, they’re all involved in different sports or dance or activities. And so that’s most of my time is either doing things on YouTube or chasing around a bunch of little kiddos and trying to make sure that they they’re safe and having fun with their life. So those are the main hobbies outside of that. I mean, sports have always been a part of my life. And yeah, just enjoying life and trying to figure out what it’s all about. 

Spencer: Nice. Awesome. That sounds good. What sports are you interested in? 

Erik: I grew up playing almost everything, but basketball has always been a mainstay, tennis. Pickleball is kind of taken over the world at this point. So as a tennis player, it kind of hurts, but more friends play pickleball than they do tennis. So we get into pickleball quite a bit, golf, just anything that is a ball and chasing a ball. I’m like a dog. My wife teaches fitness classes so she can just run a marathon and exercise and do that. I can’t do that. I need to chase something. So if it’s a frisbee, a ball, something like that, that’s, that’s where I get excited. 

Spencer: I’m the same way. Like when I, I much prefer to like play sports versus like, you know, just running around a track or, you know, doing weightlifting or whatever, like playing sports is way more entertaining for me. 

Erik: Right. You trick yourself into not realizing that you’re exercising. 

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So your channel is called the retirement nerds. Maybe explain a little bit about what your channel is and the type of videos that you do. 

Erik: Yeah. So as the name kind of suggests, as we tackle topics that are specific to retirement, now the vast majority of our audience is older. So think, 55 plus. That doesn’t mean that those under 55 wouldn’t benefit from it. Now we have kind of four pillars on the channel. Medicare is where I kind of nerd out. So I’m the Medicare nerd. For those who aren’t familiar, that’s kind of health insurance for seniors, uh, 65 and older. We have social security, which again is benefits for seniors. We have financial planning and then estate planning. So the financial planning and estate planning really do come into play for people like us, right? So 20s, 30s, 40s, 50 year olds, where they’re trying to prepare for retirement in a smart way as they’re younger. And then once you get to those big, massive, complicated government programs at 65 or older, that’s where our channel kind of comes in. And so most of my videos are educational videos that are explaining how Medicare, social security, investment accounts and estate planning actually work. Um, and it’s funny because I think a lot of viewers want me to be more political or be more opinionated on certain things, but there are more viewers that I think are more appreciative of the fact that I try to stay as neutral as possible. And I’m just explaining how things work. And then we can kind of work together around what, what ideas that are out there of how we think they should work. But that’s kind of the gist of what the channel is about. It’s not a lot of bells and whistles, not a lot of explosions or big huge event entertainment side things, but it’s, it’s just educational for people. 

Spencer: That’s awesome. It’s very important stuff to know. So I’m glad there’s people like you out there doing that type of content. How long have you been doing the YouTube channel for? 

Erik: So this specific YouTube channel, we officially started it about four years ago. Now, for anybody who started a YouTube channel, you’ll kind of know what I’m talking about here, but you have a Gmail account, you go to YouTube and you start a YouTube channel. So that was four years ago, we put a video on the channel about four years ago, just to have a placeholder. We weren’t really serious about it. And then after about six or seven months, just in the industry that we were in, I felt like it was a good idea to start making videos on YouTube to help with our internal business. So to take another step back a little bit, I was part of an agency of insurance brokers who help specifically with Medicare. And so around that you, again, you have seniors coming into an environment talking about insurance that is a foreign language to most people. And we would have an hour to meet with people. And in that hour, we found that the first 45 minutes of every conversation was the same. And we’re dealing with, again, foreign words that they weren’t fully comprehending, not at any fault of their own. It’s just something that people don’t really think about. And I started to think, you know, like, what if we sent a video to our clients that were coming to meet us already, that outlined that 45 minute discussion perfectly, and then we could spend that hour of time on things that are answering questions or helping them develop that understanding, or talking about the more important aspects of what they’re going to have to deal with in retirement, rather than that 45 minute conversation explaining the difference between two insurance plans that are out there for seniors. So that’s how it started, it wasn’t trying to grow a YouTube audience. It was, how can I make specific videos for our existing clients to answer their most common questions? 

