Episode 185: How to Build an Organic Traffic System on YouTube

Is it too late to start a YouTube channel in 2019? Today’s guest, Sunny Lenarduzzi, is here to assure us that it’s not too late, and there is plenty of opportunity to grow a personal brand and organic traffic system, as well as teach us how to capitalize off of it.

Sunny uses Molly as her guinea pig to show us how to start a personal brand from the ground up. Sunny shares her YouTube secrets, including how changing a video title helped her client reach 6 million views, the 2 types of calls to action to place in each video, and how to get YouTube to place your video in their algorithm.

 

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:

• How Sunny’s weekly video content strategy organically grew her brand and positioned her as a social media marketing expert with over 3 million views
• Sunny’s 4-Step YouTube Process—Research, Structure, Optimization, and Distribution
• The Hot Script Formula of viral YouTube videos—Hook, Outcome, and Testimonial

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Boss YouTube Channel Checklist
Sunny’s Website
Sunny on LinkedIn
Sunny on Youtube
Sunny on Instagram

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Molly Pittman: Instagram and YouTube, these are really the two platforms that I want to focus on. With Instagram, I pretty much have an idea of what to do, but with YouTube I’m like, I’ve listened to you talk. I’ve heard a lot about YouTube, but what should I do to build Molly Pittman out on YouTube?

Darren Clark: You’re listening to Perpetual Traffic.

Molly Pittman: Hello everybody. Welcome to episode 185 of Perpetual Traffic. Molly Pittman here with a very special guest today. Sunny-

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Lenarduzzi.

Molly Pittman: Sunny, hey, how’s it going? So happy to have you here.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited. I’m having like a geeking out little moment being on this podcast. I’m stoked.

Molly Pittman: So stoked too. I can’t believe it took 185 episodes to get you on here. I’m so glad you’re here. For those of you that don’t know Sunny. Number one, you’re missing out and I’m glad I could introduce her to you. But Sunny I actually met a few years ago in Austin. There was a party. It’s really an event party, I guess, called Internet Marketing Party. It’s been around forever. Lots of people that obviously love digital marketing go to this party that’s once a month. So, anyway, before the party David always has a speaker mastermind. So, the gift he gives back to the speaker for speaking is that they get this mastermind. So he asked if I could come and help out one day, and I did. It was Sunny.

Molly Pittman: We had never met before. I think this was a few years ago. Life was very different for both of us. I remember being so inspired by your business but mostly so inspired really by the way that you show up in the world. I think it’s a big reason that you’ve been able to attract the success that you have. Right? I know you have a long bio, but one of my favorites is that Forbes named your YouTube channel one of the top 20 channels that will change your business. That’s pretty significant.

Molly Pittman: So, I met Sunny a few years ago, and since then definitely follow you on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. We’ve run into each other at Traffic and Conversion Summit and Social Media Marketing World. Sunny is a marketing expert, but really loves to talk about YouTube. That’s where you got your start. So, Sunny, kind of tell me because when you said this in the mastermind I was like, “Wow, this is so interesting.” You kind of fell into this, right? In a way. Intentionally fell into this.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yes. I often say that I kind of fell in backwards a little bit. And it’s funny because I think if someone were to look at my trajectory, they would say it was an obvious fit for me to be on YouTube. But it wasn’t so obvious to me. I was a journalist and thought that that was what I was going to do forever. My goal was to be a 6 o’clock news anchor. I reported at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games and really enjoyed it, but there was something always kind of missing for me. I think I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: On my own home from the games I was driving down the Sea to Sky highway and just daydreaming. I was like, “You know what? I kind of want to start my own thing and start my own business in the media.” At the time really social media and Facebook were starting to become more prevalent, but no one was really using them for business.

