How This Realtor Gets 50% of His Listings from YouTube (Christian Walsh Interview)
Hey, friends. Katie Lance here. Welcome back to the podcast. This month in our Get Social Smart Academy, we focused on video and YouTube and how to show up better on video and how to be more effective on YouTube. And I'm doing something I'm actually haven't done in a long time.
Speaker 1:We recently interviewed Christian Walsh, an amazing realtor, husband, dad, YouTuber. He has a YouTube channel over 34,000 subscribers. He gets more than 50% of his listing leads from YouTube. We did an exclusive interview with him to talk about his tips and tools. I thought it would be fun to share a snippet of that conversation.
Speaker 1:If you would like access to the full interview plus our training and content calendars, we would love to have you part of our academy family. I'll put the link below so you can check that out, but you can go to KatieLance.com/academy, k a t I e l a n c e, Com forward / academy, and get signed up. You'll have access to our live training. I do a live coffee with Katie each week, and your membership includes access to our masterclasses. We have our YouTube masterclass coming up soon.
Speaker 1:You have access to content calendars, a camera templates, private community, and more. I'm excited. Enjoy this conversation with Christian. I'm gonna come back at the end and give you a little message with a couple tips and takeaways. Let's get into the show.
Speaker 1:Hey, everybody. Welcome to coffee with Katie. We have a special guest today. Say hi in the chat. Let me know where you're tuning in from.
Speaker 1:I've got a big cup of coffee in California, so we're we're getting caffeinated this day after a holiday. Happy Easter to anybody you wanna celebrate it. Welcome. Hello, back. Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Good morning. Loud and clear. This month has been YouTube tips, tricks, strategies. Shameless plug. We have our YouTube masterclass next Tuesday.
Speaker 1:This week, we're gonna dig into talking about YouTube, and I love being able to have a practitioner in the house, someone who is full time agent and doing great things on YouTube. We're excited to have Christian here today. Without further ado, introduce Christian Walsh, who I have known quite some time. Christian's a longtime member of our academy. He's a realtor, a YouTuber, killing it on YouTube.
Speaker 1:We have chatted over the years. Christian is here today to share on being a lead machine on YouTube. Welcome, Christian.
Speaker 2:So excited to be here. I almost made late talking shop with Katie. Katie, you bring them in.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I think we have best crew in real estate. I'm biased, but I think we do. Nina's here from Naples. Hey, Selena.
Speaker 1:Lisa's here from Atlantic. Good to see you. Lots of warm welcomes for you today. We're gonna go for about an hour. We have this recorded.
Speaker 1:So if you missed something, you can watch the recording inside the academy. And I'm ready to dig in. Are you ready?
Speaker 2:It's gonna be an hour, but you may have to tell me, okay, Christian. Enough. Gotta get back to work. I love talking about video, and I get excited.
Speaker 1:For everybody watching, feel free to put questions in the chat. We'll try to get to as many as we can. I have a bunch of questions too. Welcome to the party, Christian. I'm excited.
Speaker 2:You're right about it being coffee time in California, but to be fair, I have coffee all day long. Anytime is coffee time.
Speaker 1:Alright. Let's dig in. How did you get started with YouTube? What inspired you to go on this journey?
Speaker 2:I was always doing video, and it wasn't very good. It was very sporadic video. They've been telling us for years and by they, every expert, including you, Katie, we're supposed to be doing video. So COVID hit. They deemed us non essential.
Speaker 2:I was like, what am I going to do? I got a wife, four kids, and two dogs. I was talking to my son. He said, dad, you talk about video, but you only have seven subscribers on YouTube. That hurts.
Speaker 2:This is all around the time COVID was locking us inside. I said, I'm going to go all in on video. Needs work. But I started to be consistent and systematized. You need the systems to be consistent.
Speaker 2:Came up with a script format and have an operations director, Michelle. I'd focus on YouTube. Came up with systems and tried a bunch of content. During that time, a lot of people were watching videos, so there was a COVID bump in viewers. I got a lot of subscribers.
Speaker 2:Over a shorter term because of COVID, that allowed me to be consistent and have motivation to continue. And it was pretty quick. As about six to nine months into it, I did get a listing out of the content I was creating. That was reassuring.