Spencer: Yeah. Did you see a lot of success? Like, did you feel like you were having those same conversations still, or did that do what you wanted in like covering the topics that were brought up a lot with those conversations? 

Erik: Yeah, I think that the quality of the video at the time isn’t like this, right? Like over time, we’re developing studios or whatever else to make it look nicer. So it didn’t look like this, but in terms of the content delivered, I think we nailed it in the sense of you think of in an agency and there are multiple, call it employees who are interacting with different clients, and one employee might know a certain topic better or worse than another, and they might deliver it in a more polished or a more awkward way than others. And so from the video perspective, we were able to put out, it’s not perfect, but it was delivered in a way that we felt was appropriate to clients so that they were getting that message exactly how we wanted it with as much information for them as possible. And so that made those meetings with the agents so much more efficient. And what we learned is that the questions that our clients had in Salt Lake City, Utah, there were millions of people across the country that had those same questions. And so I think if people are starting their YouTube journey, I don’t know that my case right now is the best one to use, but our third video went the equivalent of viral in the Medicare space. So our third video got 250,000 views, it got us over that thousand subscriber limit to get monetized. Most of the YouTube experiences that I’ve been involved with, because I have other channels that I deal with as well, third video probably isn’t going to get viral for you. It’s finding a little bit more information around your audience and what’s going to really click. But in that sense, that kind of got us started. And that was a great start for us to start moving forward on becoming more serious about YouTube outside of just our clients, our local clients, and what could we do nationally with this? 

Spencer: Yeah, that’s awesome. So I actually want to jump back a little bit. I feel like growing up when you talk to people and you’re like, Oh, what do you want to be when you grow up? I feel like people don’t usually say like, Oh, I want to go into the insurance field. I want to talk about Medicare. So how did you get into, you know, the industry of insurance and things like that? 

Erik: Yeah, so I wanted to be a doctor. So I, this kind of the story around that is I played basketball growing up and we had a team of eight kids on our basketball team, just kind of like a travel team. And two of those eight kids lost vision in their eyes. One was just a freak accident. He got poked in the eye, it detached his retina, never got fixed. And then another friend of mine got in a car accident and he lost vision in his eye. And so growing up and as I started to start going through college and everything else, I was like, man, it would be cool if I could invent like the bionic eye and get my friends their vision back. That was, that would be awesome. That was the like grand goal. And so I went through, I speak a different language. And so when I got into college, one of the counselors was like, look, if you know another language major in that, and you can focus all of your time on the pre-med classes and get good grades there. So that’s what I did. As I went through college, my wife had our first kid. And then as I was graduating, we, she was pregnant with our second kid. So all I had to do was take the MCAT and then apply to medical schools with her being pregnant with her second child and understanding what that first pregnancy was like and the time commitments. She has a, an uncle who’s a prominent cardiologist here in Salt Lake City. And so we sat down with him and his wife and just kind of asked, what does our future look like? And his wife was like, I was a single mom for 12, 13, 14 years, where he was off doing medical school, residency, fellowship, and then working. And my wife and I had a conversation around that of that, that wasn’t the life that we really wanted. And a lot of changes were happening in the healthcare space, just based off of the time that I was able to shadow doctors going through the pre-med requirements, going through research and all of the things that are part of that. And so I kind of took a step back. And what I was working in at the time was this startup company. And it was exciting. And there was kind of building something new. And so we kind of made a shift and that startup ended up getting bought. And then I created another little startup company with a friend of mine. One of our biggest clients was in the insurance space specific to pharmacy benefits. So you think of like prescription drugs and managing all of that, they’re called a PBM or a pharmacy benefit manager. And that got acquired. And then one of our clients as part of that was a health insurance company. So you think of like the big carriers, it’s one here locally, but if you think of like UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, Humana, Etna, an insurance company. And then from there, one of our clients was this Medicare agency that offered a plan that we had as that insurance company, just kind of developing the relationship with the president of that company at the time and an opportunity arose. So it’s this big kind of winding path of now I’m in the insurance space and a lot of my doctor friends that I was shadowing in the past, it’s like, oh, you’ve gone to the dark side, like the insurance companies are the bad guys, you were supposed to go the good direction. So it’s, that’s kind of the long story of how I ended up where I’m at. 

