Podcast vs. YouTube: Find the Best Platform for YOUR Business!

Hey Friend!

Are you an online business owner tossing around starting a podcast or a YouTube Channel? What platform is the best for you and your business based on what you offer the world? Thinking about podcasting and creating a YouTube channel at the same time?

I dive into having a podcast versus YouTube channel with my special guest, Gillian Perkins. We have the same story but on opposite platforms. I went all in on podcasting six years ago and grew a successful business using podcasting. Gillian chose YouTube as her entire focus for six years. Only after we had our podcast or YouTube channel established did we take on a second long-form content method.

Gillian is the CEO of Startup Society and the host of the Work Less, Earn More podcast. She is a mom who homeschools her five children. She lives with her family on a fifteen-acre property in Oregon. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, gardening, and watercolor painting.

Enjoy this conversation about podcasting versus YouTube. Remember, there is no right or wrong answer as to which long-form method you choose for your product or service. What matters is that you pick one and get started with confidence.

HOW GILLIAN PERKINS’ ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEY BEGAN

Stef: Gillian, I’m so excited to have you on the show. Tell us what you do.

Gillian: I am a digital business strategist. I help people start online businesses and scale them to six figures and beyond. My specialty is in YouTube strategy because that’s where I have experienced huge success with my business. I also teach automated funnel strategies because I love to work less and earn more. When I am in the office, I do things that pay me over and over again such as projects that give a long-term return on investment. I have five children, ages two through ten, so I like to spend as much time with them as possible, especially because I homeschool them.

EVERY PART OF YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEY MATTERS

Stef: That’s amazing. How long have you been in this space? When did you start, and what did it look like when you first started?

Gillian: I have been an entrepreneur for about fourteen years. I started my first business, a local music studio, in high school and learned a lot such as marketing and hiring a whole staff of teachers. I grew it to be one of the biggest, music studios in the northwest.

After eleven years, I sold the music studio, knowing that was not what I wanted to do long-term. It was my day job, my nine-to-five that paid the bills, but I really wanted to transition to entrepreneurship.

Owning and operating a music studio was an incredible educational experience, but along the way, every year or two, I started a new side hustle. Some of those businesses flopped, some succeeded, and others I kept doing for several years.

CLARITY COMES AS YOU WORK YOUR BUSINESS

Gillian: I slowly had this epiphany that I thought I was starting all these different businesses because I was trying to figure out the ONE THING I wanted to do as a career. I finally realized I loved entrepreneurship and marketing. Every time I started a new business, it was a new marketing challenge to figure out how to get the first customer. So, I started helping other business owners struggling to get their customers. I started helping them market their businesses.

Being a music teacher for all those years was not an accident. I am a teacher at heart; teaching comes most naturally to me. At least, my audience tells me all the time that I explain things so well. I make things simple to understand. So, after running a digital marketing agency for a few months, I decided I wasn’t good at working with clients and having deadlines. I transitioned that business into teaching digital business owners how to market their businesses.

FIND THE NEEDS PEOPLE HAVE AS YOU SERVE

Gillian: Clients hired me to run ads for their businesses, and I got them impressions and clicks. But at the end of the day, I couldn’t determine whether or not people would buy their product. Most of the time, their product weren’t selling because there was a flaw with the product or they hadn’t validated the product idea and then their messaging was off. They weren’t seeing a demand for their product, or they weren’t talking about it convincingly or clearly. I realized that I needed to teach these online business owners how to market their products or services. So, I launched the education brand that I run today. It started with a website where I wrote blogs and then turned into a YouTube channel that grew very quickly and has continued to grow for almost seven years. I have been an online entrepreneur for about seven years now.

People kept asking me about YouTube strategy, so I started a sister brand called Creator Fast Track. And then I started a podcast called Work Less, Earn More about three years ago now. I also started a company called Startup Society, which provides everything an online business owner needs to know to start and grow their business.

I know this is a lot so while these things all work together as an ecosystem, I keep them separate and speak to their unique audiences because I don’t want to confuse people with too many different offers from one brand. Even though I am a multi-passionate person who wants to do everything, it can be confusing when one brand tries to do everything.

