Are you struggling to grow your YouTube channel, even though you’re posting consistently? In this episode of Creators Uncut, Spencer sits down with Matthew Pierce from TurboRank to uncover proven strategies for optimizing your channel, re-engaging your content, and using platforms like Reddit to drive traffic.
Check out Matthew and Turbo Rank: Turbo Rank Website
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Transcript
Matthew: It’s hard work. You have to be consistent. You got to do everything right.
Spencer: And so I feel like there’s a fine balance between like doing what you want and doing what will, you know, help your channel grow.
Matthew: But, you know, it’s just, it’s there. Why don’t you use it? It’s free.
Spencer: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Creators Uncut. Super excited for another episode today. We’ve got a unique guest. His name is Matthew Pierce and he’s from, I don’t know, I guess it is a YouTube channel, but they’re primarily a business and it’s called TurboRank. Matthew, thanks for being on the show.
Matthew: Hey, great to be here, Spencer. Yeah, we are TurboRank. We, for five minutes, were called TurboTube, but YouTube did not like that. And being that we want to cooperate with YouTube and help people grow their YouTube channels, we thought we’ll do whatever you tell us, YouTube.
Spencer: We learned that lesson. Yeah, yeah, I got to bow down to YouTube. So for the, for our viewers who may not know you or what TurboRank is, why don’t you go ahead and go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of, kind of what you do.
Matthew: Sure, sure. No, I love to. And I think there is a lesson in here for just about anyone. You know, you might be starting out with YouTube. You might be a brand of mid-sized business, whatever. There’s so many powerful, wonderful things that you can do with YouTube if you know what you’re doing. So just about me, I’ve been around here, knocking on the YouTube door since 2007. That makes me very…
Spencer: Whoa, that’s when it started, right? That’s when it started. And the reason for that is I started my career in radio. I was on radio, syndicated radio shows. This is when Howard Stern was on the radio, not SirSexM. Everything was radio, radio, radio in my life. And then around 2006, I decided to take some of these radio shows that I was producing and turn them into podcasts.
Matthew: That worked great. It went, it went viral. That’s the word I hate, but it went viral. Like all our, our shows are like on the top 20 on YouTube, on the charts, because we were new, right?
We’re new at it. And all I was doing was taking radio shows and putting them on a podcast. That’s easy enough to do. In fact, one little story, we didn’t even have a podcast server and this company was teaching people how to invest in real estate. So they put it on their mortgage company server.
Their mortgage business down for like 24 hours because they got so many people streaming. And they were like, I’m focused at you. I’m like, dude, you’ve got this many listeners.
I’ve watched this huge radio, I mean, a huge podcast for them. So it worked out wonderfully. But anyways, took all that podcast stuff.
So, well, let’s just plop it on YouTube. It was the same thing I’m doing here, radio, then it didn’t work. It worked terrible. You know, their radio show and their podcast was greatly listened to, viewed, interacted with. But the YouTube channel just kind of sit there, got five views. Because we were just taking the radio show and putting an image on it.
Just no thought. I didn’t know what tech I was doing in YouTube. So I said, basically, I got to kind of try to figure this out. It’s not just a dumping ground where you put content on. It’s so the other channels podcasting, obviously not ready. That is not a search engine, really. It’s just you put it up there and you publish consistently. So I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I could, maybe there’s some things I can do to actually like get ahead of the game here. And that’s just kind of took me off on my little steady on optimization on YouTube. Gotcha. I thought I was so smart. I am not so smart because I have a data scientist working for me. And I’m like, what?
Spencer: So do they like study everything about YouTube and like the data that you see?
Matthew: No, she studied how to bring oil out of the ocean. Oh, but she’s just smart and she knows. And she knows, you know, like stuff, I’m more the creative, you know, so that that’s, that’s great too. You need a, you need a couple people in the game.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah. Jumping back just a little bit. What got you into radio? I’m curious. Do you like being like creative or like, like talking to people? Is that kind of what got into it?
Matthew: I was nine years old. My parents took me to the ski resort and it was going to be great. And there was a little, like, it’s this little teeny guy in a booth doing radio and he was throwing all his records on the ground. And my, they couldn’t drag me away from that radio station. And I told the guy, can I just hang out with you all day? I’m like a nine, 10 year old little kid. Yeah, fill in the records on the ground.
