Last updated on June 14th, 2024
Nico Kamenzky of Morningfame talks about how to find the right topic for your YouTube videos.
GUEST: Nico Kamenzky of Morningfame. Watch Morningfame on YouTube, and connect with Nico in the Tube Ritual Facebook group.
HOST: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by Dane Golden of VidAction | LinkedIn | YouTube
SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.
PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
It’s time for HEY.com. This is the podcast where we help marketers and business owners like you grow your customer community through helpful how-to videos. My name is Dane Golden and today we have Nico Kamenzky of Morningfame. Did I say it right, Nico?
Nico Kamenzky:
Yes, you did. Welcome. Thanks for having me today.
Dane Golden:
Awesome. So glad to have you. You are the creator and founder of Morningfame.
Nico Kamenzky:
Correct.
Dane Golden:
What is it and why did you start it?
Nico Kamenzky:
That’s actually a good question. Let’s start with what it is, it’s a YouTube tool and analytics tool that helps you growing your YouTube channel with analytics. That explains you a little bit more about which video topics work well on your channel as well as an SEO tool so you can rank and search. But the question about why did-
Dane Golden:
Yes, why?
Nico Kamenzky:
That’s actually a more difficult questions because it was really not that planned. Four and a half years ago, I started to become an entrepreneur, I was very interested in analytics in general and I started to build a Morningfame version, one so to say, which was all about analytics and integrating the numbers that you get on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all the other social media platforms. But it turned out that no one wanted to use it.
Dane Golden:
What?
Nico Kamenzky:
So I had to really start over, one and a half years.
Dane Golden:
That’s called a pivot, I’m sorry to say.
Nico Kamenzky:
Yeah, exactly.
Dane Golden:
It’s never starting, it’s never failing it’s called a pivot.
Nico Kamenzky:
Yeah, exactly. I didn’t understand what a pivot really means until then, I thought I did pivoted three times already until then but then I did a real pivot one and a half years of full time work, I had to completely throw away and because I had YouTube integrated in the first version already, and my few beta testers that I had on the first version were particularly happy about the YouTube integration. So I decided the issue was, I was not freely able to give actionable insights, something that the tool can show you so you can act on that.
And so I realized I have to focus on just one single platform and because the beta testers were happy about the YouTube integration, I decided I go all in and only do analytics and everything about YouTube and nothing else. And that’s the Morningfame version two so to say that you see today. And luckily with the feedback loop of all the users it really arrived at the point where I wanted it to be that it really helps you in the end and it’s not just numbers where you don’t really know what to do with them.
Dane Golden:
And Morningfame I should say for anyone who’s having trouble spelling it M-O-R-N-I-N-G-F-A-M-E morning and fame get famous in the morning.
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly. That’s the reason why I’m sending out emails in the morning at seven o’clock, because you never know overnight you might get have gotten famous.
Dane Golden:
And the URL is morningfa.me.
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly. You have a link in the description, right?
Dane Golden:
That’s right.
Nico Kamenzky:
It’s invite only so Dane has an invite for you.
Dane Golden:
That’s right. I have my special affiliate link and you’ll see that I am an affiliate proudly. Now one of the things I wanted to focus on and ask you about and I’ve never asked you about this is, I want to understand this topic generating system that you’ve created that includes relevance of your own YouTube channel. Not your own YouTube channel, a YouTube channel owners channel. So you’ve created a method by which to say this topic. Yes, it’s a good topic for some channels but is it relevant to your own channel? Why is relevance so important? Have you found a way to determine that?
Nico Kamenzky:
Yeah, it’s really an integral part of doing SEOs to rank in search for YouTube. You have to understand where you can actually place your videos.
Dane Golden:
And I’m sorry we’re talking about video SEO, we’re not necessarily talking about SEO on Google. Is that correct?
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly. Although, ask me again in a minute. I can tell you a little bit more about Google SEO as well, because YouTube videos do rank well in Google.