PODCAST VS. YOUTUBE: MULTI-PASSIONATE PEOPLE STILL NEED TO CHOOSE ONE

Stef: There are a lot of people in my audience who are multi-passionate like that, and they think they can have three or four companies at a time. I tell them one at a time. You can do everything, but you can only successfully start one thing at a time.

Gillian: Yes, I found with everything that I’ve done in my personal life and with my business whenever I try to start multiple things at once, they all fail. When I focus on one thing, even for a few months, and get it growing, there’s momentum. It will become successful, and then you can go and start something else.

HOW GILLIAN CHOSE YOUTUBE AS HER LONG-FORM CONTENT METHOD

Gillian: I wanted to teach people how to market their online businesses starting with their messaging and product offers. I wrote blogs on my website, but no one read them. I posted on Instagram and Facebook and saw no growth. With two likes here and five likes there, my audience technically wasn’t growing. I got a handful of new followers each month, but at that growth rate, I was going to be an old lady before this business made any money! Something had to change.

CONSIDER WHAT HAS OR HASN’T WORKED IN THE PAST

Gillian: I thought back to all the different marketing strategies I tried with all the previous businesses I had started. I tried every marketing strategy then: ran Facebook ads, Google ads, newspaper ads, billboards around town, and radio ads. Of all those things, some worked, some didn’t. I asked myself, which one worked the best? What got me the biggest result with the least effort? Which one brought me the most predictable results?

One stood out to me and that was YouTube. While I hadn’t tried YouTube as a marketing strategy, several years prior, I started a YouTube channel as a passion project. It was a hobby channel where I was secretly hoping, fingers crossed, that I would become a famous YouTuber. I loved watching YouTube, and I thought that looked like such a fun job. I knew that successful YouTubers made plenty of money.

WHAT GILLIAN LEARNED FROM A PASSION PROJECT YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Gillian: While I hoped, I had zero confidence that I would become a famous YouTuber. And rightfully so because my videos were terrible in their filming quality, editing quality, everything. They were horrible, but I couldn’t see how bad they were. I posted on YouTube off and on for about three years with about fifty videos in that time. Putting up two or three videos in a month, and then not posting for a month or two made me inconsistent. I felt like a failure since I couldn’t manage to be consistent. So, I eventually shut the channel down.

Before I shut the channel down, it actually started to grow, getting five views per video to two hundred views per video. Then I had a few videos completely take off, getting thousands and thousands of views. One got over five hundred thousand views! Immediately, my eyes were opened, and I could see what other people could see when they were watching my videos. I stopped asking, why aren’t people watching my videos? And immediately started asking, why are people watching my videos? I now could see how terrible they were, and I was embarrassed so I shut the channel down. I still secretly wanted to be a famous YouTuber, but not that way.

A year or two went by, and now I have this new brand and I’m teaching people entrepreneurship on my website. At least I was trying to because, remember, no one was reading my blogs. I thought of YouTube. What if I figured out how to make good videos? If I learned how to edit them, what might happen? What if I figured out how the algorithm works?

KNOWLEDGE ABOUT YOUTUBE BROUGHT CONFIDENCE

Gillian: I spent months researching YouTube, became a student of the algorithm, and analyzed thousands of channels and thousands of videos to figure out what set apart the channels that succeeded from the channels that stayed stagnant like mine had. I came up with a relatively short list of things that set apart the successful channels from those that weren’t successful. This knowledge brought me confidence. I knew that if I just did these things with my videos and my channel, it would grow. In this, I was confident because I couldn’t find a single channel doing these things that were not quickly growing or already big and successful.

So, I jumped back into YouTube now armed with that knowledge and armed with confidence. Now feeling like a failure because I couldn’t be consistent was not an issue. I posted every single week without exception for years. I decided that no matter what, on Mondays, this was my number one priority. So, every single Monday, I filmed a video, edited it on Tuesday, and published it on Wednesday. I knew that I had to do that to be able to give it a fair test. If I didn’t post consistently, I wouldn’t know if my lack of consistency was preventing the channel from growing or if it was the strategies.

