Welcome back to the Visibility Impact Show . I'm super excited today that we have a special guest who has never been on the podcast before and he is the YouTube ads guy . He has scaled high ticket coaches in various niches to seven figures . Friends , Welcome to the show , Lloyd Dodgen . Thank you so much for being a guest today .
Hey , thank you so much for having me . This is awesome .
OK , youtube ads . Like how did we get to what were you before you were a Uber driver , right ? Like how did we get from Uber driver to YouTube ads , guy .
I'm going to give you the 10 year story . I'm really swell now . Cut down really quickly . I tried about 15 different businesses with relative success . Each of them failed .
All of them valuable lessons over time got to a point in life where I had a system reset with a passing of a parent and the ending of a relationship due to some fun stuff , and then I decided I was going to surf in San Diego and on that journey of trying to make ends meet while re-figuring out what business I was going to build , I realized over time
that I had learned a bit about advertising and it was really started off with Facebook ads and I had an opportunity as I was driving and , like you said , I was doing DoorDash , I was doing Lyft , I was doing Amazon Flex .
I was doing it all just to make sure that the bills were paid all the while in the evening really just working or in the weekends working on my business .
I had an opportunity , kind of a break in it all , as I started to realize I didn't really like Facebook ads that much and I had a friend in the real estate niche who was making these beautiful $5,000 , $10,000 videos for this really well-to-do real estate guru in San Diego , and but they were getting like one or two views on it . They weren't getting anything .
So they're like , what's the point of us making these videos if we're not going to get any eyeballs ? And so they were asking hey , can you get more eyeballs , can you run ads to it ? And I was like sure . Like as any entrepreneur along their journey in the beginning goes yeah of course I can , and I had taken a Billie Jean course on YouTube ads .
He was one of the only guys out there that had had any information on YouTube ads , and so I took it , I learned it , I applied it , we were getting we were buying views , but we were getting very targeted views and ended up one of the houses for $26 million had sold as a result of the visibility on the videos , and so I was like , hey , I kind of like
this YouTube ad thing , I like this a lot better . For some reason in my head , it just it made more sense , and along the journey of driving , one day I actually had a DoorDash delivery to Billie Jean himself , because he also lived in San Diego and I wasn't too sure if it was really going to be him , but as I was getting closer to , the area .
I was like I recognize that , I recognize that from some of the videos , and I was like holy crap , this is actually going to be delivering to his place and went up to the top of the condo and just had a conversation with him . He remembered me from some phone calls , from some training and everything I told him .
I was like hey , man , I'm getting some success with YouTube ads and he's like great . He's like go all in and be the YouTube ads guy , you won't regret it . And I was like cool , and I took that super literally , named my company the YouTube ads guy , and that was 2019 . So here we are today .
OK , I have never heard the Billie Jean story . This is the first time I've ever heard this story , so I'm glad that my listeners get to hear this too , because that's really cool .
Yeah , yeah . It was very serendipitous that I just so happened to have been delivering to him and I just told him I'm going to result with it , man , and he just gave me that advice . He's like go all in , do just this , and I started focusing on building just the YouTube ad age . You see , I started shedding everything else in the business .
Then the pandemic hit and Facebook , ios 14 hit , and it was literally the perfect storm for me to grow , because everybody was looking for an alternative and I was one of the few people out there . That was like it's very clear as to what I do .
Yes , there is no questioning . But what is the YouTube ads guy ? That's a really easy one , so I love that and that's great visibility in itself .
Just the name . Yeah , the branding alone has helped out a lot . But yeah , that's kind of how that transition it was business number 15 or 16 that just wasn't really working the way I wanted and just took everything I learned and kept iterating into the next business until here we are today and we've done very well .
So I think the question my audience is going to have , so I'm going to ask it is , first of all , what's the difference when it comes to YouTube ads ? And then , obviously , youtube is owned by Google and they hear a lot about Google ads , so is there a big difference between the two ?
No , they're the same thing . Everything is done on the Google ads platform . You're just positioning your ad on the YouTube website versus Google PPC , which we'll have along the actual Google site on Search , or we'll have with their native or their display ads which we'll see on websites and other places .
Or email like .
Gmail . It's like we don't even say that we're running a Gmail ad . Even though we are running a Gmail ad , it's still all done on the Google ads platform .
It's just one of their properties .
It's just one of their Google properties .