Molly Pittman: Right.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: I decided, “You know what? I’m going to start an online magazine. I’m going to start my own media company because I’m not really digging the way that this traditional media game is going.” And the amount of control that was needed to control what I was saying, what I was wearing, how I was saying things, what stories I was doing. I was like, “I want that freedom back.” I started an online magazine. I built it out to a staff of about 10 writers, and it went really well, and it really taught me everything I needed to know about social media at the time, which was so new. And I figured out how to build Rant.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: I really built the brand completely organically through social. I was selling ad space on the magazine, and that was my revenue stream. It didn’t make very much money at all. It wasn’t super scalable, not at all, but so valuable for me to learn. I was using just Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Instagram wasn’t even around yet. So, I just fell in love with it, and I was really good at it. So all of a sudden all of these companies started taking notice of me and asking me to do the same thing for their business and kind of put them on the map when it came to social media.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So I started doing that. I did that for about four or five years. It just got a point where I know there is definitely someone listening right now who can relate to this, where you just get to a place, and you’re like, “Okay, I have so many clients, I’m this one woman show. How do I even have time to do the work I need to do?” And so I figured out I either had to clone myself or hire a team. I wasn’t ready to hire a team, so I just sat down one day, and I started answering my client’s questions via videos. I figured I could send them to my clients in one fell swoop and answer all their questions at once because they all had the same questions.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So I figured I’d just get on video, send it out to them, and that would be that, and I wouldn’t have to go to a meeting or get on a phone to answer the question and waste my time doing that. So, the question that I was getting over and over and over again at this time, it was March of 2015, was all about Periscope because it had just launched at South by Southwest, and it was all the rage. People were like, “How do I use this for business? How do I leverage it?” So I just sat down and made a really quick video in my apartment in front of a window with a webcam and sent it to my clients, had a handful of clients, the next day. Didn’t think anything of it. I wasn’t using my YouTube channel at the time. I wasn’t promoting myself at all. And I woke up to a couple thousand views. I was blown away. I was like, “Okay. How’d that happen?”

Sunny Lenarduzzi: I just started kind of reverse engineering it, and I was like, “Okay, I made a video on a topic that everyone’s searching for right now and that everyone’s talking about, so that means that there’s a lot of traffic that is out there looking for this, and I just happened to be the first person to make a video on the topic.” So I kind of hit at the right time. So, I challenged myself and said, “Okay, what would happen if I did this every single week once a week for a year?” So that’s what I did.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: At the time, this was in like I said March 2015, almost four years ago now, I didn’t even know what an online business was. I didn’t know what an email list was. I didn’t know what an online course was. I’d never heard any of those terms before.

Molly Pittman: Oh, good for you.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So this kind of started everything for me.

Molly Pittman: Wow. That’s incredible. You know, I love that you said that you thought you wanted to be a journalist who wanted to be on the news. It’s interesting I think sometimes, not that we get attached to the end result, but we think we know what it looks like. Right? Instead, you just relied on your skillsets and your intuition and here it led you this way. Right? Sometimes people resist that, and I think that’s such a cool part of your story that people should really pay attention to because look at the life that you’re living now.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: It’s very different than what I imagined, but I’m so grateful.

Molly Pittman: Of course. And what I really love is that you didn’t go into YouTube thinking, “I’m going to figure this out.” Right? After I was an intern with DigitalMarketer in 2012 I was hired on full time, and I really wanted to master Facebook ads. That was my goal. Luckily, I was able to do that, but you came at this from a completely different way. Right? It almost showed you … I don’t know. It was like, “Hey, Sunny, I’m over here. You should come figure this out.” Very, very cool.

Molly Pittman: I’m also in a moment right now where you were talking about switching from agency life to a more scalable online business like you have right now. I think a lot of people listening can relate to that. That’s something that I’m going through. Late last year I actually let go of all of my clients because I knew that there was something more scalable out there for me where I could reach more people. And that can be really, really scary, but once you start to see the results … Right?

Molly Pittman: I’m doing a launch right now for a new program about traffic, and now that I’m seeing the results and the opt-ins come in, I’m like, “Okay, there’s life here.” But in between that transition period I’ve kind of been sitting here with my fingers crossed wondering if it’s going to work. Is that how you felt or you might still feel like that some days?

Sunny Lenarduzzi: My God. I’m like, if that feeling ever goes away, I honestly think I’m doing something wrong. I think it’s just sort of the nature of the beast. I do remember when … I feel like that moment has come up so many times for me because I remember when I left the Olympics. That was a big moment for me where I was like, “I’m going to start a business.” Ignorance is bliss. I had no idea what I was doing. I just kind of went for it. I think if I did know how hard it was going to be, I don’t know if I would’ve done it to be honest. Then I remember when I started my consultancy, I had this kind of like fork in the road where I was offered a full-time job to go work in house at a really successful big media company, and I could do that or I could go and start my consultancy.

