Summary: Jake Larsen is a world-famous YouTube video marketing expert. Jake runs the agency and online training center "Video Power Marketing" at VideoPower.org. Jake has amazing insight and experience into how individuals and also businesses can increase sales and brand awareness using video and YouTube. It is with great pleasure that I say "Welcome to the call, Jake." JAKE: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. GREG: Excellent. I was looking forward to this. This is a very exciting area of online marketing and I think an area that's really going to just get bigger and bigger. And I've been speaking to you over the last week and I know we met earlier in the year in the U.S. as well. I think once people become more aware of what's happening in this space, that's going to definitely be more and more excitement around it. Would you agree? JAKE: Yeah. I just read an article today that video viewership in the next three years is supposed to double. So, if you think about how much it's just grown in the last couple of the years, it's just growing very fast. GREG: Yeah, it's a crazy exciting area. And I think there's amazing opportunities for...if you'd call them "early adopters" in this space. Before we get into the how the marketing works in this YouTube space, you've got a really interesting story with how you got started on YouTube with video marketing and how you got out of your day job. Do you mind sharing that with us at all? JAKE: For sure. A little bit about my background, I've always loved making videos as my video comes from video production. Like a lot of people, I can make really cool videos, but struggle to have people see them. You can post a video on YouTube and a month later, still only have 47 views. So, it was still really frustrating, right? GREG: Mm-hmm. JAKE: But I ended up getting a job at a company called ZAGG. They make mobile accessories; phone cases for your phone and all that stuff. And we did some scratch test videos for them and those kind of actually blew up and did really well. And it so well that the company became a case study on how businesses can effectively use video to grow their company. And so, grew their YouTube channel from zero to 35,000 subscribers and 35 million views. And so, then, when YouTube came out with TrueView; those ads you can skip after five seconds? That's relatively new. We've only been seeing those for the last year and a half, two years. Brand new platform. We were one of 10 companies asked by Google to be YouTube marketing ambassadors. And so, they kind of flew us up to the Googleplex and showed us this new TrueView platform which is done in AdWords. And we were one of the first companies to start experimenting within it and using it and kind of gave them some feedback. While I was there, they kind of shared that they want to take out TV advertising. Like, they have very high goals at Google. And the scary thing is, they're doing exactly that. Looking back a couple years later, it's happening. And it's the future. So, after this experience and learning how to set up this campaign, I also got a lot of opportunity to spend tens of thousands of dollars with the company's money and found out we learned what doesn't work and we learned what works. And so, then, I started getting a lot of calls from people "Hey, can you set this up for my company in doing this?" And I was kind of straddling that line. "Do I quit my job and help other people with theirs? Or should I stay here with the security and all that stuff?" Our firstborn child was coming in a month and I saw the future, I saw what I could do. And I saw the value that I can also bring to people in building these effective video campaigns. And I made the jump. I quit my job a month before our baby was born and haven't looked back. I've loved every second of it. And it's only been 10 months. And I have a team helping me, too. Because business has been good.