But it only shows up on YouTube videos , correct ? Yeah ?
well , things have changed a lot and that's no longer the case . They've kind of taken away our capacity to choose only YouTube videos . So things do actually pop up on the display network , but then there are certain controls that you could try to limit that and just focus just on the YouTube platform itself .
In your journey of helping people with YouTube ads . Do they need to have a great YouTube platform or a platform that's a YouTube platform that's doing really , really well , or do some of them actually do better once they start having the paid ads behind it ?
That's a really good question . I've seen things work out very interestingly where people with very large audiences don't yet do too well with YouTube ads right out of the gate and people with zero audience do really well with YouTube ads out of the gate and really everything is always based on just your ability to know your audience .
Try to basically change their energy state from a low energy state to a high energy state , get them to where they're actively engaging in the ad and shift them to where they can be at least problem aware , you know .
And that's the way you're communicating with them in the actual ad itself , and I think a lot of people with large audiences take for granted that , oh , I have a big audience , people know me , your YouTube channel knows you and I would say 20% of your YouTube channel really knows you .
Yeah .
You know , like , if you think about it , like if I have an email list of a hundred thousand people , not everybody's gonna be a raving fan of me . There's gonna be a small percentage of those people that are raving fans , but it's not gonna be the entire email list . And the same thing kind of goes with your YouTube channel .
So I've seen it work with both ways , like where I've seen people who have no audience go do really well . I've seen people have big audiences not do so well or not do as well as they would have hoped from pulling from their audience initially . Do you think there's no requirement to have a YouTube channel that's already doing well .
It can help out a lot , though , like I just wanna make sure I have that caveat on there it can make a big difference , especially if your audience is , if you especially have . I think here's the catch to it all Do I have an audience of buyers or do I just have an audience of people that are just checking me out ?
And I think that's kind of the barometer that people should have when they're thinking about the kind of ads that they're running to the audience that they have on their YouTube channel . It's a great place to start .
I always recommend that people start the running their YouTube ads to their audience first Cause if you can't sell to your audience , probably gonna have a harder time with a cold message .
That makes sense , and I think too now with YouTube shorts helping us grow our audience . Are they always going to be a raving fan , or are they just really liked that one 15 second video ?
Yeah , luckily YouTube is getting smart about that , because when they created shorts , it was almost like you might as well have had a YouTube channel and a YouTube shorts channel , or call it youtubecom and youtube shortscom , because the two didn't connect , so whatever was coming in through YouTube shorts , youtube was never gonna recommend your channel to them .
Since I think it was late last year , they finally made the tunnel between the two to where , like , if they're showing your shorts , they now can start recommending your actual long form . If they've watched your long form , they now will start recommending your shorts , and so that's a big boon for people .
But yes , I do agree with you that the type of attention that you're acquiring is different , and it might not be buyer attention , but it's still worthy because you still want to gather that attention as like the feeder into your long form content .
Absolutely . I'm going to guess that the majority of my audience has probably played around more with Facebook ads , because I think people are under the impression that you can spend a little bit of money and get results and like does that correspond with YouTube ads ?
Do you have to spend like big amounts of money , or can you spend $5 a day , or what does that look like ?
So you can spend a little bit of money . You can spend $5 a day , but I think whenever you're running advertising , I think you have to take it with a level of like seriousness of an investment that you're making , because you got to think about it this way . Your money is also competing with other people's money .
You're competing against their bidding of the algorithm . And let's assume that you're getting a dollar a click , which is pretty standard these days , like as like a bare minimum threshold . If you get below a dollar a click , you're probably doing cool , and then you know it depends on what your CTR is and then depends on what your conversion rate is .
I think everybody can say on average a dollar to $3 a click . So if I want to get a lead a day , let's say I want to get a book call a day , which I say that and my funnel one out of every 10 leads becomes a book call . So I'm having to spend . If they're spending a dollar a click , I'm spending $10 a day to get a call .
You've got to kind of look at your budget and go like when is my $5 a day really going to do this ?
And on YouTube it is a system where the type of attention that people , that you're trying to get from people , is different than a Facebook ad , and so typically you're going to have a higher quality lead , but you're also going to pay a little bit more per lead .
Would you recommend like with Facebook ads ? Obviously we're running to build our list . We're running to have sales . Would you use YouTube for all of those same reasons , even like brand awareness and video views and things like that or would you use it more specifically ?