You got to put him back on the shelf. I wanted nothing more in my life from that point on. So yeah, it’s just, it’s creating content. It was a different era, you know, and I still love radio. I’ve still involved, but more on the YouTube side now.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. Also a note, sorry, I keep jumping back, but also a note on the podcast. You know, personally, I’m not a huge podcast listener, but I know that they’re, they’re huge. Actually, it’s kind of ironic because this is a podcast, but I’ve always wondered how, you know, before YouTube, like people found podcasts because there isn’t that same search engine like YouTube has.
Matthew: So I always found that interesting. Yeah, I did a lot of business shows. That was sort of my main thing and sort of where I ended up with, but I knew that like, I put the word gold in the title, or if I put Warren Buffett in the title, I could put more, we would get more downloads. So there was a little bit of SEO involved in it. You know, I always thought about like writing, I mean, like people didn’t even write clickbaity ever on a podcast, but I would kind of dabble a little bit.
I would like, let’s try to make it a little more interesting. And the thing about the podcast, honestly, I do feel like they’re, they tend to be more loyal than the YouTube. YouTube is just like, you know, you go into this huge mall and you got every store in the world that you could dream of. And you’re like, oh, oh, my God, I got over there. You know, they tend to kind of, they’re not, they’re lazy, maybe they’re in their car listening, they don’t have time to search like that.
So they stick with you. But the YouTube, there’s so much more you could do. Like, here’s the thing, YouTube wants to help you.
Right? The podcast engines, they don’t want to help you. YouTube wants to find more people to come to your channel, to come to your videos, because they make more money.
Yeah, more time they’re watching. So you got to figure out how to let YouTube do the heavy lifting and not fight YouTube. That was my biggest mistake when I started. I was trying to fight YouTube.
Oh, I’m going to do this. But you know, this click baby kind of thumbnail, no, that do everything they want you to do. Yeah, more, you know, it’s like you said, now down to YouTube a little bit.
Spencer: Yeah. And now YouTube is like the biggest podcast platform, you know, partly that’s probably because how many users use YouTube. But I think it’s because, like you said, they want to help people, they have that search engine. So it’s just easier to, you know, find podcasts and stuff like that. So diving a little bit more into YouTube, you kind of help people optimize their channels. So with the clients that you work with, what kind of things do you do to like help them improve their channel or start a channel?
Matthew: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So first thing, mindset changed from almost, it could be a big brand. I mean, we’ve worked with some really big brands, and they just kind of, even as a big brand, use it as a place to just throw a bunch of content on there without any thought at all. So the first thing we do is say, hey, look, this is the second largest search engine. It’s a big social engine.
It’s a way people convert if they’re trying to buy something. Oftentimes they’ll see it a commercial, whatever, they’ll go and they’ll search for it, they’ll find the YouTube video on it. So you’re given an unboxing or a demo or a real life human face talking about their experience with the product. It’s so, so overly powerful. So I get them to kind of think about like, first off, the potential here, because it’s not this little thing that you push to the side.
This is something you should be putting a lot of energy into, in my opinion. So we do an audit for them. My favorite data scientists will sit down and it shall take two weeks maybe. She’ll look at all the competition. She’ll look at all the keywords. She’ll look at building a content strategy.
She’ll look at what assets do you have? What can you repurpose? And the whole thing. So it’s given to them with a pretty bow on top. All they got to do is unwrap it and do what we say.
Spencer: That’s awesome. Yeah. Cool. So a question on that. If a client doesn’t do what you say, do you kind of like stop working with them or has there been any like, we’re dynamics with some of your clients?
Matthew: I love that question. I don’t and I have no idea how to answer. I mean, does a client never not do it every time? So I mean, have we fired any clients?
Not really. We’re kind of, I don’t know. It’s not like, so for us, the typical engagement at minimum is at six months.
So we’ve kind of spent some time getting to know each other. We’ve done the audit. You know, they get to buy it. I think the big disappointment for me is that people will go and they’ll see success because we report on it every month. We give them a really nice report.