Speaker 1:Was there a turning point or a certain video that sparked that?
Speaker 2:Most of my early content didn't get massive views. A few popped a little. That was reassuring. I was doing market updates, and those were good. That was a local market update.
Speaker 2:I started with just Orange County, which is where I'm based in Southern California. And then it started to bolt on other counties when people started to ask about it. So now I cover six counties in my market updates. Those videos did well. And just understanding what was going on at that time we had eviction moratoria go into place.
Speaker 2:So we couldn't do evictions because of what was going on with COVID. So I dove all in on that content, and that content started to do well. And I'd always worked with investors. So I was interested in the landlord tenant relationship. Those videos did well, but there weren't any videos.
Speaker 2:I did get a couple that had about 60,000 views, which seems like a lot, but then everybody compares themselves. Others getting hundreds of thousands, millions of views. Sixties. Good. Not setting the world on fire.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. Some people do not have
Speaker 2:get hundreds of views, and then thousands is like a dopamine hit.
Speaker 1:So I wanna ask about your content niche. You mentioned landlords, tenants, buyers, sellers. Can you talk a little bit, like, how maybe how your content has evolved over time? And do you lean into, like, specific niche? Does that help with with lead generation?
Speaker 2:Going back to COVID, I like to think that when I have a one on one discussion, I do a good job, and people enjoy those conversations. That was the motivation for video, especially talking head video like we're doing. I wanted to make it easy because I was doing two videos a week. I backed off a bit, but I will get back to that much content again. That's where the market updates came in.
Speaker 2:That was easy. I can't say market updates lead directly to business. They build trust, but it's not like somebody's going to watch one or two and say, %, this is the person I'm gonna work with. I was getting leads that my content's geared towards sellers, owners of property they wanna sell. The landlord content dovetails.
Speaker 2:I talk about new laws, which continue to evolve, particularly here in Southern California, and make it tougher for landlords to be landlords. So I talk about those topics and how to sell a tenant occupied property. So videos like that, content like that, that does lead to people reaching out. They'll watch two or three of those, and then they'll reach out to have to talk about listing their property. I've leaned in more to creating content like that versus just a general market update one a month.
Speaker 2:You need to know that as a real estate agent, the nuance in being a landlord and how tough it is.
Speaker 1:Pam says, just launched my channel this week. I'll be happy when I get 20 views. It is. I'm proud of you, Pam. Another thing, please
Speaker 2:engage with the comments. That's gonna help grow your audience. Just ignore it. I see that on YouTube sometime.
Speaker 1:Easy to forget. I've gotta check my YouTube comments. It's not as intuitive as other platforms.
Speaker 2:There's no easy tool I've found. Maybe one of your students can chime in, but I haven't found an easy tool for YouTube comments. But just make it part of your day, like five minutes while drinking coffee. I delete any comments that have profanity in them just because that I don't want that on there. I've decided I'm gonna delete it.
Speaker 2:It's your channel. Don't engage. Don't feed the trolls. Block those people. Last week, they were saying goofy things.
Speaker 2:Block them for
Speaker 1:It's like your house, your rules, your channel, your rules. Click on a comment. Block them. Delete them. Very easy.
Speaker 1:You you can't do it for clicking on their name. There's usually three little dots. Click that and get rid of it.
Speaker 2:They won't see you won't see them. Cool.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you one more thing. I see Linda's question. I wanna ask if there's a couple things that have helped grow your channel. 64,000
Speaker 2:subscribers. Consistency. If you looked up your competition, other realtors sporadically posted, and it's been a month or two since they posted. That's a no no. Be consistent with the crypto scam comment.
Speaker 2:Both of you have a lot. That's a compliment because they think your video is getting views. Be consistent and figure out your system, what you're gonna do. So for me in the beginning, I decided, okay, two videos a week, and I was gonna edit it myself. I wanna batch and have someone else edit after five years.
Speaker 2:I will get there. I promise. So that means if I'm gonna release two videos and it's gonna be Wednesday and Friday at noon, I need to shoot and edit Tuesday and Thursday night. I'm shooting and editing to have content ready the next day. And that's it.
Speaker 2:Just be consistent.
Speaker 1:And you're editing all your own stuff. Personally, I've done every editing scenario. We've hired amazing folks. I've done it myself. There's a value in learning some basic.