Molly Pittman: You were like, “I can’t lose my freedom.”

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yeah. But I was really tempted. I was like, “There’s the security of that or just go for it.” I think every big win I’ve ever had has sort of come with these challenges. Even YouTube it was like, “Okay, I’m going to give you a year doing this consistently, and then you’re going to see what happens.” I never look back when I do that because I really put myself to the fire. I’m like, “Okay, you got to do this now and get your head down and really focus on it and be consistent and learn the ins and outs.”

Sunny Lenarduzzi: That’s what happened for me. I always say that YouTube changed my life, and it sounds so cheesy, but it’s true because I went … That year when I started and I put out that very first tutorial about Periscope I went from being pretty behind the scenes and not having any sort of brand and not promoting myself at all and no one really knowing what I did to all of a sudden three million people seeing my videos in that first year and having this demand that I’d never seen before. That’s when I created my first digital course. It’s when I built up an email list of tends of thousands just organically through YouTube. I did my very first launch when I didn’t even know what a launch was a year earlier.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: I built my team. We’ve gone from … In the last three and a bit years, we’ve gone from me as the solopreneur to now we have 14 people on my team. That’s just like a wild ride. None of it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t go all in on YouTube.

Molly Pittman: I love it. Sunny, we were chatting a little bit before we hit record. We obviously talked mostly about Facebook ads on this podcast. As everyone who’s listening is aware of, paid ads are a very different game than organic. Right? I think there’s a time and place for both of them. When I was looking at my plan for this year, I love what you said you committed to doing YouTube for one year. That’s how I’m looking at my year. It’s like, “What are the things that I want to commit to because I know they will pay off?”

Molly Pittman: So I’m sitting down to plan my year, and I’m asking myself, “Where should I invest my time?” Right? As I see it right now, I definitely think that Instagram and YouTube are probably the best opportunities in 2019 to grow organically on a platform. I think we’re probably a little past that with Facebook. I’m not sure what you think, but Instagram and YouTube, these are really the two platforms that I want to focus on. With Instagram, I pretty much have an idea of what to do. It’s a little bit more straightforward. It’s also a platform that I consume a lot personally, so I find it easier to be a marketer when I’m used to being on the other side. But with YouTube, I’ve listened to you talk. I’ve heard a lot about YouTube, but what should I do to build Molly Pittman out on YouTube?

Molly Pittman: I think there are a lot of people out there that are wondering and wanting to build an organic channel out this year because they’re seeing that putting all of their eggs in the basket of paid traffic can be kind of risky. Right?

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Absolutely.

Molly Pittman: I think for you to give me advice and tell me what I should do, it will give everyone else context to how they could do the same. So, yeah, I’m ready.

Darren Clark: Hey guys, it’s Darren Clark here, the producer of the show. Real quick, I got some exciting news. We’re finally releasing the Brendon Burchard episode of Business Lunch tomorrow, and it is one of the best episodes. One of the things Brendon says is, “The time to have the map is before you enter the woods,” and that is precisely what this episode is. Brendon has beaten down a path to success, and he tells that story in this episode. So, here’s a snippet for you.

Brendon: I knew that these were the five moves. It’s kind of like in TaeKwonDo. There’s 12 moves. You really don’t have to know anything else, just those and those proliferate into every single thing that you can do. For me, it was like collect name and email, trigger autoresponder sequence, build pages, shoot, and build sales page, and take money checkout. That’s all I need to do, so I had him show me that. I left there, and it was three and a half weeks after that that we did the 1.6 million dollar launch.

Darren Clark: If you want to hear more, go to Business Lunch with Roland Frasier on Apple podcasts.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Just to like put this into context too, if people only knew the people that are coming to me on a regular basis. These are like the gurus of paid advertising. They’re like, “Hey, I’m starting to realize I need to kind of diversify here, and I can’t fully rely on paid ads.”