Dane Golden:
And we do want to know about that, but in general the main crux of what you’re doing is its relationship to an individual channel. Correct?
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly. First and foremost we want to rank our videos on YouTube because then we have the whole virtuous circle of getting promoted by the YouTube algorithm, and it really starts with ranking in search. For that, you have to understand that on YouTube there are so many different channels on there as so many big channels as well. Especially if you’re just starting out on YouTube you have a small channel right now. And so doing SEO is not only about getting the right title, the right description and tags for your video but also to understand where do you have an opportunity to actually make your videos rank. And if you look at video topics, which are very common, big trends and all that. There, you have many big channels already hogging the ranks of the search results. And for you as a small channel, it is then usually not possible to begin with to rank there even though if you do the best possible job at writing the perfect title and add in the perfect text for example.
Dane Golden:
Let me ask you, pause there for a moment. So what I hear you saying is that on the first page, and we’ll call that the first 20 links, is that what we’ll call the first page?
Nico Kamenzky:
Yeah.
Dane Golden:
So on the first page of YouTube search what you’re saying is that the bigger channels have a higher likelihood of getting their videos on there. But I see on the first page, I see channels that are not large that get on the first page but you’re saying you have a higher likelihood, the more subs you have or the more average views you have. How is that determined?
Nico Kamenzky:
Yeah, exactly. For YouTube it’s a range of factors that determines whether you can rank for a search term, whether you can beat a larger channel or not. The most important metrics for that is of course watch time of your videos. How long do people watch your videos, as well as the click through rate which means that if YouTube is showing your thumbnail in the search results, for example, for your video, how many of those who see it actually click on your video to watch it? And only then as you get a click through, so to say. And YouTube is looking at how many click throughs does a video get, and how much watch time does it then create.
Dane Golden:
But that’s not related to the channel though?
Nico Kamenzky:
It is very related to the channel. It’s a difficult question here. It’s not directly related to the channel in a sense that when you look at the subscriber account and so on but it’s a result of how big your channel is. For example, if you’re a large channel and you have a lot of subscribers and if you upload a new video then you have a large group of subscribers who are watching your new upload right?
Dane Golden:
Yes.
Nico Kamenzky:
And this is creating a lot of click through and watch time for the video which is in turn then sending very good signals to the algorithm and the algorithm in turns then says, “All right we have a big group of subscribers here who really enjoyed the video.” The enjoyment factor is measured mostly by the click through and the watch time but also other factors, but let’s not make it too complicated.
And then it has these signals and says, “Okay, if they enjoyed the video then let me promote the video even more to similar people who are very likely to enjoy that video too.” In this way it kind of a virtuous circle is created for the algorithm to promote your videos and obviously large channels with a large subscriber base have a better jumpstart for each new video then they have small channels have.
Dane Golden:
Okay, so the larger channel the better odds you have to create this virtuous circle as you’re saying. But, what if I have a channel that is about lawnmowers, for instance, and I upload a video about makeup? Even if I have a large channel, am I going to rank for makeup?
Nico Kamenzky:
Yeah, true. That’s a good question because we basically do our SEO and our site to optimize the video to help YouTube understand where to rank all the videos. But who is in the end deciding whether the video will succeed or not? It’s our audience, and I just talked about the subscribers. It’s also as well the first people who find the video and search, those groups of people tell YouTube whether they enjoyed the video or not. And here is, so to say you have to understand that the algorithm is not deciding by itself whether a video is good or bad, it is looking at the audience and how they react to the video. In that way it understands whether a video is actually good or bad. Now comes the point where the video topic is critical here, you have already established an audience like your subscribers who expect certain video topics and if you’re, for example, always do videos of about lawnmowers then suddenly you do a video about makeup, if your subscribers do not expect that kind of video and they are probably not interested to watch it.
Dane Golden:
Let me ask you this question. So first of all what you call the system? So I’m typing in to find the topic is like a topic generator or what’s it called?