PODCAST VS. YOUTUBE: DATE ONE BEFORE YOU MARRY IT

Gillian: If you’re thinking about starting an online business, a podcast, or a YouTube channel, it can be difficult to commit if you feel like you have to marry it. How do you know if I want to do this thing forever? So instead, commit to dating it. Go steady with it. Give yourself permission to do it for a certain period of time.

For me, I dated YouTube every single week for three months and then reevaluated. At the end of three months, I had over a thousand subscribers. Every single video was getting hundreds of views per video even after just three months. It was an easy yes to keep going. After six months, we had twenty thousand subscribers with each video getting a couple thousand views. By the end of the first year, I had fifty-five thousand subscribers. And then at about fifteen months, I surpassed one hundred thousand subscribers. Now I knew what I needed to do to win, and I was seeing the fruits of my labor.

Stef: That’s so good. I want to highlight, Gillian, that you decided on one method of long-form content that you went steady with. It was YouTube for you. I tell my audience all the time, there are only three options: podcasting, YouTube, or blogging. You must pick one.

Gillian: I’m so glad there’s not more options. I had a hard enough time deciding between those three.

Stef: Exactly. Gillian and I have similar stories in our entrepreneurship. You chose YouTube, then put your head down, and were super consistent with it. I chose podcasting, stayed super consistent for seven years, and only now am going steady with YouTube.

Are you willing to share the things that helped your YouTube channel grow?

PODCAST VS. YOUTUBE: CHOOSE CONSISTENCY

Gillian: The first thing is consistency. Everyone thinks the algorithm likes consistency but the algorithm doesn’t care. Consistency is important because people care about consistency. Subconsciously, they care because if you show up over and over again, they remember who you are. Helping them remember who you are is your most important first step. If you post one video and then three weeks go by before you post another, people will forget who you are. They will be less likely to click on that video, and that sends the algorithm a bad signal. It tells the algorithm people aren’t interested in your video. Then it won’t recommend it to people, and your channel won’t grow.

Consistency is also important because it creates quality. When you consistently publish, that means you are consistently practicing. And when you consistently practice, you get better at it. With anything you do in business, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

PODCAST VS. YOUTUBE: IMPROVE QUALITY

Gillian: Quality is the second thing that helped my YouTube channel to grow. People think if they learn YouTube strategies and how the algorithm works, their channel will grow, but that’s not true. The most important thing is the quality of your videos which includes:

CONTENT QUALITY

• Structure your video well. Do you plan out the content in your video, camera angles, sliders, and B roll images?
• Share good information. Is it entertaining? Is it interesting and enjoyable to watch? When I say entertaining, that does not mean you must be funny. Sometimes people jump to that conclusion, but it does need to be enjoyable to watch.
• Keep people’s attention. Consider the pacing of your video to keep the viewer’s attention. Keep the video moving and have one interesting thing followed by another interesting thing.

FILM QUALITY

• Use good lighting for a nice, crisp image. Most people can improve their image quality by improving their lighting rather than buying a more expensive camera. The phone’s camera itself is plenty good quality these days. But if you’re sitting in a room with a yellowish light bulb, it will look terrible. If you sit in front of a window and it’s an overcast day, it will look beautiful. So improve your lighting.
• Record with the best audio quality. Surprisingly enough, audio is more important than video quality even on YouTube. People are willing to put up with not the best-looking image, but if the audio sounds bad, it grates on people’s nerves, and they can’t stand listening to it, especially if they’re listening with earbuds. They’ll click off a video with bad audio. But if the pacing is good, the information is good, it’s entertaining, and your audio sounds good, people will put up with a slightly grainy video. That said, YouTube is a competitive space, so you want all of these things to be as good as they can be.

PODCAST VS. YOUTUBE: CONSIDER PROGRAMMING

Stef: That’s interesting. What is the difference between the type of delivery when it comes to podcasting vs. YouTube? Would you say podcasting leans more toward storytelling and creating a deeper connection with your listener than YouTube? I think it is interesting the type of person that might watch a YouTube video versus listen to a podcast.