Spencer: Gotcha. That’s, that’s an interesting story. I bet there’s a lot of YouTubers out there, maybe not the exact same story, but who start wanting to do one thing and then end up in a completely different field. So do you regret going that path or the way things went? Or do you feel like it was for the best? 

Erik: No, not at all. I mean, I have a couple of great friends, my best friends growing up in high school, they went the medical school route, one’s an orthopedic surgeon, once an interventional radiologist. I mean, they went that route and I look at their lives that they’ve gone through and they are the personality type that could handle it. I think that with my wife and kids coming along and just my personality, I don’t know that I would have been able to handle the challenges and the things that come from that experience. And then I think coming full circle to where I am today, I think those experiences of being on the doctor side and being on the hospital side and then being on the drugs, prescription drug side and insurance side, I think it gives me a unique opportunity to connect with my audience and bring them a complete perspective about what’s going on in healthcare in general, because there are so many siloed fragmented parts of healthcare. So the fact that I’ve lived in many of those silos helps to build the picture around why certain things are happening the way they are or why costs the way that they are. Or if something is pulled, a lever is pulled over here, that’s going to have causes and effects on another side of things for their healthcare. So I think that all in all, I mean, being a YouTuber as silly as it sounds. I mean, it’s the best life I could have ever imagined. I just never would have thought that it was a career opportunity way back in the day. 

Spencer: Yeah, definitely. You mentioned connecting with your audience. And I think I want to dive a little deeper into that. I feel like if you talk to most YouTubers or creators, they would say like knowing your audience is really critical to success in growing on YouTube. Because, you know, I’ve worked in the YouTube space for about four years now, maybe a little bit more, but, you know, I could edit videos as much as I want. But if the video isn’t for the right person, you know, they won’t watch it. So knowing your audience is really critical. So how did you figure out like who your specific audience was? I mean, I know you do Medicare, and so it’s like 65 plus. But was there anything more to that to figure out like what steps to take to know who your audience is? 

Erik: Yeah, I think that if anybody’s going to start making content on YouTube, there are a couple of, I guess, warnings that I would put out for folks is that if you’re trying to create content that is not you. So if you’re trying to develop this personality, if you’re kind of a more relaxed, low key person, and you’re trying to blow up with all of this energy and enthusiasm that you don’t really have, or vice versa, you’re a very energetic person, and you’re being forced to tone that down. I think that you’re going to burn out. And what I found is that my personality in going into a complicated decision is I want to know everything involved so that I can make a more appropriate decision. So if I’m going to go buy a car, or I’m going to go to make any major purchase, my personality is one where I’m not just going to go in and say, hey, you tell me what to buy and I trust it. It’s give me all of the examples, what are the pros, what are the cons, and then let’s make a decision. And so from my audience, as I started to build this channel, I started to make videos around that idea of if there is a particular topic, or a particular subject within that topic, there are going to be positives and negatives to everything, and I might have a personal bias one way or the other, but I’m going to try to remove that bias, and I’m just going to deliver the pros and cons of every topic that I cover. And there are other channels in my space that do something different. They are either highly politicized, so they’re making political commentary and suggestions, or they are highly biased against or for certain things. And that’s how they want to live their lives and build that channel. That wasn’t me. And so I found that my niche of the followers that stayed loyal to me appreciated the openness, the non-biased approach to things. And so I think that’s the, but that’s who I am, right? Like, I try in general with life to not carry a bias, whether that’s politically or whether that’s on any topic that me or my friends want to discuss. Very rarely am I arguing with people and trying to convince them of my point. It’s, okay, let’s see all of the sides. So I think that’s probably the first warning for anybody considering a YouTube channel and content where you’re going to be the face or your opinion is going to be expressed is stay true to who you are. And that’s, if you are passionate about a topic, be passionate about it. And that’s great. And so with my audience, that’s what connected with them is just the authenticity of, I don’t have to be somebody that I’m not. And then there were certain videos that this is the second thing that I would probably recommend for anybody is starting out, you don’t really know what your niche might be. Some do, but for the most part, if you’re doing reviews for products or you’re doing video tips or you’re doing entertainment or sports commentary, there are a lot of sub topics within everything. So let’s take sports as an example, because I like it. There are sports videos where you can do highlight videos. There are sports videos where you can do comparisons between the goats, right? Of MJ or LeBron or Ronaldo or Messi. 