Molly Pittman: Yes. Really quick, Sunny. It is going hand in hand also with what paid advertisers are saying because especially on Facebook advertising everything now is going back to having a conversation. I just launched some ads for this program I was telling you about a few days ago, and the ads that are winning are of me and Ezra Firestone chilling by a lake in New York. A photo. Yeah, a photo.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: I thought it was just an organic post, and I think-

Molly Pittman: No, it was an ad, but it looks organic, and that’s why it’s working. Right? Same principles here.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Well, I think that’s a really interesting thing. Just a little bit of a side note is, I actually was doing a poll yesterday on my Instagram about the kind of content that I share there. I said, “How important is it to have these perfectly polished photo shoot style photos. The response that I got was so surprising to me, surprising and not. People don’t care anymore. It started this firestorm of conversation of just like authenticity and real photos now stand out more than these perfectly polished, perfectly filtered photos on Instagram because nobody’s doing it. So I think that’s the reason that ad for you really stood out. My most successful paid ads, we started using paid ads once we had the capital from doing all of our organic stuff, was the most selfie style, me walking on the seawall of Vancouver ads and just super, super organic.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: I think regardless of if you’re paying for advertising or if you’re doing the organic traffic route, organic, authentic, real videos and content always wins, and that’s the biggest sort of hurdle that people have when it comes to YouTube is they’re like, “Okay, I need the right camera. I need the right lighting. I need to invest in a videographer. I need to invest in all of these things.” Yes, eventually. But I started with an $80 webcam and a window. That’s the thing that matters most, and so for you, the thing that matters most is the value of your content.

Molly Pittman: Of course.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Because at the end of the day YouTube is a search engine, and it’s owned by the largest search engine in the world. So you want to be making content that’s searchable and that is super helpful. I often go back to this example. You and I were talking on stage at Traffic & Conversion Summit last year, and you were saying that I think it was like your fire alarm or something broke in your-

Molly Pittman: Oh, yes. Yes.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: And you were like, “I went onto YouTube to figure out how to fix it, and I immediately went… I didn’t even care what the top result was, I just wanted the shortest video.” That is very true of a lot of things even in your space. So, you are a wizard when it comes to paid advertising and Facebook ads. You really know your stuff. You really are an expert. So, that’s where you want to bank in on, and for me when I’m talking to entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, business owners, what are you a genius at? I tell people to create this thing called the master list, and that really is a list of every skill that you’ve mastered, and that’s where your content starts.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So it’s a combination of the master list and then FAQs. What are the questions that people ask me?

Molly Pittman: Oh, boy. I’ve got those. Yeah.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Oh, you do? So, like that would be place number one to start is to look at that FAQ list and to go through it and be like, “Okay, what could I easily make a video on?” I’m not talking like, you don’t need fancy pants videos when you’re getting started. You just need to start putting them out there. You just need to be on camera. You just need to be sharing your knowledge with people. Right off the top of your head, do you have any FAQs that you can think of that you can do a video on?

Molly Pittman: Of course. What to do when my Facebook account gets shut down? Or what to do if Facebook ads aren’t working? Right? I’ve got probably 50 that I can think of.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: I can even … We do run ads. I truthfully don’t know anything about the ads part of our business. We have someone else who runs it, so even things for me I’m thinking like, “How do you A/B test ads?” What about it is kind of creative?

Molly Pittman: How do you set up Facebook targeting?

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yes. So many things. There are branches and branches and branches. Then you can start breaking those down into categories. I think the biggest hurdle that people have is “What do I talk about?” I think there’s often a misconception particularly with YouTube. I know you said Instagram seems more intuitive, and it’s easier to figure out. It’s pretty straightforward what to do in it. It’s actually very straightforward what to do on YouTube too. It just gets cluttered.

Molly Pittman: I’m already realizing this. I’m like, “I just need to make a list of questions. I can do that.”

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Exactly. I think the thing that clutters it is there’s a big difference between being an influencer creator and an entrepreneur on YouTube or business owner on YouTube because if you’re a business owner all you need to be doing is it’s free advertising. I had three million eyeballs on me in the first year, and as long as I was talking about things that solved people’s problems or answered people’s questions when it came to marketing online, particularly with YouTube, I was gaining new customers every single day because they were finding me every single day.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So that really is step number one. You don’t need to be fancy with it. You don’t need to be vlogging every day.