Speaker 1:Once you understand the editing process, how you shoot your videos becomes better. One side feeds the other.
Speaker 2:K. This is fun. That's why I like livestream. Same thing with real estate. We should not be doing our own paperwork.
Speaker 2:We hire transaction coordinators, but you should do your own paperwork in a few deals, especially in the beginning, so you understand the paperwork. Same with editing. Descript to edit. It's a very easy tool. You import the video.
Speaker 2:It transcribes the video, and then you edit the transcription. It edits the video for you. You have to see it to understand.
Speaker 1:I did a training on this couple weeks ago. Go back and watch it.
Speaker 2:Katie, I need to do that because it's so intuitive. I never watched any tutorials I need to figure out because it does way more than I'm using it for.
Speaker 1:I wanna get to Linda's question. Linda says, Christian, what is your process for coming up with content?
Speaker 2:You'd want some low hanging fruit. Market update video, put that into your calendar. Katie's got great tools to help calendar your content. Market update's easy. They can use your other prompts and ideas, Katie.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna do at least one of those. I like to do a foreclosure update, a rental market update, figure out how you're gonna do each For a market update, I use Altos Research. Figure out in the branches. Those are high low hanging fruit. I'm gonna do those.
Speaker 2:There's a few websites I visit for landlord tenant law. I visit those every day, and that'll spark ideas for content. It's a balance. Some of it's gonna be timely. Like your market update videos, they're going to watch them for that month.
Speaker 2:But then other stuff, like anything technical, I'd like to dive into technical law and things like that. So in California, have Proposition 19, which covers property taxes. That's fun for me. That's fun content. One of the things that gets underestimated is the library of content.
Speaker 2:When you look up Katie Lance and you see how much stuff that Katie Lance has created and how much great stuff that Katie Lance has created, you can't help but realize that Katie Lance knows what she's talking about. It makes it easier to do business with Katie. That's what you need to think of for real estate. Create content around things you enjoy. And over time, as you build your library, that's the other side of building trust.
Speaker 2:I get a lot of
Speaker 1:questions. Powerful. But you said us in the beginning how you're gonna do a market update, a couple things. I don't know if you realize how huge that is every month, but it saves brainpower. Like, if you can get into a consistent routine, pick one or two things you do and fill in with other stuff.
Speaker 2:You're talking to people. You're occasionally talking about real estate to people who talk those things that you're talking about at open houses or with clients or your clients are calling you or the things you're wondering about, like tariffs in the real estate market, that's all content. You will find content everywhere. You get to the point where you're like, I don't even wanna sell real estate. I just wanna make content.
Speaker 2:To be honest, I'm there. The money they pay for being monetized, Katie and I were talking about not enough to retire.
Speaker 1:Enough to buy a drone or a, like, a camera lens or something. I bought a new microphone recently.
Speaker 2:You sound good, Katie.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I was gonna scroll back for a second because I saw a bunch of really good comments. Beth Goulding is doing a great job. She's got a podcast, cool stuff on YouTube. She says, send playlist links to my clients when applicable.
Speaker 1:Are there other ways you drive traffic to your channel?
Speaker 2:Good question. I've invested in a specific YouTube course. Encourage you to invest in Katie's content as well. This is for a niche I'm moving into. His mentality is that you don't want your clients to see the content you create because you want to let YouTube's algorithm roll and find new people.
Speaker 2:I ignore his advice. I can still send a weekly email newsletter to my clients. And the weekly email newsletter is basically the one or two videos I shot that week. So that's going to go out on Sundays and people can go ahead and view the content there. Then posting it to every channel.
Speaker 2:I focus on YouTube and YouTube comments. Then Michelle will go ahead and take that same video and put it everywhere else. Even in a 16 by nine format I use on YouTube, I've had a few pop off on TikTok. Playlists are good. I encourage you to create playlists.
Speaker 2:I have playlists around market updates. You should have a market update playlist. Prop 19, property taxes. In California, we have a law called s b nine, so I have a playlist for it. I was one of the first to create content on this.
Speaker 2:I've gotten leads out of it, but it's there. I've got that playlist. Your playlists are important. You can send them to clients when you're interviewing and they have a question. You can say, I created a video on that.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna send you that video.