Spencer: Yeah.

Erik: And so you can throw out all different types of videos. And you might find that a certain type resonates within the YouTube algorithm, and then double down on that type. So for me, our videos that always do really well as I have a white board, and I just outlined the costs of certain procedures. So my mom had cancer and she passed away. I had all of her bills from her medical medical perspective. So I could outline how much the bill was, how much insurance covered, how much she was, she or we were responsible to cover. And then I do that with a heart attack from family members or friends have sent in knee surgeries. So those whiteboard videos do really well. Knowing that initially, that was our third video, knowing that I could double down and make those more often and get more consistent growth, knowing that that video I put out isn’t just going to see 20 views that are my friends and family and go away. I found that effective niche and there are others. So it’s not just whiteboard videos, but there are others that we have found do well. Those are probably the two things that I would recommend to somebody starting on YouTube is one, be true to yourself. Otherwise, you’re going to burn out and hate it. And number two, find your niche, but that takes some experimentation. So do lots of different types of videos, and then you’ll find what works with your audience and then double down on that. 

Spencer: I completely agree. So what would you determine as something that’s successful or fits that niche of your audience? Do you look at your analytics and be like, oh, the watch time is greater on this video. And so therefore, I should do more content like that? Or is it based on comments or likes? How do you determine what is successful and what you should repeat and try and make more of? 

Erik: Yeah, I think listening is really important in the start of this, right? I worked for an agency and we were the largest Medicare insurance agency in our state. And so what that meant is we had a lot of clients coming through our door and asking a lot of questions. We did a lot of presentations over Zoom or webinars where behind the scenes, right, like I’m answering the Q & A parts of things. So I could see the questions that seniors had more often than others. And then we could build videos around those questions. And then now, I get, I don’t know the exact numbers, it’s probably hundreds of comments a day that come through and I read all of them. I don’t answer all of them because if they’re going to be mean and yell and political things that again, isn’t my personality, I’m not going to deal with it. But if they have genuine questions, I just get questions so often throughout the days that I can kind of see the trends of what’s happening. There are changes that happen in my world and there are updates. A bill was passed on the 5th, so a couple of days ago, that impacts the people that I talked to and they have questions about it. So those questions help form what I’m going to make videos about. And if I don’t have the expertise, then I can bring in other experts that can talk to those points. So that was my most recent video that was released yesterday. It was a very prominent or a very important topic on social security that just came out with that bill signed. And that was doing really well from a timing perspective, but it’s knowing that my audience wants to hear that and then bringing somebody who can articulate that in an effective way. 

Spencer: Gotcha. So you would you say that you mostly look at the comments and questions that you get versus like the numbers and analytics? 