Molly Pittman: I just need to answer the questions, right? I mean, it’s what we tell people here like solve the pain point of your market and your ad copy. I’m just solving problems over here on YouTube.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yeah, and it’s not like I’m doing like five videos a week. I’m doing one video a week. My channel has grown to over 200,000 subscribers.

Molly Pittman: Sunny, you know what’s funny? This morning I had some issues with my Facebook ads, and one of my ads was disapproved for a reason. I didn’t even know what it meant. So I Googled it, and someone had shot a YouTube video on what to do, and I watched it, and I did the step by step, and it worked. I mean, this happened this morning to me. I just make a list basically. I can just in Excel sheet make a list of as many questions as I can think of like that.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Exactly. We call it the Sunny system, which is the-

Molly Pittman: I love it. I love it.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: It’s really four parts, so that research part is hands down the most important piece. In my program YouTube For Bosses, that’s the most labor intensive part. But I had someone yesterday message me and say, “I’m so glad that you make us do that research,” because I had a video title that I wanted to use. I don’t know. It was about a thousand searches per month, but the search competition was so high, and then I tweaked one word, did a bit more research, and the search volume sky rocketed and the competition went way down.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So research is the most important part, but after that it’s the structure. People oftentimes forget about that.

Molly Pittman: So number two is structure?

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yeah, structure. It’s so, so, so important. You can also call this scripting. But like this Sunny system it really does work across platforms. You can use this on Instagram. You can use this on any other platform. Use it on Facebook. But with YouTube particularly that structure piece is the script part. I call it the hot script formula, which stands for hook, outcome, and testimonial. Because at the end of the day for example when you’re looking for how to fix the fire detector in your apartment, you don’t care who’s telling you, why they’re telling you, you just want to know how to do it and fix it the fastest. Same thing goes here is that people want … And same thing with what you were searching today. I’m sure you were just like, “Someone give me an answer and give me an answer quick.”

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So the hot script formula, the purpose of it is to get you in and out of the content as quickly as possible and to give the viewer what they’re looking for immediately because the number one metric on YouTube now is watch time and retention. So, you need to make sure that if people are clicking on your video, they’re actually watching the whole thing because if they’re not, YouTube is not going to allow you to rank in the algorithm, and they’re not going to put you at the top of the search results, which is what you want because when you’re at the top of the search results for how to set up my Facebook ads, you better believe there are thousands of people every single day that are going to find you.

Molly Pittman: Of course.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So that’s new traffic for you all day long. So that’s really where it’s important to focus on the structure. So you start with, “In this video, I’m going to teach you how to get more views on YouTube.” That’s your hook. The outcome is by the end of this video you’ll know how to rank on page one of YouTube and the testimonial is I’ve taught thousands of students and helped thousands of clients do this exact same thing. One of my clients recently went from zero to a hundred thousand subscribers in 10 months and has built a half million dollar business in their first year.

Molly Pittman: Bam. How can you not listen? I love it.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: There’s a lot of so-called experts out there, but when you have that credibility in there as well, people are going to want to listen to you versus anybody else that’s uploading videos on YouTube. Then you go into the meat of the content. So step by step, no fluff, no filler. And a big caveat that I also want to say is like don’t tell people why to watch the video. They already know why they’re there. So for you when you’re looking up that solution today of like why your ad got disapproved.

Molly Pittman: I was like, “I already know. I just need to fix it.”

Sunny Lenarduzzi: You’re like, “I know why I need to know this, but just tell me what the reason is that it’s actually happening.” So people don’t need to know the why. You don’t need to justify it. You don’t need to go into long detail. You don’t need to justify who you are, just get in and out of that hot intro in a minute, get into your content step by step, no fluff, no filler. Give people what they want to know. At the very end the final piece of this is so, so, so important. It’s giving people conversion call to action. So telling people, “Okay, great. Now you know how to get more views on YouTube,” but I’ve actually created an entire checklist on how to set up your YouTube channel for success to attract real leads and real clients. So that’s your conversion call to action.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Then your engagement call to action is to say, “Give me a like if you enjoyed this. Comment below and let me know what your YouTube channel is all about. I would love to check it out. Be sure to subscribe.” Because the more of those likes, comments, and subscribes you get on your video and shares, the higher you’re going to rank as well and the more of that perpetual traffic you’re going to get in the long term.

