Should You Use YouTube to Grow Your MSP Business? (3/3)

Welcome to Gone Phishing, a show diving into cybersecurity threats that surround our highly connected lives. Every human is different. Every person has unique vulnerabilities that expose them to potentially successful social engineering. On this show, we'll discuss human vulnerability and how it relates to unique individuals.

I'm Connor Swalm, CEO of Phin Security, and welcome to Gone Phishing. In this episode, I'm joined in part three of our three-part series once again by Tom Lawrence.

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Connor Swalm: Tom is the founder and CEO at Lawrence Technology, and he is also an incredibly accomplished YouTuber, which is why we're talking about YouTube today. Tom, I'd consider you very successful on YouTube. What does success look like on YouTube?

Tom Lawrence: First, you have to set what your goals are. If you are going to compare yourself to the biggest YouTubers, you're going to be very disappointed. I still do that, and sometimes I disappoint myself. Comparison is the thief of happiness, and I make myself unhappy frequently.

But once you decide where those conversion goals are—what do you want to do? Do you want to engage an audience? Educate an audience? Maybe you have a conversion goal because it's a business, and that's very relevant too, because we got bills to pay. As much fun as I have engaging with audiences, I can set those conversion goals and go, "Alright, these are the metrics I'm going to measure." The metrics can't be as simple as a lot of views. You're not going to get them in the beginning at all. So your expectations should be low and you can always change because I started YouTube without any conversion goals other than I want to educate people. But then I realized it was taking up so much of my time.

I realized I needed some customers because I'm spending as much time on this, if not more, than I do managing and running my business that turns out needs leads. So I updated my conversion goals and I'm pretty happy with where I'm at, where we see people booking and hiring us. That is something you can evolve over time. But when you first start, just figuring out how to do it is going to be the commercial. Did I get the video uploaded? Then I set a cadence schedule where I'm going to upload every Tuesday and then stick with that schedule. Those are really simple goals. Don't even think about the views at first. That's going to really come later with your content and as you kind of level up.

Connor Swalm: So this conversion goal you said you had, do you ask every prospect, every person that fills out a contact form at your business, do you ask them where they found you from?

Tom Lawrence: We don't have to because we actually dropped at the end of 2018. We stopped marketing 100%. Well, I say we stopped marketing. I say we stopped buying marketing. So we know where everyone found us from. We know how they do it. Matter of fact, it's frequently included on our contact form. "Hey, I watched this video and I'd like to hire you to do this thing." They're giving us that metric of, this is the video of why I'm here at your contact form. So they give us that implicit feedback.

To give some background on the numbers: if you go back in the 300 days, because our recent merger, we did a lot of analytics and look back for the merger we had with CNWR. The last 300 days, we have had over 600 bookings. That means not just contacts, but people who paid us money to buy consulting services from our team, from YouTube. The conversions are actually pretty wild right now. Sometimes the challenge is when they see our booking calendar because we have an automated process for that. They go, "No one's available today, tomorrow, or into the better part of next week." I'm like, "Yeah, we're trying to staff up as fast as we can. Sorry. But yes, next week is the earliest opening." Sometimes it gets better. It kind of ebbs and flows with when upgrades and updates people happen and consulting that's needed.

Connor Swalm: And you said that started roughly in 2019.

Tom Lawrence: Yeah, but that's not when my YouTube channel started. The YouTube channel started before then. We did a couple of videos in 2015. Really didn't get much traction, but I made that dedicated commitment. I'm going to start doing one live stream a week. I just made some real solid commitments and built a studio in April of 2017. That's when I actually put the effort into YouTube and turned it in. It took me a while, but I mean, the breadth of the number of videos—there's 1700 videos on my channel right now, so it's not like I say lightly. I went at it, creating content, just hammering it out. Any tutorials I can have. And I've helped some other people launch. And it's the same thing.

If you really put the time in and figure out what the audience is asking and really hammer down on getting that content out there, you can see success. But you just have to expect you're going to be completely punished by the algorithm when you don't have an audience. YouTube does not suggest your videos, because they have no metric to decide if your video should rank higher or not. So you have to keep those expectations as low as possible. You can help yourself, though, by working out once you've kind of figured out what your niche is, collaborating if possible, with other people in your niche that also have audiences, being on podcasts, anything to slowly build that first 10,000 subscribers, because that's kind of critical for you to get noticed that you have some of those subscribers.