Speaker 1:That's powerful. Cindy asked, you mentioned landlord tenant info. Are you a property manager?
Speaker 2:No. And if funny thing is a lot of the landlords who watch my content will say, do you know any good property managers? I tell them I know property managers, but good is a different story. My wife was like ten or fifteen years ago. It's a hole in my Rolodex.
Speaker 1:I remember the Rolodex for sure. Maureen asked Christian, what do you use for equipment? Mic, tripod, lighting, phone.
Speaker 2:Good question. Started out with my phone. Do not let equipment be an excuse. Enough excuses not to start in video. Hating it.
Speaker 2:You tell your students all the time. Just use what you got. Your phone's a good start. Get a a ring light and a microphone that plugs into your phone. Start recording that way.
Speaker 2:That's where I started. Now I'm using a digital SLR camera. It's a Sony one of the Sony vlogging cameras with an interchangeable lens. I built a frame behind my monitor so that I can and I got lights on it and a camera sitting here. It's just plug and play.
Speaker 2:Literally press go. No excuse not to shoot video. The Osmo Pocket three, great. If you're gonna walk around and shoot, you can get the DJI mic set to bat. Don't go crazy with equipment.
Speaker 2:Start with what you got.
Speaker 1:You can do a lot with just a phone and a simple mic. People will forgive poor video quality, but audio quality, people tend to bounce really quick. You can find a cheap 9 or $10, maybe even $5 little it could be corded that you plug into your phone. It makes a difference. If you already have a phone, get some sort of little mic.
Speaker 1:That'll
Speaker 2:help. % next. Get a gimbal. Get smooth. There's guys, and I say guys because there's two guys I know of on YouTube.
Speaker 2:They create content for real estate. Now it's fear driven content. I do not recommend this strategy. A gimbal, cell phone, mic, and hundreds of thousands of viewers just from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's amazing. Pam asked, do you delete market update videos after the next one gets posted?
Speaker 2:Never delete content.
Speaker 1:I have videos that were twelve years ago. Bold predictions.
Speaker 2:I could bite you, but you know what? Everybody's wrong. Nobody knows what the heck's going on with real estate. Anything analyzing the market, keep it up.
Speaker 1:It gives people perspective. When people come across your channel, if they like your vibe, they're gonna be like, who is this guy? They go to your channel, binge watch, see something older. It gives even more credibility like, oh, this guy's been doing this a while.
Speaker 2:If you've been doing market updates for five years, that's a lot of time spent.
Speaker 1:What about one on one videos with a guest? How do those balls? And is it all real estate or a mix of personal?
Speaker 2:You figure out what you wanna do and where you post it. You don't have to do YouTube. You can focus on TikTok. It doesn't have to be long form. It can be short or fun.
Speaker 2:Doesn't have to be talking heads. I haven't done interviews other than Zoom or Restream for streaming. We similar tool to Zoom, but it allows you to go live. Although, I guess Zoom does too.
Speaker 1:But the advantage But Restream allows you to go multiple places.
Speaker 2:So you can go to. So when we do a live, it's on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. You can integrate it. You can pay to be on x and livestream. We did it for a while, but it wasn't worth it.
Speaker 1:One of our agents does cold calling, and the lady said, yes. I do wanna sell my home, but I don't know who you are. He told her to Google him knowing he needs market update, and Google promotes YouTube. He got the listing because of digital permits.
Speaker 2:November from a landlord who owned a duplex nearby. Another agent had sent her my videos on landlord tenant law, and she ended up reaching out to me directly to list it because she knew I knew how to deal with the situation. We got it sold, and she did her ten thirty one exchange. It was just super happy. Your content could get you listings with other agents helping you.
Speaker 1:Are you able to track the I know a lot of agents track where leads come from. Sometimes it's hard because people are like, I see you everywhere. Are you able to track, I get this many leads from YouTube?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's at least half of my listing leads come from YouTube. They tell me right in the beginning. Oh, and in my voicemail, I say I'm a YouTuber and a real estate agent. And that is Interesting.
Speaker 2:When people leave a message, that'll be a conversation starter. If they don't know I'm on YouTube, they'll look for me. I made it easy to work with other agents. Some of check me out on YouTube. It builds trust.