Molly Pittman: Awesome. I love that. Okay, that sounds easy enough. I mean I could shoot like 10 of these in a few hours. I feel like I’m ready to go do it now.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: That’s awesome. I love it. I mean it really is that simple and that’s part of my strategy too is I really believe in bulk shooting your content because that’s the easiest way for you to ensure consistency and to continually show up for your audience so that they want to show up for you.

Molly Pittman: Yeah. I mean, that’s what this is all about. Right? Then do I just start posting them?

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So step three is really the uploading and optimization phase. You want to upload the video and make sure that it’s got all of the information for YouTube to be able to find you. So optimization can oftentimes scare people, that word, and it feels really technical. But it’s not. It’s simply having the keyword that you want to get found for or the key phrase of what you want to be found for in the title and having it in the tags and having it in your description. That’s really it. You just need to make sure that there’s information where YouTube and Google knows where to put your video because you’ve got all that information in there so that they can actually categorize it. That’s really the simple aspect of uploading and optimization.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Then the final phase is distribution.

Molly Pittman: Hold on, Sunny. Really quick on the optimization, if, for example, my video was what to do when your Facebook ad account gets shutdown, that would be the title, and it would be in the tags and the description. Then I would add some other copy in there too, right?

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yeah. You want to make it sound human.

Molly Pittman: Do you want it to be in question form or do you want it to be more in what to do? Do you get what I’m saying? Question form versus … I don’t know what you would call the other.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Question versus, I guess, phrase?

Molly Pittman: Yeah, right.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: You can really do it either way. That’s where this research phase is so important, and that’s where we dive into so many different techniques of finding the right title for your videos when we work with clients because there are so many different ways you can do it. It will make a huge difference. We had one client who titled her video one thing and then I told her to just tweak the last piece of it, and that video today has six million views on it.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: So, honestly, the easiest way to do it is how are your customers asking you the question because how they ask it is what they would be searching for.

Molly Pittman: What are they typing, right? If I was going to type, what would I type? Okay, awesome. That makes perfect sense. Okay. Then distribution because this is important to me too especially I want to use this podcast and my email list to help get this YouTube channel off the ground. I know everyone doesn’t have those assets, but I’m sure that’s important.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Totally. It’s a complete unfair advantage when you do. I think this piece too so many people don’t do it. They’ll post a video on YouTube and hope that it gets seen. I’m like, “No, you’re missing a big step here.” Also keep in mind when I started producing content for YouTube, I didn’t have an email list. I didn’t have really any assets at all, but I just started leveraging even like the one person who joined my email list, which was my mom.

Molly Pittman: Thanks mom.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yeah, thanks mom. I just started getting into the habit of every week I was sending out the video to my list. That was my habit, and we still do that to this day. Every single Tuesday we send out my new video content because the more eyeballs you can get on your content in the first 24 hours on YouTube and the more signals you get, so likes, comments, shares, subscribes, the more YouTube goes, “Wow, this must be a really good piece of content, and this many people are engaging with it. We should push it in the algorithm in suggested videos and we should also push it up in the search rankings so that more people can watch it.”

Sunny Lenarduzzi: This is where that evergreen traffic machine I like to call it, evergreen sales machine, lead machine, comes into play because if you’re producing a video that you know is being searched and that has the capability of being ranked, and then you’re pushing it out to your warm audience who already knows to trust you and is going to watch it because they are interested in the content you’re sharing, and they’re giving you those signals, then you’re boosting the piece of content up in the algorithm for even more eyeballs to see and more cold traffic to discover you for the first time. It just starts working for you.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: I have videos that are three or four years old, and they are still bringing in 200 to 300 leads a day for us from my email list, and I’m not touching them.