We show them weekly metrics on our own dashboard. Everything is like great, but life gets in the way or priorities change or there’s new marketing people moving in and it’s just there’s like chaos then. And sometimes it’s so disappointing because we’re on such a wave.
You could just see it growing exponentially and then poof, you’re like, oh, well, we’re new people. What are we doing? And then we kind of lose steam. But it almost always comes back and then we just kind of build upon that. And I think one thing too that I’ve learned is that you can reoptimize your videos and it actually really does work. So you shouldn’t keep your videos necessarily always static because you kind of learn from the next video and the next video and audience is change and you see people maybe respond to. So YouTube likes that. It kind of shows them that you’re paying attention.
Spencer: So by reoptimizing a video, do you mean like re-recording it but just like doing it better? Or do you mean like changing the settings, changing the thumbnail, changing the title, that kind of stuff?
Matthew: Yeah, yeah, that kind of stuff. So it’s, I mean, first off, at a minimum, we recommend 40% of your videos being viewed. That should be your sort of minimum goal, ideally 50% or more. So, you know, if a video is not performing well and it’s just, it’s just kind of a dud, then unlist it, you know, don’t even have it in your mix because it kind of, it kind of ruins your batting average, right? You can go into a video though, sometimes it make a little tweaks to, you could try, you could test A, B, C, you know, thumbnails, but change the title and change the description. Love chapters. If you’re not doing chapters, do chapters because that really helps index, you know, in search and overall search. So yeah, there’s a lot of tweaks and optimization is kind of like as much of an art as it is a science, right? So you got to use your own kind of gut feeling on how things are going and looking, but you know, you also got to kind of pay attention to the numbers too, because we all have this perceived idea of what people want and you’re pretty much wrong.
Spencer: I know. Yeah, I feel like, you know, sometimes I make my own videos and I feel like what I want to make isn’t necessarily what people want to see. And so I feel like there’s a fine balance between like doing what you want and doing what will, you know, help your channel grow.
So yeah. So for those of you who don’t know, I usually meet with our guests just for a little bit to get to know them and kind of, you know, get to know about their channel and stuff. So when I first met you, Matt, you mentioned like a Reddit strategy.
I don’t know if you just kind of said that, but I’m curious what that entails, because I have a story that kind of goes along with it, but what kind of do you do with Reddit or maybe sharing to other platforms? This is part of our secret sauce.
Matthew: So optimizing is all that I’m going to share my secrets, no worry. But it sounds cool. But, you know, it’s part of our, you know, obviously, optimization is the foundation, you know, of everything. So you’re doing everything to put your best foot forward for YouTube and then trying to improve that, just being like consistent about that. But you put a little magic, a little fuel on the fire by marketing outside of YouTube, then watch what happens, right?
It could really blow up. And we use Quora, we use Facebook groups, but the number one is Reddit. So why really out of all of them?
Oh, by far. I mean, it’s almost to the point sometimes why are we doing these other things? We like social signals. And so we think social signals still help, you know, when you share it and YouTube knows everything, Google knows everything. So it all kind of feeds into that. And it’s not that hard to do. The Reddit thing is tricky.
Reddit people, they are ready to sniff you out in a second if you’re trying to market or be spammy, or you got something up your sleeve. So we just kind of changed that around and said, you know what, we’re not, we’re good people, we’re making good videos here, we’re trying to help people. We’re not bad people. Why are we so worried? So we kind of go in that mindset and we add to the conversation. So we say, you know, oh, that’s great, you’re interested in blah, blah, blah.
Guess what? I just watched this video and it really breaks it down. Skip over to three minutes and 30 seconds and then he goes exactly over. You know, so we do things like that or we’ll ask, you know, sometimes we’ll ask a question like, does anybody know how to solve this problem? And then one of our guys goes, yes, we do. And then they ask, right.
So it sounds simplistic and it really is, it is, it doesn’t take a lot of time, but it takes a lot of care. If you just plop your videos on some stupid channel, they’ll immediately downvote it. You’ll be shadow banned.
You know, you’re trying to add karma into the whole mix here. So that also means many times you don’t promote your video. You’re not just, we do like 10%, 20% where we actually have a promotion of some kind. But we’ve had, 200,000 views. We’ve had so much traction off of this strategy. It doesn’t work every time.