Until you have those, the algorithm is like, "Wow, this could be possibly the best video ever on this topic. It's probably the perfect result. But the fact that only four people have watched it, that's not enough for us to actually throw it into a recommendation engine."

Connor Swalm: For those of you who missed the part of this three-part series before, we talked a lot about how to get started, should you buy gear, how to get over your own nerves about getting it done. And now, what do you think—people's expectations—it took you almost two and a half, three years to get from just a small blip to "Wow, I actually feel like this is working for me now." What should other people's expectations be?

Tom Lawrence: It's going to vary a lot with what your niches are. So I'd mentioned in one of the previous episodes there's a channel that does a lot of stuff about Azure. They have a clear conversion goal because they are a business. They're a consultancy specializing in some of the Microsoft tooling, and their conversion goals are not the most views. They're certainly not getting them. But when people go, "Wow, this is the tutorial I need. But this Azure thing is kind of complicated. I'm going to hire these people because they have a clear call to action that says, 'Hey, you can hire us, head over to Lawrencesystems.com, fill out the form.'"

And I say that occasionally in some of the videos, depending on—I don't try to be too pushy about it—but hey, I explain it. There's a little blurb at the bottom in the beginning of the video that says, "You can hire me for this." And then I hold nothing back and say, "This is the entirety of how to do this thing." It doesn't mean someone will want to do the thing. But you've now shown that you're good at it and those can help your conversions because they're like, "Well, if you're good at it and your goal is to convert this to a customer, why don't I hire the person that's good at it? Their video clearly shows me they know what they're doing and I don't."

That's why I'm watching this video and I thought it would be easy, but this video tells me that's more buttons than I'm going to press, but this person will press those buttons for me.

Connor Swalm: So it sounds like your advice is almost very similar to a lot of business advice that I hear and that I receive regularly, which is: find a very small niche, almost as small as you possibly can. Be an expert in that area. Passion should show through. And that—I remember I didn't even know what the word "pfsense" was. And then I looked at your YouTube channel one day, like a couple months ago. I was like, "How the hell is this dude so gung ho about pfsense?" It's like, I have no idea what it is. I doubt, like, seven other people on the planet know what it is, but I guess Tom does.

Tom Lawrence: Yeah. And next thing you know, you're like, "Oh, pfsense, the firewall company." And you're like, "Oh." And it kind of spirals from there. The thing you can do on the Internet—and YouTube is definitely a niche of that—is the fact that you can find this minimal, viable audience and that's what you're doing it for. Find that minimal, viable audience that's passionate about it. It doesn't have to be 10 million, 20 million views. That's not where it is. Even a lot of my videos, I know, especially my videos about virtualization and things like that, it's not going to be a Mr. Beast style video where it's epic, it's where it's millions of views, because entertaining people is fun and all that. But when you start getting down to the niche nerd tech tutorials, it's not going to be that. So you can't measure those metrics.

Think about your conversions. Think about what you want to do. Did you convey the message? Those are the things that I find important for myself and probably a good starting point for creating tech content on YouTube.

Connor Swalm: So have your passion bleed through. Pick a small audience. It'll probably take way longer than you think, so mentally prepare for that. Any last minute advice for anyone who's looking to get into YouTube before they get started?

Tom Lawrence: Just get started. I know that's a cliche, but boy, someone should have slapped me because, I mean, I was technically capable of doing this long before I was doing it because the technology is not that hard. Tools out there are like Davinci Resolve is a free editor program. There's just nothing you really have to spend a ton of money on. You just have to put the time in and have a passion for sharing. So that's really the key to it.

Connor Swalm: Be passionate and you will succeed. You heard it from Tom Lawrence, right? Awesome. Well, this concludes our three-part series. So thank you so much for joining me for three videos in a row, Tom.

Tom Lawrence: Awesome. Appreciate it. Thanks for letting me have some time here.

Connor Swalm: Anytime. I always love chatting with you and you got some wonderful things to say. Everyone who is listening, thanks for listening with us. I'm Connor, CEO at Phin, joined by Tom Lawrence.

Tom Lawrence: All right, take care.

Connor Swalm: See you all next time. Thanks so much for tuning in to Gone Phishing. If you want to find out more about high quality security awareness training campaigns, how to launch them in ways that actually engage employees to change their habits, then check us out. Phin Security at Phinsec.io. That's P-H-I-N-S-E-C IO. Or click all of the wonderful links in our show notes. Thanks for fishing with me today and we'll see you next time.