I am joined by Daniel Rose, one of the original founders of six pack shortcuts. In today’s episode, he reveals how he scaled the fitness business to be the number one channel on YouTube with advertising and how you can too. If you follow these steps.
Adam: Daniel Rose, one of the founders of six pack shortcuts, you guys were the number one fitness channel on YouTube, right? Are you still?
Daniel: No, I believe there are a few bigger ones now. There are a few yoga channels out bigger, but for a long time, we’ve been the biggest fitness channel.
Adam: Yeah, it’s absolutely incredible. I was blessed because I got to see the origin of it right from the beginning when you first started and then you sold it a little while back if I remember correctly, right?
Daniel: Yeah. That’s exactly right,
How to scale your business with Youtube Advertising
Adam: Dude. I love it. So today, what we want to talk to you about is YouTube and your angle on YouTube, which is a little bit different from everybody else’s. We spoke with other YouTube experts in the past and it’s a lot more about organic creation. But one of the things that you guys did with six-pack was you actually scaled YouTube via advertising, right?
Daniel: Exactly, that was our specialty. We focused a lot on the advertising and the marketing side. We did some stuff on your organic side, but it was all supported by the marketing.
Adam: I love that. So, Dan, let’s imagine we’ve got somebody sitting here listening to this and they’re like, I don’t know what six pack shortcuts is. I don’t know how it works. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a background about you and your story in the six-pack?
Daniel: Yeah, sure thing. So back in 2010, I was kind of struggling. Back in the time, I was a little bit involved in the dating advice industry. I had written the book about sex a while back, but I was having some disagreements with those partners. So I decided to start a business on the side with my friend who was a trainer. Basically what we did to start off with is we made videos.
We put them on YouTube and we started seeing a few sales. What we were selling was a course on how men could get six-pack abs, how men could lose their belly fat, and get in shape. We tried putting a few organic videos up and we got a few sales from that, but when things started taking off is when we started advertising. We started advertising way back before Google had even fully taken over the YouTube advertising interface. We were able to blow it up.
So we started with that course, teaching men how to get six-pack abs. We later moved into supplements. The main product later became a Greens Powder. We also had apple cider vinegar, testosterone boosters, and a bunch of other things. So by the time I left, there were a bunch of different digital product lines, a bunch of different supplement lines and it became a really big company.
How to start a Youtube Channel from scratch in 2022
Adam: Dude. I absolutely love that. So somebody’s listening to you today and they’re like, okay, I want to create YouTube, I want to use advertising. Where does somebody start if they were going to start right from the beginning today?
Daniel: I would say the very first thing to do if you don’t have anything up on your channel at all, is to start by making a few simple organic content videos. Get a few things up on your channel, just so it’s not a completely empty channel and so people know that you’re legit.
The next thing I would do is learn how to script a good ad. A lot of people go on there and they’re trying to advertise a video, which isn’t optimal for an ad. What I would say is learn how to catch somebody’s attention in the first five seconds and learn the structure of a good commercial. Then I would write a few commercials and get started advertising your first commercials.
How to create a youtube ad in 2022
Adam: Okay, I love that. So in terms of scripting that first commercial, is there a format to follow or a book somebody could read that can give him an idea? Should it be 15 seconds or 30 seconds? What should people be looking at doing?
Daniel: I think any type of copywriting course or marketing course is going to help with your YouTube copywriting as well. There are a few very important things that are different. The most important thing that’s different when I see a lot of people messing up, even experienced copywriters on YouTube is what I call the Skip Stopper.
What is the Skip Stopper in Youtube Advertising?
As you know, most people listening to this will know, most of the advertising on YouTube is skippable. What’s called instream advertising, means that your ad shows up before the viewer’s video they wanted to watch and they’re kind of interrupted by it. They have the option to skip your ad.
After five seconds, studies have shown that about 90% of these ads are skipped and it kind of has to be this way. We can’t spend our time watching every ad, we can only watch a few that really speak to us, which we think we might be interested in.