It doesn’t work every video, but when it does work and it really works, holy, like you wait, it’s one of those, you wake up overnight and you’re like, what in the world happened? Go to this video. Oh, where’s that referral traffic? Oh, you know, you can’t, you don’t even know exactly, because this is not even a very good reporting in my opinion. But you know, you can kind of dissect it a little bit and figure it out.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah. That is, that is super interesting. I’ve got one question and then I’ll kind of share my story. Yeah, so I’m curious. So a lot of the times when I go to Reddit, I’m like, googling a question like how to do a certain thing. And I could see like tutorial YouTube videos being really, really good for Reddit. Does it, I’m curious, does it also work for like just entertaining videos that may not necessarily teach you something? Is there like forums or like, I guess like, how would you go about sharing like an entertaining video on Reddit? I don’t know. Does that question make sense?
Matthew: A little bit. You could find a forum, a subreddit of people who like to knit with turquoise yarn. There’s the most random, there is a home for everybody on Reddit. I mean, if you like ladybugs, whatever it is, there’s whatever it is, there is something for you. So, but you’re saying, you know, like most of my examples are like business related or problem solution. What if you’re just entertainment? Have we done that? I mean, we have, we’ve had like gaming channels and poker. That’s kind of like entertainment, I guess. You know, just strictly entertainment, of course, it’s just like everything else, you know. And really, that’s what people want.
I think oftentimes to go on Reddit for is for entertainment because you’re just, you know, you’re bored or whatever. The thing about search though, is that like we’ve got one client and we kind of looked at their, you know, what people were asking, like the questions they’re asking. One of the questions was asking about, it’s like an awkward product, like how do they ship it?
It’s a big grant. And so we did some videos on it and we really promoted in Reddit. And if you search that, that’s like the number one result in Google. And the great thing is they give us a little bit of a commission for every time somebody goes there.
And that little bit of the commission is built and built and built and built and built. Just because we’ve like added that little SEO thing into it. And we figured that out and we promoted that in Reddit.
And now we’re ranking on so many keywords, but that’s just like, that’s just like an everyday one. Somebody’s going to ask like, well, how do they ship this? You know, how do you get an alligator in the mail? You know? Yeah.
Spencer: Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay. Thank you so much for sharing the secret sauce. Well, let’s see your story. Yeah. I mean, so my story is not a great story. It’s like, and maybe it’s because we weren’t doing, actually, I know we weren’t doing the secret sauce. I think we were too promotional, but me and my wife, we were trying to share some of our videos on Reddit, you know, to kind of, you know, promote the channel. We didn’t know about the secret sauce, but I think we were too promotional because, you know, the forums we would like share the videos on, it was just like instantly like taken down.
Like you said, it seems like they just like are so ready to like sniff you out and be like, Oh, this isn’t real. So that’s, that’s our story. It’s not a great one. And so I’m glad you shared the secret sauce of like, join some
Matthew: fun where they’re talking about editing or do this and you started out in value to it. Then you show them, you can even share it a short, right? It kind of brings people to your channel and that, that might have been better.
There is one tip for your, your audience. I don’t know if it’s still even around, but I used to do this a couple of years ago. There’s a subreddit called Mealtime Videos. It’s just people who want to watch random videos and you just publish it.
And we would get like so many people watching. I’m like, what is this thing? And it’s like people on lunch break, they just want to, somebody to give them another video. So there’s things like that out there too, that you really don’t have to be so crafty about, I guess. Yeah.
Spencer: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, I appreciate you sharing the secret sauce. That is a super helpful and we’ll probably try it out with a few of our podcast episodes. So yeah, I guess switching gears just a little bit. I still want to talk about how you help clients. I’m curious, what do you do with a client? Say they’ve had a YouTube channel for a long time, but it wasn’t a focus and they have a lot of like, like a lot of videos that are really old, outdated, haven’t done too well. What would you recommend for them? Would you like have them unlist them all and like recreate them or like, would you go through and try and optimize all of them? Kind of what would your suggestion be for a person like that?
Matthew: So this is the most common scenario for us that people call it. They’re frustrated because they are spending a lot of energy, creating videos, sometimes a lot of budget and they’re just getting nowhere.