Speaker 1:Well, Diane says, I know you focus mostly on YouTube. Do you take clips from your video and put them on Instagram or Facebook?
Speaker 2:You should. And it's easy that you can use Otter.ai or no. That's the reason.
Speaker 1:Well, you can actually use Descript. So I'm gonna take so, Christian, in Descript, this is cool. You have your full video, and an AI button says, do you want us to create clips for you? Like, my last video Yeah. Created three, four, five little clips, and it picks, like, the best ones.
Speaker 1:You can fix it and edit it if you'd like, but it's awesome.
Speaker 2:I this is worth the price of admission for me. I should be chopping it up and using it in different ways.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is you can still put longer form. Like, one of the things I've tried doing this year is actually putting the longer YouTube videos on Instagram or TikTok. Yeah. And you think they wouldn't do well because they're horizontal, longer, and some do better than on YouTube. There's a lot of evolving and changing.
Speaker 1:Try different things. See what works.
Speaker 2:Opus clip was one I was thinking. Right, Katie? I had a video that has over 300,000 views on TikTok. It was doing better on TikTok than YouTube. Eventually, caught up.
Speaker 2:And I feel there's competition between YouTube and TikTok. If something's doing well on TikTok that ends up on YouTube, they're gonna pump it up as well.
Speaker 1:Linda asked, I'm data driven. I worry my content's too boring. Any thoughts? They're not boring.
Speaker 2:Your content is gonna be served up to the people who want that content. Then that's the way you are as a person. You like to talk about data, so work with people who enjoy that.
Speaker 1:I think that's how you two connected. I remember connecting Linda and Christian and Linda. You really like Christian's videos because you have a lot of data. You're engaging and fun, but you're also, like, you've got like, you come to the table and bring research, and I think I remember Linda you saying, I really like that about his style. He's got data to back it up.
Speaker 2:If you're the dancing, singing house realtor, god bless you. Create that content. You will find people who want to work with you. You do you, Linda. People are self conscious on video, but that's what you look and sound like to all of us.
Speaker 2:There's a question about 16 by nine. Video like this is 16 by nine. Nine by 16, that's what TikTok likes. Does Instagram still like it? I don't even know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's still likes it vertical, but Instagram is really starting to promote longer form video too. And I think to your point of I think there's a lot of competition with Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
Speaker 2:Don't let knowing which aspect ratio to shoot in slow you down. Just shoot something.
Speaker 1:Joe asked about live streaming. Do you announce it in advance?
Speaker 2:Great question. Katie does a great job putting it in her email newsletter and sharing it on social media. Those are all things you want to do when you go live. Being consistent, like Coffee with Katie is consistent. Going live on a random Wednesday, once a year, you can't expect many people to show up.
Speaker 2:For us, it's been about every Thursday with different attorneys. I mentioned it in my weekly email newsletter. Put it on social media in the community tab in YouTube. I send an email half an hour before we go live. Half hour before going live is the best.
Speaker 2:Tried fifteen minutes, but that's too soon. Half an hour before I go live, they're gonna get an email and they show up.
Speaker 1:I love that. I'm just gonna share your channel if you're okay with that.
Speaker 2:I finally decided if I don't look like that anymore, it's a glamour shot from twenty years ago. I was playing with some AI tools to create headshots. That's fun.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. They've done better. In the beginning, it was like, that looks nothing like me.
Speaker 2:They look like cartoons.
Speaker 1:Here's your channel. Let me drop this in the chat so you can subscribe and support.
Speaker 2:Scroll down a little. Click on videos, please. Question about the email list. Accidentally signed up and get emails as if you're a buyer. How many emails do they send you a day?
Speaker 2:A lot. Five or 10 a day, it seems. So we get worried we're sending too much email. We can send them more before they get tired, and there's an unsubscribe link. Once or twice a week is fine.
Speaker 2:Most agents aren't sending anything once a month.
Speaker 1:People overthink it. Every time I send an email, people opt out. I'm trying to encourage people, like, for my YouTube to go, you're curious about x y z. Make it a chat about how you might drive people to sign up.