So what most people don’t realize is that you got to catch your prospect’s attention in the first five seconds or else everything after that is not going to matter. If somebody skips the ad, you could have the most brilliant call to action, the most brilliant sales funnel but it’s not even there because prospects will never see it. So I would say that’s the first thing, really think about those first five seconds of the ad and micro-analyze it to get the perfect five seconds to catch people’s attention.
What is the perfect Skip Stopper for Youtube ads?
Adam: If I was going to ask you for an example of a perfect skip stopper that you guys came up with, what would it be?
Daniel: There’s a variety of different things. A couple of different things that we did that worked really well, we sold the product to men over 40 called “Abs After 40”, if you’re over 40, you’ve probably seen this ad where the ad starts off, where there’s two really good looking older women that are in their early forties walk out in bikinis and it starts with that shot.
So your attention is grabbed right away. After that, it transitions to kind of a frumpy-looking old guy who’s trying to get their attention and he’s getting ignored.
So I got your attention, but then it kind of transitioned into relating how the prospect feels. The frumpy old guy was actually Mark McGill, who was our trainer for the product at the time. He rips off his shirt and jumps in the pool and you can see that he’s in incredible shape. He’s got ripped six-pack abs, he’s I believe 56 now, and just like fitness model shape.
You can see the women’s reaction to him is totally different, and of course, this was done with hired spokespeople and it was acted out, but it kind of lets people visualize the reactions, the difference in how they’ll be treated once they get in shape like Mark.
That’s one example and there are many different ways you can do this. Just a promise of content can be a good skip stopper. A very specific statement to a specific person, there are many different ways, but that kind of gives you an idea of how you need to catch attention.
How many ads should you run on Youtube?
Adam: Okay. I absolutely love this. Then in terms of like how many ads you would run because I’ve had some unique insight into this, I was helping out with six-pack back in the day.
But like, if you give some insight to the listeners, how many ads would you run? How many would you start with? Obviously, you would split test them, maybe you could talk a little bit about that as well?
Daniel: Yeah, sure thing. This is something that a lot of people don’t know. We would be producing around 10 to 15 new ads per month at six-pack. Once we had the full team of copywriters and video editors built out. That was a really unrecognized reason for our success because we had some good ideas.
My copywriter had great ideas. The people on the video editing team did a great job. Everybody was doing an excellent job with the commercials, but there was a lot that we were making that didn’t work.
Probably about eight out of 10 would not work on a huge scale. One of the biggest reasons why I think we got so many huge-scale hits is that we simply produced more high-quality commercials. We kind of had more at-bats. It’s like a baseball player. No baseball player is going to hit a home run every time. But if you give yourself more at-bats, eventually it’s inevitable that you get some home runs.
So that’s one part of it. First, you have to produce enough creative that way you can achieve large-scale success. The other part of it is most people don’t know how to split test their ads on YouTube.
Most people, what they do is to either split test on view rate, split test on sales, or they have one single metric that they split test based on. I developed something called the three-level split testing system. I’m about to release a book on YouTube marketing soon.
I talk in detail about this, but just in a nutshell, the three-level split testing system is when you have a lot of data, enough data to split tests based on the ROI and the sales, then you split tests based on the ROI. Many times, you’re not going to have enough data to test based on sales.
So in that case, I would split tests based on cost per lead. If you set your funnel up or your e-commerce store the right way, this will have a really strong correlation with sales and it can enable you to make meaningful improvements to your campaigns.
When he spent 30 or $40, we would also even do an additional level of split testing beyond that for the smallest campaigns called cost per click, split testing. So on YouTube, when somebody views your ad, that’s counted as a view.
When somebody responds to your ad and clicks on the call to action, then that’s what’s ultimately counted as a click. So the clicker is not something everybody who sees the ad will do, only a small percentage will click through. Your cost per click can also be a good way to make improvements if you only have a little bit of data and it’s a small campaign. So that’s the key here, make it a good amount of creative and have a good system for split testing it..
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