It’s super, super common. So what we do is we do an audit, right? And we go in with scientists do her whole magic. What I’ve learned and what I didn’t expect because we never did this for our own channel.
I’ve done like 150 YouTube channels or more. But we just kept going. Now we like roll it back and then we build out like a content calendar. We look at the SEO keywords. We kind of think of what do we need to do to go forward to make this better. And then surprise to me, you can go back and kind of warm up the algorithm. You’ve got to kind of retrain it to what you’ve kind of learned with your little homework assignment there. So that means, oh, we’re trying to attract Arborist.
I’m looking at my tree outside. So we’re never like YouTube is confused. We’re talking about these leafy issues or whatever. We got to really reorganize this. So you see, oftentimes we’ll go back and we’ll re-optimize 20 videos. That takes two weeks to do that, not just the time, but we don’t want to tomorrow once to kind of slowly train the algorithm. Then with these businesses that we’re working with, they’ve had two weeks to kind of follow our suggestion and then kind of create the content that we actually are recommending for them to create. So then we’ve got the algorithm kind of like, oh, okay, you’re actually a tree pruning business here.
So you’re not, you know, talking about fertilizer. So here’s your audience. And then here’s how we kind of move forward with it. I don’t know. I did the tree thing. I’m just looking at my tree out there.
Spencer: Yeah, no, that’s a good example. That is, I hope our viewers find that helpful, you know, because I think there’s a lot of YouTubers out there or businesses that just have like, like you said at the beginning of this episode, they just kind of throw content on YouTube. Yeah. And so maybe re-optimizing that is helpful.
Matthew: So it’s super easy to get frustrated and it’s super normal to get frustrated because, you know, it’s just, it’s hard work. You have to be consistent. You got to do everything right. I mean, it’s really hard. But when it works, it works.
And it really, really works. Yeah. So I mean, for almost everybody, I think it’s, it’s possible to have a really top-ranking YouTube channel. But it’s not just about like, making good content. It’s also about having a strategy and keywords and optimizations and titling and marketing. So it’s, it’s work.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why so many YouTubers like have a team behind them. Yeah. To kind of help them with that. So that’s super interesting. I’ve got one more question on kind of helping YouTubers and what you do to optimize videos. It’s, I guess it’s kind of a tangent, but what are your thoughts on shorts? I’ve heard of a lot of different things on shorts since they’ve come out. You know, I’ve heard some YouTubers say it like hurts long-form views. I’ve also seen people say like there’s a new funnel now where it’s like shorts are on top and then long-form views. And like the shorts are meant to like funnel you to the long-form videos. I’m kind of curious from someone who works with optimizing YouTube channels what your thoughts on shorts are.
Matthew: It’s two completely different audiences, right? So the short audience is like a tick dock. They’re just like bored. They’re sitting around. They’re just going, you know, like get them to stop. One little optimization trick is longer shorts aren’t better. Most generally short shorts, like under 30 seconds are better because the algorithm likes you to watch more than 100%. They like you to watch it and then circle in and do it again. Another reason don’t have like, hi, goodbye. Just like cut. And then it’s like, oh, did it stop?
What happened? You know, that’s kind of like a little optimization trick. But my opinion and what I’ve seen work, I mean, because when we started, people would say, oh, I got a special sales offer. It’s only this weekend. So let’s put it out there as a short.
It doesn’t work like that. It’s people that want to be entertained. So use your long form videos like a trailer, right?
It’s just a tease. Give them the juiciest little part from that video, you know, and then, and then drive them to go to the long form video. And we do see very, very regularly people will go to the long form video, split it up, you know, and then you could even make, I personally believe this a little bit in the minority, but I like standalone shorts where they’re not just cut downs, or you’re actually like saying, hey, we’re going to talk about XYZ and you’re a dummy if you don’t watch this video, whatever you want to say to get them to watch it. And that, you know, that works well too. Yeah. Yeah. Try to put, you know, it’s just, it’s there. Why don’t you use it? It’s free. Yeah. Yeah.
Spencer: From my experience, the standalone shorts do way better than like taking a segment. And I think people recognize like when you put in the effort for like a standalone short, and it versus like when you like take a clip, unless that clip, you know, is really spicy or really juicy. Yeah. I agree with you. I think like the standalone’s are way better. But yeah, I was just curious about shorts. I’ve heard so many different opinions and thoughts on them and kind of what to do with them.