I would use it to sell . I would use it to sell and I would go to VSL . I would go to VSL or webinar and then I would go to a book call .
Okay for my audience . It doesn't know what VSL is . Can you explain A video sales letter ?
So you have an offer and instead of writing out long sales copy , you've got to think well , they're already in consumption mode in video , so they're watching a video . So you providing a training for them or providing some information that's going to be beneficial to them in a video form is not going to be like this extreme step for them to take .
It's not going to be out of the way .
They're already on YouTube because they're either wanting to get entertained or educated , and so going into a VSL is one of the most logical next steps for you to present your offer , to present value , to position yourself as an expert and to eventually get them on some sort of sales call , or to get them to just buy the sale , depending on how high ticket your
item is . If you're selling something 3K and over , I recommend that you're getting them onto a sales call .
Is there any business that you wouldn't recommend ?
run YouTube ads , the business that has the hardest time and everything is based on impressions . That's really what I would say is like the benchmark If I'm limited in the amount of impressions I get , I'm going to have a harder time reaching my audience properly .
So if you're a local B2B business or B2C business , you're going to have a tougher time with YouTube ads than if you're a national or international coaching company , because you have impressions that you can reach . You can reach a larger audience and you can optimize your budget more better . Local businesses it's not impossible .
You can still do it well , but I feel like it's a bigger uphill climb than even for e-commerce . In e-commerce , I would put second as a harder business to do because you need to understand the math . I was talking with this with Ali Hansen the other day .
We were talking about YouTube ads in e-commerce and you need to understand the mathematics of your business and your funnel .
So if you're buying an $8 product and the market is only allowing you to sell that individual product for $33 , you have $22 worth of play in your CPA and really I would say that if you're going to be selling a physical product , you probably want to have $50 to $60 worth of CPA for your YouTube ads if you're going to be trying to sell physical products .
So this is what I mean . So , versus I sell a coaching program and I sell it for $5,000 , well , I have a lot more wiggle room to be able to run my traffic and still be able to effectively acquire clients .
Thank you .
That's where I think it's the best for people who are selling a high ticket offer , have some high ticket program or have a low ticket front end , but understand the lifetime value of their customer . They also have a ways to increase their average order value through their funnel , through OTOs and upsells and anything else .
That's one time offers for anybody that doesn't know what an OTO is , Basically a limited time . You can only get it while you're in this funnel and you're only going to be able to get it for this price with all these extra little bumps .
It's like your way of just being able to really cover your ad spend , but it's your way of trying to get that last extra sale that people are like , oh , if I say no to this .
Yeah , it's that sense of urgency .
Yeah , it's a sense of urgency .
If somebody is running Facebook ads and they want to add YouTube ads , is there a strategy that you could actually work both together ?
Yeah , Typically how I focus my YouTube ads and if I do anything with Facebook ads , I think Facebook has a much better beast for retargeting than it is cold . I think YouTube is a much better beast for cold than it is retargeting Because , if we think about it , especially if we've learned anything from Chrissy video builds trust .
Trust allows you to bridge the gap significantly faster , to be able to close a potential sale and convince people to take the action that you believe is the best for them . Text not everybody reads these days , but video . If we are watching YouTube video , we have two choices Watch the video or hit skip , Nothing else .
Yeah , we can't be distracted by this and this and this and this , or potentially scroll down and come back up . It's just a video . When we're no longer engaged , we're either going to hit the skip button or we're going to hit the actual call to action button and go to the site . We have a chance to build trust very , very rapidly .
Use the parasocial relationship to our advantage through video and do that at scale , Because the amount of inventory ad inventory is so much broader than it is on Facebook . There's so much more ad inventory and there's targeted ad inventory as well . That's the other part about YouTube over Facebook .
I think it's a better cold strategy than it is a warm strategy , and not to say that you don't use YouTube for your retargeting as well . But I'm able to target people's YouTube channels . I'm able to target their Google search . I'm able to target what they were in market for .
So YouTube has this capacity to know what you've done for the past two weeks and has it changed ? You're starting to look at wedding dresses . Were you never doing that before ? Got it ? You're engaged or you're about to be engaged ?
Yeah .
Let me start and you'll start seeing the shift in your advertising and everything around and your YouTube ads and your Google ads and all that . I can look for people that are in market for a new house .