Gillian: Yes, this is your programming. Not computer programming, but like television programming. You might call it your content calendar. What topics are you going to cover and the titles you’ll give each video? This programming is important.

This programming is where I see a difference between podcasting and YouTube. I find that with podcasting, people listen for conversation and community. They want to learn about the general topic that they’re interested in. YouTube viewers on the other hand are on a mission for either dopamine or utility. Ideally, you want to offer both dopamine and utility through your YouTube channel.

YOUTUBE VIDEO VIEWERS WANT TO BE ENTERTAINED

Gillian: Viewers want to be entertained in some way. Again, that doesn’t mean funny, but they want something that gives them a sort of dopamine hit because your content is interesting and entertaining to watch. If you only check the dopamine entertainment box for YouTube, people will come to your channel, watch, laugh, and subscribe, but you won’t have a lot of sales.

YOUTUBE VIDEO VIEWERS WANT TO LEARN HOW TO DO SOMETHING

Gillian: Videos that offer utility provide solutions for the problems your audience has. They go to YouTube because they have a leaky kitchen faucet and want to know how to fix it. YouTube is a search engine, so they search for how to fix my leaky kitchen faucet and find you. You get discovered and your audience grows.

If you share the how-to, YouTube is the place for you. If your videos only offer utility, viewers, and subscribers tend to grow slowly over time. You may have random videos pop off and get one million views and then other videos get thirty-seven views. Views aren’t consistent because you’re getting search traffic from individuals who are looking for an answer to their questions right now. They find your video, watch it, get the answer they need, and leave.

That said, utility channels can turn into profitable channels. But it’s not very consistent and you don’t have as much control over it as you might like. There isn’t a nice snowball effect that we see with other strategies where your audience is growing and growing, and you’re getting more sales and you get some monthly recurring revenue and things like that. Instead, it’s like you’ll have one video driving conversions so well, for example, how to fix the leaky kitchen sink.

THE RIGHT PROGRAMMING FOR PODCAST VS. YOUTUBE BRINGS CONSISTENT SALES

Gillian: Then you have a mini course that teaches people how to completely plumb their kitchen sink. You see an amazing conversion rate because your course is cheap, and people can see your expertise in the video when you’re answering their first question. When you mention another question they have, they buy your $37 product all day long. That’s awesome until the algorithm has tapped out all the people who want that video. For example, maybe it becomes outdated. Suddenly the views dry up, your sales dry up, and there’s no guarantee that you can replicate that success because you haven’t built an audience along the way. You certainly haven’t built a business along the way. Essentially, you have a successful product and a successful ad.

With YouTube, make sure that your videos fulfill the need for dopamine and utility, your videos are entertaining and useful.

PODCAST VS. YOUTUBE: CHOOSE WHICH IS RIGHT FOR YOU

Stef: That’s powerful. If you are deciding between starting a podcast or YouTube, consider what space and niche you serve. Is what you do or how you serve best achieved through videos or audio? Consider the time and investment for podcasting versus YouTube. What would your life look like when you start a YouTube channel?

Gillian: Deciding between podcasting versus YouTube comes down to a few different things:

• Your Personality Type: You know if you are someone who only listens to podcasts and hardly ever touches YouTube, or if you listen or watch YouTube a lot. If you like listening to podcasts and watching YouTube, try both. Try one for three months. If one sounds easier to you, try that first. See if it’s a fit.
• Time and Financial Investment: A lot of people who start with podcasting think that YouTube is a lot more expensive. I spent hardly any money on YouTube when I started. I used a window for my lighting and filmed with a camera that I already had. I didn’t have an external mic, so I bought nothing. As my YouTube channel has grown, I have invested more money into my YouTube channel than into my podcast. I invested in more expensive cameras and better lights, but it made sense because the YouTube channel was my bread and butter. With the podcast, a microphone was my biggest upfront expense.
• Content Method that Attracts the Right People

TEST AND TRY WHICH PLATFORM, PODCAST VS. YOUTUBE, IS RIGHT FOR YOU

Stef: I like the test and try methodology to see which one you like best, podcast versus YouTube. I think you know in your gut what you have time and bandwidth for and what’s calling to you. After you test and try out podcasting versus YouTube, choose one and only one that you will do and go all in on it for at least a year. Long-form content is typically not going to take off in three months.