Matthew: You could put those shorts on other social media channels too. You can use it on your Instagram. So you get a lot more bang for your buck. And that really would be another audience off platform, which would get extra credit for. So yeah, I mean, it’s there. I put the energy into the long form. Honestly, the shorts is like a promotion. This is how I look at it. Yeah.
Spencer: That’s a good way to say it. So I can agree with that. All right. So I’ve got two more questions for you, Matt. First one, I don’t know if you have any fun stories to share, but this year we’re kind of focusing more on stories and experiences.
And so I’m wondering through all the years of doing YouTube and helping people optimize their channel. Have you had any really crazy or really memorable experiences of working with someone or doing something that like you’d like to share?
Matthew: Yeah, you know, just doing this and working with so many different clients and so many different businesses and personalities. There is a ton of that stuff. I’m not sure it even completely relates to YouTube, but it’s just been really great. Helping people kind of market themselves. One crazy story, I kind of alluded to it, but it’s a video that we published in 2008 and it’s still going strong.
And it has an offer code on it, so people save money. And I mean, you know, it’s been very fruitful. So I guess maybe the story there is that, you know, don’t be afraid if you’re a YouTuber to partner with somebody sometimes, because I was new. I’m like, well, I know you pay me this amount of money and I do the video for you, but they kind of said, no, you know what, if you do it for us for free, you’ll get a little piece of the pie for the rest of, you know, as long as that video’s up there. We published the video, we market it, we keep watering it a little bit. But I mean, it makes a pretty significant amount of money. So that’s my little YouTube annuity, we’re doing a plan.
Spencer: That’s crazy. 2008, that’s like almost 20 years.
Matthew: I would just love for it to go 20 years, you know, 2000 and 08. I said an 08, right? I think it might have said, anyway, so if it could go 20 years, can you imagine, you know, one, and I was, I had a partner at the time and he’s like, no, we’re not doing this, we’re not doing it. I’m like, I’m doing it. I believe in fate here.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah. That’s crazy. Because I feel like all the videos I’ve seen that are from around that time period are like, back then I feel like nobody really kind of planned out their stuff. Like they just kind of threw stuff on YouTube for funsies.
Matthew: I found like, I was going, it’s so stupid, I was working at the gym and there were characters in my gym, and I would say, you make some YouTube videos for me, and I’d like buy a lunch or whatever. And they were just like, you know, they were friends and they were relaxed. You know, we’re doing, we’re just kind of goofing off. And that sort of organic content that just was real, just kind of really resonate with people even today, you know, because it wasn’t so planned out. It was so stupidly edited and everything was horrible, but it was so horrible that it was good. You know.
Spencer: Well, Matt, thanks so much for being on the show. You’ve had a lot of great advice, and I hope our viewers kind of take that in and maybe apply it to their own channels. I’ve got one more question for you.
And this is kind of one we ask all of our guests. But from your experience doing YouTube, has there been any mistakes that you’ve made that you feel like you’ve learned from that might be beneficial to our watchers?
Matthew: I have never made a single mistake in my life. This is one big mistake and one big learning opportunity. So I guess, you know, maybe not the funnest suggestion, but my learning would be to just kind of have a plan, right? So go in, look at what your competitors are doing. Why are they getting more views? Why are they getting less views? What is their number one video?
How did they talk about it? You know, and then kind of build off maybe from there. And then, you know, it’s great to make a mistake. You know why? Because you learn from the mistake. You’re like, oh, I’ll never do that again. You know, and you should embrace the mistakes. Because it’s a learning opportunity. Yeah.
Spencer: Yes, I agree. I can’t remember what YouTubers said this, but they said, whenever I look back at my old videos, I always cringe just a little bit, but that’s a good thing because that means I’ve improved. I’ve kind of learned from my mistakes.
Matthew: Yeah. And you should never be happy with, I mean, I’m always better, better, better. There’s always a better. I mean, if you’re a basketball player, you want to improve your score every year. Mm-hmm. So.
Spencer: Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Matt, for being on the show. I really appreciate it.