I can look for people that are in market to go get married in market to buy a car , so it's like I have such intent-based advertising and so when I know that , I also know that they're probably people that are problem aware and solution aware at that time , because they're intentional Versus Facebook , I don't know what stage of the funnel you're in yet , especially
with a cold ad . So I have to assume you're at the beginning of the funnel and therefore I have to talk to you in the broadest terms possible .
Absolutely . Now let's talk about creating YouTube ads . Are these like even though they're not short form size , I'm assuming , are they very long videos , or is it like get to the point as quick as possible ?
No more than three minutes is all you need . You don't need any more than three minutes . We have ads that are 45 seconds . The equation of how long your ad should be is to how big your ask is . If you're just getting people to opt in , you don't need that long of an ad .
You just need to convince people that opting into this thing is going to be a good thing . If your next ask is to get them to buy or to get them to watch a BSL all of a sudden , I need a little bit more convincing .
I need to go and not only hook them right , get them to actually be curious about it , then I need to go through the process of overcoming objections the vehicle objection , the internal objection and the external objection as I'm also providing more called actions along the way to get them to finally make the decision to go . I want to go get this thing .
It's almost like your YouTube . The bigger the ask , your YouTube video starts to become a BSL in and of itself .
I like that . Do you think the quality of the opt-in is different on Facebook versus YouTube ?
Yes , 100% . I believe that the quality and I've seen this in the data that the quality of an opt-in on YouTube is significantly better than the quality of an opt-in on Facebook , because people are watching video , because they're actually consuming you , they're trusting you , they're listening to you .
When they're going to go to the next end , they're much more likely to take the next step . They're also in consumption mode , which is something I said earlier . If you do have a BSL , they're much more likely to watch that BSL or are much more likely to watch the webinar , because they're already wanting to learn , they're already eager for the next thing .
I love that Versus if they're on Facebook , there goes that other thing to distract me .
Yeah , I love that . When you have clients that have a BSL , are they going to a platform or is this an unlisted video on YouTube ? What's the better strategy ?
You want it to always go to a funnel , 100% . You want it to go into an opt-in page that gets into the BSL . That's on the next page of their funnel . Then you want your funnel to go to an application page to a book call . You're typical call funnel if you have a high ticket offer .
When you're running YouTube ads . I see this with Facebook ads , obviously , that's the thing I'm most experienced with , but people want to go to your actual page , your profile , and consume even more . Do you see that happening with YouTube ads as well ?
Yeah , if you set up your Google Analytics and you set up specific keywords like your brand name , your personal name , certain things , you'll actually see brand lift happen in your Google Analytics . You'll see an uptake in people researching your name and actually doing that . This is why pairing YouTube ads with Google PPC ads are so powerful ?
Because we've had , where I've had , google PPC ads and PPC is just pay per click . It's your standard search ads that you'll see . I've seen search ads that we've built as retargeting . When people are searching for a specific keyword and they've already interacted with their YouTube ad , get a 25X return .
We spent a couple of hundred bucks and made a few thousand dollars . It's one of those low-hanging fruits that pair so well , because people are going to be curious . Yeah , they're going to type in your website . They're going to go and look up your name . They're going to go and see . That's where you get to control the narrative .
I love that . I hope my listeners are as intrigued as I am , but I love video . This , of course , just makes more sense to me and building the parasocial relationship and having the quality on YouTube is huge .
Yeah .
I love that .
Yeah , you get that at scale .
Yeah , I feel like I could talk to you about this for days .
We might .
Okay , all right . Well , we have lots more to cover with Lloyd , but I would first love to do to take a little shift and do some rapid fire questions for you .
I wasn't prepared for this , I know .
Nobody ever is . I change the questions all the time , except the first one is all the time . It's always the same . But I think I know the answer . But I could be wrong . What is your favorite social media platform ?
YouTube hands down .
All right . Who is your favorite person to follow on social media ?
Oh man , that's a tough question , I would say . Right now , my favorite person to follow on social media is Cody Sanchez .
And where do you follow them ?
YouTube Okay . So she teaches people how to buy businesses , and that's one of the things that we're doing in our advertising agency is starting to buy boring local businesses .
Oh , okay , I love that we're going to have to have you back on the show and talk more about this .
Yeah .
Okay , favorite vacation spot .
Favorite vacation spot as of right now , after going there this year Paris .