Molly Pittman: That’s what’s so powerful about this. I mean, guys, this is why I am going to invest resources into this this year because this is something that it really is perpetual. To have this consistent building of your brand, this consistent traffic is so great. Sunny, I’ve got a question. Sol I just searched the Facebook ad account shutdown, and it looks like there’s like 75,000 plus videos on YouTube. Do you ever think it’s like too late? Do you think it’s too late for me to enter this market?

Sunny Lenarduzzi: No.

Molly Pittman: Okay. I was going to do it anyways, but just curious. I mean, people ask me about that in terms of Facebook ads. Is it too late? No, it’s not.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: No, it’s definitely not. I think the thing is it’s actually super fun to get in right now because it just takes an element of being creative in the research process because, yes, there are a lot of people doing videos on that topic, but it’s one big game at the end of the day. So, maybe you don’t start with that topic. Maybe you start with the topic that has a little less competition. We have a whole formula for how we figure that out and equate the competition that you should be looking at.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: But you start out with less competitive topics. You start gaining momentum and authority in your niche. Then once you start owning it, then you start going after these really competitive topics, and you can start winning there as well. It’s super possible. We have people who are just starting who are gaining thousands and thousands of subscribers every single month from scratch because they’re using this process.

Molly Pittman: Wow. That’s incredible. Okay. I said one more question, but I have one extra question.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Okay. Ask as many as you’d like.

Molly Pittman: In the creation of these videos, I sit down, maybe I shoot 20, would it also be okay … I mean, I’m seeing myself posting these on Instagram and Facebook too because they’re questions my audience has.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Totally. Totally. Yeah. So one of the things when it comes to distribution that’s really awesome is you’re leveraging this one piece of content, and you’re distributing it across platforms in a way that is native to those platforms. That’s giving you even more credibility, even more authority. So we just basically break down my longer form content into bite size pieces of content for other platforms, and that’s a really great way for us to gain momentum on those other platforms as well.

Molly Pittman: Awesome. All right Sunny. Well, I’m ready to rock and roll.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yay.

Molly Pittman: So I’m going to do this. Then we’ll have you back on later this year to see how it goes, see what you think I should do next. I really, really appreciate you, like I said not just for your information, your marketing knowledge, but you’re an awesome human.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Oh, you too.

Molly Pittman: That’s definitely something to be proud of. Sunny, so can someone hire you?

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yes.

Molly Pittman: Okay. How would that happen? Because a lot of Perpetual Traffic listeners are like, “This sounds awesome. I want to hire her.”

Sunny Lenarduzzi: I’m glad to hear that. We have so many different offerings. Our best thing to first kind of take a look at is YouTube for Bosses, which is our digital program, and it’s a four hour crash course that explains in depth this whole process that I just mentioned. But you can also hire us for consulting, and we also have a done for you service as well. There are several different things that you can do with us. If you visit me at SunnyLenarduzzi.com, you can get in touch there. We have also a bunch of free info and free downloads there that can help you get started too.

Molly Pittman: Heck, yeah. Sunny is also an incredible speaker if you haven’t seen her before. She would be great to book for your conference if you’re thinking about that.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Thank you.

Molly Pittman: Sunny, thank you so much. I appreciate it. I can’t wait to see how this goes. Everybody follow Sunny. Hire her if you need her help. Thank you so much for your expertise, and we’ll have you on next time.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. One quick thing before I do go for you, your homework, if I’m going to give you homework.

Molly Pittman: Yes. Give me homework.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Anyone listening who’s thinking, “Okay, I really want to do this,” the best place to start is The Boss YouTube channel checklist. It is 14 simple, simple steps, and it’s four businesses, four entrepreneurs to get your YouTube channel set up the right way. So whether it’s you doing it or you have someone on your team take care of it, that would be the best place to start. So you can just search Sunny Lenarduzzi, Boss YouTube channel checklist, and that would be the place to find it. I’ll send you over the link too so you can put it in the show notes.

Molly Pittman: Awesome. Yeah. We will have all this information in the show notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. Thanks again, Sunny.

Sunny Lenarduzzi: Thank you.

Molly Pittman: See you next time.

Darren Clark: You’ve been listening to Perpetual Traffic. For more information and to get the resources mentioned in this episode, visit digitalmarketer.com/podcast. Thank you for listening.

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