Matthew: Sounds great. Yeah. And if anybody out here needs help with their YouTube channel, we kind of tend to focus on businesses that are sort of mid-sized or above, but we’re happy to help you. It’s TurboRank.co. Don’t put that M in there. It’s TurboRank.co.
Spencer: Nice. Awesome. I’ll make sure to check out TurboRank. And thanks again to our listeners and watchers for checking out this episode and kind of a plug for ourselves. But if you need help with video editing specifically, you can check us out at http://www.creatorluxe.com. And we’ll see you in the next one.
EPISODE RECAP
YouTube Isn’t Just a Content Dump
Matthew’s biggest early mistake? Treating YouTube like a place to upload content instead of a platform to strategically distribute it.
Back in the late 2000s, he took successful radio shows and podcasts and simply uploaded them to YouTube—with almost no results.
Why?
Because YouTube isn’t passive. It’s a search engine, a recommendation engine, and a competition—all in one.
“It’s not just a dumping ground where you put content on.”
The shift came when he realized that success on YouTube requires intentional optimization, not just consistency.
The Real Formula: Strategy + Consistency + Optimization
Matthew makes it clear: good content alone isn’t enough.
Growing on YouTube requires:
- A clear content strategy
- Strong titles, thumbnails, and descriptions
- Understanding keywords and search intent
- Ongoing optimization and iteration
It’s not easy.
“It’s hard work. You have to be consistent. You got to do everything right.”
But when it works—it really works.
The Balance Every Creator Struggles With
One of the most relatable moments in the episode comes from Spencer:
“There’s a fine balance between doing what you want and doing what will help your channel grow.”
That tension is real—and unavoidable.
Matthew doesn’t suggest ignoring creativity, but he emphasizes aligning your ideas with what people are already searching for. The sweet spot is where your interests meet audience demand.
Re-Optimizing Old Videos Is Underrated
One of the most actionable takeaways: you don’t always need new content—you might need better optimization.
Instead of abandoning underperforming videos, Matthew recommends:
- Updating titles and descriptions
- Testing new thumbnails
- Adding chapters
- Unlisting poor-performing content
- Gradually “retraining” the algorithm
This is especially powerful for businesses or creators with a backlog of content.
The “Secret Sauce”: Reddit Traffic
One of the most interesting parts of the episode is Matthew’s off-platform strategy—particularly Reddit.
While most creators fail here (Spencer included), the difference comes down to approach.
What doesn’t work:
- Dropping links
- Being overly promotional
- Treating Reddit like an ad platform
What does work:
- Adding value to conversations
- Acting like a real user (because you are)
- Recommending your video naturally
- Only promoting ~10–20% of the time
“Reddit users will sniff you out instantly if you’re being spammy.”
When done right, though, this strategy can drive massive traffic—sometimes overnight.
Shorts vs Long-Form: Stop Confusing the Two
Matthew breaks this down simply:
- Shorts = attention + discovery
- Long-form = depth + conversion
They serve completely different audiences.
His advice:
- Use Shorts as trailers or hooks
- Keep them under 30 seconds
- Cut intros/outros to increase rewatchability
- Focus most energy on long-form content
“It’s there. Why don’t you use it? It’s free.”
A 15-Year Video That Still Makes Money
One of the wildest stories from the episode: Matthew helped create a video in the late 2000s that still generates revenue today.
Instead of taking a one-time payment, he accepted a revenue share deal.
That single video has become a long-term income stream—what he calls a YouTube “annuity.”
The lesson?
Think beyond views. Think lifetime value.
The Biggest Mistake Creators Make
When asked about common mistakes, Matthew keeps it simple:
Not having a plan.
Too many creators:
- Skip research
- Ignore competitors
- Guess instead of analyze
His advice:
- Study what’s already working
- Identify top-performing content in your niche
- Build from proven ideas
And most importantly—embrace mistakes.
“It’s great to make a mistake… because you learn from it.”
Final Thoughts
This episode is a reminder that YouTube success isn’t random—it’s built.
Yes, creativity matters. But without strategy, even great content can go unnoticed.
If there’s one takeaway, it’s this:
👉 Stop guessing. Start optimizing.
👉 Stop fighting the platform. Start working with it.
And maybe most importantly—stick with it long enough to see the results.