Speaker 2:We'll talk about that in a second. Do you see that one that says, it's over price skyrocket in SoCal, spring housing market. So that was I researched some other channels that have a lot of viewers, and it was actually Graham Stephan. He's repeated in his thumbnails and titles those words, it's over. Just took that from Graham Stephan.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm gonna put that in. That thumbnail is an AI thumbnail. You can AB test. Technically, you can do three in YouTube.
Speaker 2:So that's what I'm doing. I've got these other ones where I've got the yellow house, and I'm pointing or doing silly faces mixed with AI created ones to see how they do. When you do thumbnail testing in YouTube, it's testing view time. To come up with titles, look at what others have written. Other channels are doing well.
Speaker 2:In the research I did, you're looking for power words in titled Blindsided is a Power Word. I haven't used it yet.
Speaker 1:Is bankruptcy the right move? That's a strong statement. The truth from bankruptcy attorney. You're packing keywords, but it's also a strong state.
Speaker 2:That's part of what you're trying to do and how they work together. It's over thumbnail and title and no no. Same thing in thumbnail and title. Let them work together. Landlord advice.
Speaker 2:Outdated advice landlords must ignore in 2025. I saw others using a similar title. Landlord advice dovetails so people see how they work together.
Speaker 1:It's interesting you're doing AB testing. That's great.
Speaker 2:You don't have to do all that. Go in the weeds and people will like, forget it. I'm never starting.
Speaker 1:But for people like Linda who've been on YouTube a while and got the basics down, that's a great tip. Try something different.
Speaker 2:Think about the things you're clicking. Clickability is what it boils down to. Katie and I were working on the title for this, twenty four seven lead gen machine. It sounds a little outrageous. You wanna make a big claim.
Speaker 2:Video is a twenty four hour, seven day a week lead gen. Want to create leads while I'm sleeping. I'm terrible at open houses.
Speaker 1:About lead gen, it's important to have a strong call to action. What are your thoughts on that? Do you have a call to action that you subscribe or for more information?
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the call to action. In any video, ask for all those things. I typically I've tried it different ways, and I've asked people to like in in the beginning of the video because that's helpful with the algorithm, and some do. And then when you ask people to like your video, the like button lights up. And if you ask them to subscribe, the subscribe button lights up.
Speaker 2:At the end, I'll have the call to action to write a comment. Then I'll ask them to subscribe to the email newsletter. Occasionally, I'll sprinkle in by telling them to work with us. I'll say, don't even think about buying and selling in Southern California without reaching out to us.
Speaker 1:I'll
Speaker 2:stick that in. I have a contact us button below. Another call to action is to watch your next video to get people to binge watch. If you do a great job, you could leave out every call to action, but have them go to your next video. That would be the most valuable.
Speaker 2:YouTube will continue to serve up your content to those folks and other people like those folks looking for those answers.
Speaker 1:That's a great tip. You have to think about that as you're recording. I always think about it. It's like, are my calls of action gonna be in this video?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's a great point. And with YouTube, at the end, you can add your own videos that pop up. It's called an end card or end screen.
Speaker 2:The the end card and end screen are valuable. You can even have YouTube pick the next video. Here's the next videos YouTube thinks you need to watch, and it's from your channel.
Speaker 1:Took some on your channel.
Speaker 2:So that's a lot of calls to action. Sprinkle them in. Have the links so people can subscribe to your email newsletter. My goal is to get them into the email newsletter, or I use Calendly, and they can schedule a call with me.
Speaker 1:One thing I'm noticing about your thumbnails is that they're very bright. Keep in mind, I'm on desktop. Some of you might be on your phone on their phone, and thumbnails are tiny. Using a bright color, stay in line with your branding, but just thinking about not just how it looks on a big screen, but how does it look like two inches a
Speaker 2:Canva, you can change the size of the document. They shrink it to see what it looks like. It's a close approximation of how it looks on a phone.
Speaker 1:Denise says, vidIQ and TubeBuddy are great for helping optimize thumbnails and titles. Canva has been awesome. End screen templates ideas. Do you use VidIQ or TubeBuddy?
Speaker 2:I use TubeBuddy. I'm always skeptical of their advice. It's worth taking TubeBuddy's advice and AB testing it. Take some of those automatically generated titles. AB test them.