Gillian: It is important to have the right expectations. If you’re expecting a million views in three months, you’re going to be disappointed. You will say that didn’t work.

PODCAST VS. YOUTUBE: MONITOR CONVERSIONS INTO SALES

Stef: Now that you have added podcasting, Gillian, I’m curious how you are experiencing conversion now that you have leads coming in through your YouTube channel and through the podcast. Where do you see the most sales taking place?

YOUTUBE VIDEOS ATTRACT A VARIETY OF BUYERS

Gillian: In my business, YouTube is the top of my funnel. It’s where most people discover me. But what I find is that it attracts all sorts of people. Some are a good fit and some are not. Others are just there for the free. There are all sorts of reasons why somebody might not be a good fit. I feel it’s a sorting ground where people can watch the videos, and if they want to take the next step, they can. For some of them, the next step is to buy. For others, the next step is to get on my email list or listen to the podcast. With YouTube, you get a variety of people, and a lot of them aren’t people who will ever choose to purchase.

PODCASTING ATTRACTS READY-FOR-RESULTS BUYERS

Gillian: Those who listen to the podcast are serious students and overachievers. In my case, with my podcast being mid-funnel for me, it attracts serious listeners. I have fewer people listening to my podcast than watching a YouTube video. On YouTube, I might have a hundred thousand people watch a YouTube video and that might turn into ten sales. I don’t mean ten sales of a $27 product. I mean, ten sales of a $500 course and a $4,000 coaching program. It turns into some good money and is worth my time recording a fifteen-minute video. But if you’re looking at a hundred thousand viewers to ten sales, that’s a poor conversion rate.

OTHER FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO SALES

Gillian: I don’t only focus on the conversion rate. The fact that extra people watched the video is a good thing. With the podcast, for example, I spend a similar amount of time recording an episode, but I don’t have to set up lights and things like that. Either way, both take me about an hour. YouTube videos normally take me a little bit longer. Probably only five thousand people listen to the podcast episode, maybe ten thousand for a really popular episode. But those five thousand people, turn into about five sales.

Not everyone listens to podcasts, so for that reason, I appreciate having multiple types of media that I create so I can reach people in different spaces. That’s possible because I have a team and have been doing this for seven years. Start with one thing, do the one thing, and grow the one thing. Later, as you have capacity, meaning time, a team, and financial capacity, you can add a second method.

IF YOUTUBE IS THE RIGHT PLATFORM FOR YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS

Stef: That’s good to consider. This has been so valuable. If you are leaning into YouTube being your long-form content method, Gillian is an incredible resource for you. Where can we connect with you and listen to your show?

Gillian: Thanks, Steph. If you are specifically interested in YouTube, Creator Fast Track is the place to go. Watch my YouTube channel for YouTube strategy, business strategy, and sales funnel strategy.

IF PODCASTING IS THE RIGHT PLATFORM FOR YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS

Stef: I hope this conversation with Gillian Perkins gave you clarity and insight as to which long-form content method is right for your online business: a podcast or YouTube. Remember, there is no right or wrong answer as to which platform you choose to promote your product or service. What matters is that you pick one, stick with one, and get started with confidence.

If you decide that podcasting is the right for you to grow your online business and generate leads and sales, I invite you to check out Podcast Pro University, my podcasting course. It provides you with a step-by-step playbook for starting and launching your podcast in thirty days with zero confusion. You’ll learn what to call your show, how to lay out the programming or content calendar so that you know what to say and record, as well as how to edit and publish your episodes. You’ll also learn how to monetize your podcast. Get started with podcasting with Podcast Pro University.

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