Okay , and you spent how long there ?
Monday Moon was 14 days , about five days in London , five days in Paris and four days in Amsterdam .
Nice , nice .
Paris was gorgeous . I loved it so much . I want to go back .
Love it All right . Favorite thing to do to distress Like when you've had a stressful day . What do you do ?
Like I don't want to put more Nokia products in this oh , is that guitar or bass ? That's one of my fenders with the guitar .
Okay , love it . So you just play when it's stressful and it's de-stressing , all right . Favorite can't do without food .
Mac and cheese .
Like Blue Box or like .
Like Blue Box , kraft , mac and Cheese .
All right , so much fun . So much fun , okay , and my question I asked everybody what has visibility done for your business ?
Visibility . You know I started taking visibility a lot more seriously recently and it's so sometimes you just have to like hit yourself in the back of the head and go like why didn't I do this earlier ? I mean , just upping my visibility a little already is starting to increase lead flow , increase engagement .
When I was really doing a lot of visibility , especially in click funnels , groups , I generated hundreds of thousands of dollars , you know , with just being a little bit more visible and a little bit more , you know , value , upfront type of person .
So you know , like I kind of took a break from that and then I'm getting back into it and I'm like , oh yeah , that's right , like visibility , visibility is king .
Yeah .
You know , it's , it's . Nobody knows who you are , and if they did , they forgot who you are just as quick . Exactly . You know , and , and , and it's your responsibility to remind people that you exist , and that doesn't happen without visibility .
One of my favorite quotes is it's not your customer's job to remember who you are . It's your job to keep showing up so they don't have the opportunity to forget . And I remember who said it , because I've said it so many times , but it's so true .
It's kind of like uh , you , uh , you miss every shot . You didn't take Wayne Gretzky and then , in bigger quotes , Michael Scott .
Yeah .
Yeah , you know , when he quotes the quote , he's like yeah that's like , that's for that , for you , that's your quote , right there . You're like this is their quote , but I quoted it so that person and then bigger air quotes around everything , and that's where you see Connor .
I know , and I'm sure it's like the game telephone . I'm sure I've reiterated that to my own words throughout the years I've been saying it .
So I mean , there's nothing new underneath the sun .
So that's true .
That's very . Eventually you've got to call it your thing .
Yeah , absolutely , absolutely Okay . So if my audience wants to connect with you , where is the best place to connect with Lloyd ?
I'm a vendor all socials at Lloyd dodgin . You can find me on YouTube . I am also very active in my Facebook group . If you ever want to hop in there . It's a YouTube ads mastery with me and I go in , I ask questions , I try to teach on things that are going on with your YouTube ads . Yeah so , and then YouTube itself . You can find me there as well .
I've got some training since some videos .
I love it , I love it . And then you have a free offer for my audience . Do you want to talk about that ?
I do , I do . I think one of the things that can be two of the things that are scary for people when they're running YouTube ads for the very first time is like , well , what do I say and what should I start with with my targeting ? And so I have two free bonuses for you .
One is actual , this , one of the script frameworks that we use that help people actually grow the YouTube ads so that you're not starting from a blank slate .
And then two is our targeting timeline so you can understand , from going , you know , very niche to very broad , from the start of your advertising to scaling to $1,000 to $5,000 a day , the type of targeting that you should be using at every stage .
I love it . So good , so good . All right , before we end this episode , is there anything else you would like to leave my audience with ?
Yeah , you should definitely give YouTube a shot . Don't be scared of it . I think one of the great equalizers in business is one's capacity to just get on video , get in front of people , have a conversation , and everything is supposed to be hard in the beginning . That's just the way life works , and nothing gets easier until you start doing your reps .
So whatever Chris is telling you , with visibility , it's the same thing . Just get out there , go to your visibility . It sucks in the beginning , but no one's going to be paying attention anyways , and then eventually you're going to get really good and then people are going to pay attention . So , yeah , go try it . Some ads .
I love it , and now you have a guide that you can download to help you do just that . So , okay , thank you so much , lloyd , for pouring into my audience today . I appreciate all the information and totally , we're going to have to have you on again , because I feel like we just scratched the surface in this episode .
Yeah , I'm excited about future conversations .
Yeah , absolutely Alright . Thanks for listening . Make sure you guys share this episode and tag me at its Chrissy Connor .