Speaker 2:Same with thumbnail advice, AB test it and see. YouTube actually for my account for creators has, and it may have them for yours.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:know who has them, but they will actually suggest content and titles. I felt if YouTube is telling me this is a good title, this is gonna be amazing. AB tested it, and my title beat YouTubes. So anyway.
Speaker 1:See, I love that.
Speaker 2:AB tested.
Speaker 1:What's a good number of subscribers to say you have traction?
Speaker 2:Get to a thousand, and you can be monetized. Do I make money from YouTube? Monetized. Do I make money from YouTube? I get AdSense revenue, couple hundred dollars per month.
Speaker 2:The listing leads are where I make the money.
Speaker 1:Didn't you say 50% of your listing leads are coming from YouTube? That's huge. You're in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:When you start making money, being monetized, a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours, it continues to change. As far as traction, a 17 subscribers is awesome. Crossing a hundred's awesome. Five hundred's cool. Thousand's cool.
Speaker 2:I wanna get to a hundred thousand and get a play button. At the end of the day, some channels are all about clickbait and fear. They have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and they've grown faster than I did. Uh-huh. Look at their comments.
Speaker 2:It's people who hate real estate. They're not monetizing it. You don't have to say real estate's amazing. I'm honest about real estate. You can also swing the pendulum and be outright lies on how bad the market is.
Speaker 2:There's a whole audience out there. You'll grow super fast. 17 subscribers is amazing. What would be great is if you're actually getting business out of the 17. Doesn't matter how many views a video gets or subscribers.
Speaker 2:Another agent did a video about a new home community. Got a 50, two hundred views, but it got five signed buyer representation agreements. These are 4 and $5,000,000 new homes. He's doing fine. So you're getting calls.
Speaker 2:There's riches in the niches. They're getting into the niche, but more of the long tail approach. New home community in Irvine, California, specific area coming in a year or two. Pretty long tail.
Speaker 1:I call that. A couple lightning round questions for you. Oh. And then we'll wrap up and see if there's other questions that we've missed. Question I had is what is your favorite video you've made and why?
Speaker 2:My favorite video did actually it didn't do well, and it was before it came more systematized. I did a video about LOL cats. My operations director here, cats started in one. It was like the office kind of a setup. And we said that what we were doing for our luxury listing, we said we were going to use LOL cats.
Speaker 2:That's when you take cats, put bling on them. Like, Weekend has cheeseburger. Looked that up. One of the first LOL cats. We were gonna use LOGCAT in luxury home marketing.
Speaker 2:All straight faced. I got a client up to be in it. So we shot it again. And I released it on the first day in the second quarter as a big new initiative. And if you look at your calendar, the first day of the second quarter is April Fool's Day.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Michelle made a playlist of funny videos. We had fun making it.
Speaker 1:What is the worst or most cringe worthy video you've ever posted?
Speaker 2:Oh, there's so many. One of my first videos fifteen years ago, it's not even on that main YouTube channel. LOL cat. Laugh out loud cat. That video was me in a foreclosure listing.
Speaker 2:I had to hurry up and shoot a video about foreclosures before anybody else walked in. Everything's wrong. No sound terrible picture, terrible lighting. That's my cringiest one. You're gonna make cringe the rest of your life.
Speaker 1:Next lightning round. What inspires you on YouTube?
Speaker 2:Definitely looking at other YouTubers. Getting phone calls from people, and there there's fun ones where they think of you as a celebrity. Katie, this happens to you. When you go to your shows and people see you on stage and watch your video, they're like, Katie is a celebrity. That's fun helping people.
Speaker 2:Having calls with landlords and renters. I'm not endorsing either side. I'm trying to work with good landlords, but help good renters. When I talk to a renter, help them defend their rights. Same with the landlord.
Speaker 2:It does
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:For me.
Speaker 1:It is like music. Like, every page on YouTube, see at the top, it says, full video, shorts, live playlist. You can take videos and put them into a list. He's got a list of live streams, fun videos, legal updates.
Speaker 2:The wildcat videos and the fun videos. Playlists are great. One cool thing we've been doing is adding our stuff to Spotify. You can sign up for a free Spotify creator account and upload your stuff. I found that's great for live streams because my live streams tend to be long.