Erik: Yeah, I think that’s another thing to maybe bring up here is that my perspective on YouTube and what I use it for is very much business related, right? And so I get paid through YouTube ads, which is fantastic and that’s based on your views and the watch time. But I also get paid on them watching videos and reaching out to me for help and the partners that I have for help. And so if you’re going strictly for the most views possible, there are certain strategies that are connected with that with these extravagant thumbnails and kind of clickbait titles and then videos that are You’re edited in a way to keep the attention of maybe a younger crowd as they’re jumping around and skipping around. Mine isn’t that. Mine is a senior. About 65% of my audience watches my videos on a TV, which is crazy to me because I don’t watch any YouTube videos on a TV. Mine’s all on my phone. And so to know that my audience is watching on a TV gives me a little bit more understanding and leeway from an editing perspective of what can we put into that video. And they’re sitting down for 30 minutes watching these videos. I have hour and a half videos where they watch all the way through. And so I think that for me, the analytics are important in the sense of I don’t want to make videos where they drop off in that first 30 seconds and they leave. But for me, I make a lot of videos. I kind of put them in buckets. The first bucket I would say are useful. I want the videos to be useful for me, but in order for them to be useful for me, they also have to be useful for my audience. So that goes back to the very beginning. The most commonly answered questions. I can type out an email answering a question in a lot of depth, but it’s so much easier to make a video about it. Scale that now. And now I can send that out to everybody. I can get ahead of the problem as people watch the channel. So it’s useful to me and to them. The next one that I make is there’s, there’s kind of a, what I would say a virality aspect, right? So kind of those important topics that are happening now. Uh, I will make videos on that. The vast majority of them are useful for me, but then there’s also that virality aspect of it, of current events. I don’t make anything around Taylor Swift or anything like that. But if there is a current event in your niche that you can jump on and get more views, that’s great. It’s just that that doesn’t really drive the business side of things for me. And then the third bucket is what I’ll call a salesy bucket, even though I, I try not to be salesy, but it’s helping people understand exactly what you offer, what you can deliver to them from a sales approach. And you can mix aspects of all of those into a single video. But as those questions are coming in for me, the usefulness of a video that I make is much more important to me than the total view count. I’ll make a video that I know is only going to get a thousand views rather than a million, because that thousand views are very important to me. And they convert really well for me versus a million view video that doesn’t necessarily convert super well, but it got a lot of views. Does that make sense?

Spencer: No, that totally makes sense. Uh, I think that’s something that everyone should think about when they’re doing YouTube, what is the purpose and what is, what are your goals? Um, you know, you mentioned that it’s more of a business side of a thing rather than like a view thing. So I think that’s something that’s important to keep in mind. So. 

Erik: Yeah, I think you balance both of those, right? Again, it’s going to depend on your niche. As an example, this past summer, my family and I went on a road trip to all 48 States in the United States. So we took 40 days, we hit every state in the country, at least the lower 48. And I made a Medicare video in each state because Medicare is different in every state, both with costs and the rules and the laws that are associated with it. And so if I’m making a video in Vermont, not a lot of people live in Vermont. And so I know that my views aren’t going to be super high based off of a Vermont Medicare video. However, that Vermont Medicare video, if it got a thousand views, a large number of those people reached out and said, Hey, I saw your video in Vermont. I didn’t know that you knew us that well, you know what’s going on here. Help us. And so for me, that conversion was so important, even though on my analytics, you see a drop in the total views with my Vermont video. The conversion for me on the other side was really great. And so I think that it was a valuable opportunity for me in Vermont or any of these smaller states to make that impact. So that’s where it’s understanding not every video that you make is going to go viral, not every video you make is going to get a lot of views. But for those that don’t get a lot of views, they can still be very valuable for you. 

Spencer: You actually brought something to my mind that I think might be interesting to talk about. Do you feel like your content is evergreen content or meaning that someone could come to one of your videos a few years down the road and it would still be helpful? Or does your industry change so much or the content you make change so much that it really isn’t helpful years down the road? 

Erik: Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. So I would say that, um, for example, the video in the last 28 days on my channel that has the most views we made a year and a half ago. So, and then the next video, the next highest viewed video in the last 28 days, we made about two years ago. So we do definitely have evergreen videos that are applicable and will be applicable for the next, call it decade, which is great. But then to the point of the video I released yesterday, that is in a topic right now about a bill, a bill that got rid of a couple of provisions for social security. That’s happened. And those provisions for social security won’t really apply to anybody anymore. And so this video is just kind of right now. It’s a hot topic. Let’s get it out of the way. And then that one will have a big spike in views. And then over time it’s just going to plateau and stop. Whereas, uh, and then every year I make videos because Medicare updates, costs and prices and everything every year. So I have a whiteboard video that I do every single year on 2023 Medicare costs, 2024 Medicare costs. And then 2025 most recently, those always do really well in that year. And then they, they fizzle out because it’s not applicable anymore, but we’re trying to balance both of what are some topics that we can definitely have applied to people forever. And that builds your kind of base views as you move throughout your channel, especially from a monetization standpoint, I kind of had this base of income that I can rely on. And then you can grow on that with more evergreen content, but also see spikes in more relevant videos that are happening right now. 