Speaker 2:This stuff tends to do well if people wanna listen. One of my subscribers said, hey, I wanna listen to your content while I'm driving or working out. Spotify upload video podcasts. They could just listen. When questions come in, people are just listening to audio.
Speaker 2:I'll read the questions to make sure if somebody's just listening, they understand what we're talking about. Sorry.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. It's all good. Okay. I've got one last question, then we're gonna wrap it up. If anyone has the last questions, put them in the chat.
Speaker 1:Let us know what you thought. Did you enjoy this? Last one is what is one YouTube myth you wanna bust for agents watching today?
Speaker 2:I would say views matter. And I know that sounds ridiculous because I want views, but views don't matter if they're the wrong people watching. That's fear mongering and talking about how awful things are when it's not true. Don't fall into that trap. You want the audience that's going to resonate with you as an honest person.
Speaker 2:That would be one of the myths. It's all about views. It's really about the audience you're gonna create.
Speaker 1:Who do you wanna attract? Especially with YouTube, you have the power to steer the ship of who you wanna work with. You wanna attract. It doesn't happen overnight. This can happen on other platforms too, but especially with YouTube.
Speaker 1:People are googling things. YouTube's tied to Google. You start to attract the people you're like, yeah, I wanna your people.
Speaker 2:No. Exactly.
Speaker 1:There's the type of clients you wanna work with.
Speaker 2:You don't want just any random person to you. You want people who've watched your content and built that trust. Then you get the just list me phone calls. You get people who understand how you sell real estate. I wanna work with people who trust me.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:have time to work with people who doubt me.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of love in the comments.
Speaker 2:Thank you, guys. You've brought good people together.
Speaker 1:It takes time. Consistency. Pam says, what is the first thing a newbie should do to attract viewers?
Speaker 2:Think of it as an open house. When somebody walks in, answer those questions. Start there. Don't overthink it. Answer questions.
Speaker 2:You do a good job on the phone. You do a good job in open houses. So be that person in video.
Speaker 1:If people wanna connect with you, I dropped your YouTube. Is there anywhere else
Speaker 2:You can shoot me an email, sign up for my newsletter, schedule something in Calendly. There's a link below my video.
Speaker 1:You might have a few people who are like
Speaker 2:I love talking about this.
Speaker 1:Sharing is caring. That's one of the things I love about our community. People are willing to share and collaborate. That only makes everybody better.
Speaker 2:I misspoke when I said competition by other real estate agents. It's not a competition. We're all working together.
Speaker 1:For everyone watching live, let's give Christian a big round of virtual applause because this was awesome.
Speaker 2:I wanna give you applause, Katie. Thank you for helping us figure this out. Your commitment to new content and navigating social media, we appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. I it like I said, it changes all the time, so it keeps me busy for sure. For sure. Also, everyone watching live, we have our YouTube masterclass coming up next week.
Speaker 1:So if you enjoyed, this was a great precursor to everything we're gonna talk about. Next. 10AM Pacific, one PM eastern, ninety minutes. You're gonna get the workbook soon. In a couple days, you can peruse.
Speaker 1:And that's included in your membership. This recording will be sent out in a few hours. If you missed it, you can watch the replay. Lots of positive feedback. Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Jim says you need to watch and like your own videos so you have at least one view.
Speaker 2:Send it to mom and dad.
Speaker 1:But thank you again, Christian. Thank you to your right hand person behind the scenes. Michelle, if there's anything else we can do to support you, let us know. Have an awesome day. Bye, everybody.
Speaker 1:Okay. There you go. What did you think? I loved our conversation, and this is just a snippet. We talked for a full hour.
Speaker 1:One of the things I love when I talk to practitioners is they are in the field. They are working full time. If you'd like access to the full interview with Christian, make sure you get signed up for the Get Social Smart Academy. You can go to KatieLance.com/academy to get signed up. I love our academy family.
Speaker 1:We have amazing individuals putting in the time and energy into creating a smart social media strategy. As a member, you'll get access to our upcoming YouTube masterclass, which you can purchase separately. We'll put the link below. As an academy member, you get access to live training plus master classes, content calendars, and all of our past trainings too for the past year. So, anyways, let me know if you have any questions.
Speaker 1:You can message me. I'm Katie Lance, or you can email me directly, Katie@KatieLance.com. Talk to you soon. Bye for now.