Spencer: Yeah. How do you, uh, plan your videos? You know, you mentioned, you kind of think about different topics, whether evergreen or current events. Do you have like people that you talk to to plan videos or do you use chat GPT to plan videos? What, uh, what’s kind of your process that you do to figure out what video you’re going to make? 

Erik: I tried chat GPT probably about three or two or three years ago. And I’m sure it’s gotten better since then, but it just didn’t do what I needed it to do. And in a highly technical space that I was at, I worked with the group within the agency that I worked with a lot. Again, they’ve been in this space a long time and they know their stuff. Now I have several partners throughout the country, many of whom do Medicare. They do finance, they do social security. So I’ll have a topic in mind based on the questions that people are asking. I’ll do as much research as I can and I’ll lay that out in a manner that makes sense as to how my brain functions, right? So what is the problem? What is the cause of that problem? How do you solve that problem? And what is the next step around that? And so that’s kind of like a general frame that I use. And then if I can’t find an answer or I can’t figure it out myself, then I’ll reach out to others to make sure that I’m getting it. Accurate. And then I outline everything. I use a teleprompter. Um, depending on the video, I’ll either have bullet points or I’ll just write everything out for me. Writing everything out is easier. If you’ve never done it before, a lot of people get a little bit too focused and they don’t blink and they don’t move their hands and they’re just staring into a teleprompter and they get a little bit more nervous about being perfect. I think over time you’ll learn that it’s okay to make mistakes and you just kind of keep going through it. And then if it’s a major mistake and I sneeze or something happens, we can cut that out, but most of it is just kind of going through and making sure the outline is good. I practice out loud before I ever record a video because as you say, things out loud versus just reading quietly, different things change. How am I going to put emphasis on certain areas where they’re or, or not? Um, that’s kind of the general process for me. 

Spencer: Yeah. No, that, that seems like a great process. Um, every YouTuber does it differently. So that’s why I asked, uh, what, what percentage would you say is like planning versus recording versus editing? What is the balance of making your videos like that? 

Erik: Yeah. I don’t know that I would have the exact numbers. I know that planning is a huge chunk of it. So writing out what I want to discuss, going through and making sure I’ve got all my sources correct. Again, when you’re getting hundreds of comments a day, something that you have to be ready for, there are haters out there. There are people who just, I don’t know if they’re real or not, but there are people that seem to exist to watch YouTube videos and try to find something wrong with you. And so I try to get ahead of that as much as I can with credible sources. And so I have all of that outlined. So I think planning is by far what takes the most time for me. Recording is relatively simple. My videos average probably 10 minutes. I have longer and shorter, but call it 10 minutes. Recording a 10 minute video with mistakes and everything and setting everything up is probably going to take me 20 minutes. So you just get an efficiency kind of going with all of that. And then editing does take a long time. I have now since hired an editor to help with that. I still edit some videos, but there are programs out there to help with kind of automating a lot of the editing things from a podcast perspective, whether that’s the software where we’re remote or autopod or there are a lot of opus clips, things that can kind of help you make that more efficient. So I’d say planning definitely is the most editing is probably second most. And then filming it doesn’t take too much time. 

Spencer: Gotcha. Okay. That’s interesting. I again, I feel like every YouTuber is different when it comes to, you know, making videos. So I’ve got one, actually, maybe two questions more to ask you. What, if any mistakes have you made in your YouTube journey? And how did you kind of solve them or work through them? 

Erik: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of mistakes that are going to be made. And you’ve even mentioned it a couple of times, like every YouTuber is different. And I completely agree. And every niche of ours is different, right? And so you have me doing a talking head educational channel. You’ve got Mr. Beast who’s doing these big extravagant things. You’ve got Marques Brownlee who’s doing very good product reviews. There are a lot of different things out there that you hope to connect with your audience. I think the biggest mistakes that I have made, one would involve the comments. So I told you, I read all of the comments. And I would say nine out of 10 comments that come through are great. They are nice. They are encouraging. They are thankful for putting this information out there. But about one in every 10 are not. And it’s crazy how strangers out there, having never met you, can find your deepest, darkest insecurities and they can just push on those through the comments of a YouTube section. So starting out, especially if I’m interviewing a guest and they start bashing the guest, like I used to get really defensive and like, I got to defend my guest’s honor and like, let’s, let’s argue over YouTube comments, which I have found never works out great. And there’s nobody who wins in those things. So there is a level of you need to take the comments into consideration. But I think the biggest mistake I made early on was really taking those comments and internalizing them and feeling like I was inadequate or I was a loser or whatever, based off of some strangers saying something mean on YouTube. So that’s, that’s probably number one. Number two would be to our point of there are a lot of different types of YouTubers for me to look at Mr. Beast or Marques or any of these big YouTubers and try to be them goes against what I said earlier, if that’s not me and going against who I am, whether that’s in the delivery of the videos themselves or in making titles and thumbnails that are just wildly clickbait silly to where my audience is going to click on it and not get delivered what they thought they would. Based off of what that title promised. So I experimented with a lot of that in the past of let’s make more extravagant titles or crazier thumbnails or whatever. And that didn’t end up helping as much as I probably hoped that it would have at the time. And now I understand it. And the last thing I think is again, trying to build something different than what you need. So my life and my lifestyle is great the way that it is going and building videos to help people and trying to stay true to that and not change my channel or ruin my channel by bringing in elements of it that my subscriber base does not appreciate. And even if you go down to a very small thing with that is I’ve experimented with putting background music in my videos. Like a lot of videos have just very quiet. And I get so many seniors who get so angry about any music being in there. Like this music is so distracting. Get rid of it. I like watching videos that have that background music, but I think the whole point of that is what I like isn’t what my audience likes. And so I’m helping my audience, not necessarily me personally with my own fancy editing techniques or music or, or jokes or humor or whatever that might be. 

Spencer: This isn’t my final question, but I am curious. Do you delete or block any comments or I guess. What’s the word? Manage your comments strictly or do you just like let anything go? 

Erik: I, I delete them. It’s not a lot because I do want to keep an open dialogue with people, but if they’re, if they’re bullying other commenters, uh, that’s something that will really quickly get you deleted from my channel. If they’re using a lot of mean, hateful language, like swear words and everything else and calling people out, whether that’s me or my guest or other commenters, that’s a quick way to get deleted from my channel. Um, and YouTube makes that pretty easy. You can, you can hide users from your channel without them knowing, and they just don’t show up anymore. But if they disagree with me, I’m not, I’m not deleting those. Uh, but if they’re blatantly lying about something that could impact a retiree’s decision, that’s something that I just, I don’t want somebody to read that comment and go, Oh yeah, like maybe I should try this cryptocurrency meme coin that isn’t real because that’ll help my retirement. It’s like, whoa, like, and we, I get a lot of spam promotions that are coming through the comments. So those, those get removed. But for the most part, I keep whatever people want to talk about. 

Spencer: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. I was just curious. And then my final question for you is more of, I guess your opinion, are there any myths about YouTube that you feel like are true or not true? Like, I know a lot of people say it’s better to, you know, just put content out there versus taking the time to make it quality content, quantity over quality. That’s different for everybody. Is there any myths or theories that you think are true or false? 

Erik: I think that a myth, and you see a lot of YouTube videos on this are how you can hack the algorithm, how you can cheat the system or cheat the algorithm. Like we’ve got to understand that YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world behind Google that owns YouTube. So you’re dealing with one of the biggest companies in the world with some of the most advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence, human beings that are geniuses, like we’re not going to hack anything. Like we aren’t going to outsmart their system. So I think it all boils down to understanding what YouTube wants. YouTube wants people on their platform for as long as possible. YouTube makes money through ads. And so they want people to stay on YouTube, watch as many ads as possible. And if your videos are able to deliver interesting content that keep people on YouTube, both the video they’re watching and then any other suggested videos that you may have to keep them in that I go into these YouTube black holes all the time where I just kind of keep going. That’s what YouTube wants. And so that’s the hack. It’s not a secret or cheating. It’s make content that delivers for individuals what they want, which also in turn delivers YouTube what it wants in its monetization understanding of how they are as a business. And so that’s a myth that I would have that I think hacking it isn’t happening. There are best practices that will help you with your audience, but nobody’s going to hack the YouTube algorithm by putting out a video by copying somebody else and then magically have a million users. I think the other thing that people don’t understand too is from a monetization standpoint, there’s a lot of things that can fluctuate in YouTube monetization. So as an example, last year around this time, YouTube, it seems like had a bug in their system that hurt a lot of creators and that YouTube has, if you have invalid traffic, so you’ve seen like in China, they have all these farms where they’re just kind of liking engines on Instagram or whatever. They’re just these robots scrolling through and liking posts. If you have invalid traffic on your channel, then that will hurt your monetization guidelines. And from YouTube’s perspective, it makes sense. You have advertisers paying to get ads in front of real people. And if real people aren’t watching, then that advertiser is kind of getting cheated. And so YouTube made a couple of mistakes on their end that have come out that I think ended up triggering this invalid traffic idea, which hurt me as a creator. So if I was banking on X number of dollars a month from YouTube ad revenue, that got dropped by about 80 to 90%. And it wasn’t just me. It was like platform wide. 

Spencer: Wow.

Erik: Now they’ve since corrected that. So it’s not a problem, but there were six months there that from a YouTube ad revenue perspective, it really hurt a lot of us. Luckily, as I kind of have shared through this, I build these around a business of people reaching out to me. So I still had revenue streams that were coming that made that work. But that’s something to be aware of is from a monetization standpoint. And also your niche will affect that. So my demographic is older folks who have retirement assets and funds. My channel is relatively neutral to where anybody can watch it. And so my CPM, so cost per mill, or that’s the ad, the, the term that’s used to determine your monetization is very high. And especially the last three months, it’s in the $44 range. There are a lot of channels out there that are like two, three dollars. And so it kind of depends on who your audience is and those, those dollar figures to where you might see my channel and my monetization. But if you’re in a different niche that doesn’t pay the same way, advertisers aren’t bidding on your content the same way, that’s different. I think like you think of firearms guns, right? There are channels that talk about guns. That’s a little bit more of a touchy subject for a lot of things. And there are advertisers who will not advertise on a channel about things like that or others to where if you are in that niche, you could see your revenue drop for certain reasons, just because it’s a niche that advertisers don’t want to be in front of. So I don’t know if that helps answer your question, but that’s that you’re not going to cheat the system and then monetization isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but it can be. 

Spencer: Yeah, no, that definitely answered my question. That’s something that we like to ask all our guests on the show. Cause I’ve said this a lot, but every YouTuber is different and has a different experience. Um, and I think it really depends on the niche that you’re in. And that’s why I think there’s a lot of theories or myths out there because people are in different niches and different things work and don’t work for other people. So, um, I think you put that very well. Uh, your advice, I think is very sound. And so I appreciate all that you’ve had to share. And thank you for being a guest on the show. We really appreciate it. 

Erik: Yeah, this was fun. Again, hopefully it helps anybody who watches it. And, uh, you think you’re a great resource for them as well. So if they have questions to reach out to you and that’d be great. 

Spencer: Yeah. So your channel is the retirement nerds on YouTube. Is there any other platforms or social medias that if people wanted to follow you or your channel that they should go to? 

Erik: YouTube is kind of where I live. We have theretirementnerds.com. It’s just our website. Um, if you’re looking at retirement conversations in general, that’s a good place to go. I haven’t gotten big on Instagram or anything else. We have a TikTok channel, but again, most of my time is spent on focusing on the platform that we do well on. And that is YouTube. 

Spencer: Awesome. Thanks again, Eric, for being on the show. We really appreciate it. And thanks to our watchers and listeners for checking out this episode. Make sure to like and subscribe for more content about the business side of YouTube and social media. You can check us out on all of the major social media platforms and we’ll see you in the next one.