Nico Kamenzky:
The Morningfame keyword research to it does not generate topics for you in a sense that you get a list of search terms, it’s rather a process that involves you into where you come up with the search terms.
Dane Golden:
Right, so I type in sort of a general topic and I’ll tell you how I’ve been using it. So I type in a general topic and it says “actually, that topic is not as good as if you phrase it in this way and I know that because you’ve added a green check.” So I said, “Well that’s sort of what I want to say, so that’s great I’ll say it in that way.” And then there’s other terms that have brown Xs or red Xs in different, it’s brown Xs right?
Nico Kamenzky:
Red.
Dane Golden:
Red?
Nico Kamenzky:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dane Golden:
So how do I know that, first of all, how did you decide that this phrasing is better than that phrasing? Is it based on searches? Or how’s that determined?
Nico Kamenzky:
I see. What you should enter there is the search term for which you plan to optimize your video. And it is important that you don’t invent any term but focus on terms that are used by people in search right? We want to target-
Dane Golden:
Find out what people are looking for.
Nico Kamenzky:
Yes, exactly. And the search button suggestions for that are really helpful, you just start to enter, for example, how to mow your lawn? For example. And then you have suggestions can come up with search terms, and the green check and the red X you just talked about is a first test whether you actually entered a search term that is a search term, not just any term, but a term that is used by people in search. Because if you want to optimize for it, you want to know that not only you rank for this term, but also that people search for this term so once you rank there people come by to watch your video.
Dane Golden:
So some terms are better than others and there are several phases you go through in narrowing this down in your system, I think four steps. And then you also show what you call a gateway video, and as I understand that that is what you consider to be the easiest one to pick off, the easiest one that knock out of search because it has, generally, the lowest subscribers.
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly, yeah. We somehow have to know how competitive a search term is. I mentioned it in the beginning that many search terms of common topics are hogged by the large channels, so it’s difficult to rank there. But we can’t really easily tell how competitive exactly a search term is. So what the tool does here, it looks through the search results to find that one video that has low subscribers, low views, low engagement with likes and comments, which gives us basically an indication how little we need in order to rank. And that’s the Gateway video. So the idea is if your numbers on your channel are at least as good as that of the Gateway video then you have good chances to rank for the search term because it is not too competitive for your channel. The competition is low enough so that you have good chances to rank.
Dane Golden:
In the final step you have, I guess it’s an A through F ranking, and what’s the letter that gives you the likelihood that you’re going to be ranking? Is it a B? Is it an A? Do you only want to do one letter or another? Or is it more complicated than that?
Nico Kamenzky:
The chance whether you can rank or not is, first and foremost, determined by the competition of the search term, and for that my tool looks at different aspects: the subscribers, the views, as well as the likes and comments. And that is with the Gateway video as I just said, if you have at least D grades, which means then that your numbers of your channel are usually at least as good as the ones of the Gateway video, and when the competition is low enough you have more ranking power than the Gateway video.
And then of course there is a fourth aspect to it, which we started out in the beginning to talk about the relevance, which means that not only is the competition low enough, but also you work on creating the best possible title, description, and tags for your video, so that YouTube really understand that you want to rank for this particular search term. In there, of course we want you to get the highest possible grade, ideally an A, which would mean that the metadata title description tags is optimized to a maximum.
Dane Golden:
When it says, I have a high likelihood of getting in that top first page, is that likelihood of getting there today, this month, this year? Does it have an idea of how long it takes to get in that page?
Nico Kamenzky:
Yeah, great question. It’s actually usually right away. So when you upload your new video and have optimized it before publishing, then your check for example one hour later where your video actually does rank. And usually you should already see your video in the search results, of course, there are no guarantees. This is kind of we do the best that we can to improve our chances, but it’s of course never 100 percent chance for that; YouTube is just too complicated, complex, I would say not complicated, but usually with good grades competition grades and a high relevance in your metadata you can rank right away.
But if you don’t do that, if you don’t rank right away it may even happen that your video ranks later on, because of the history it accumulates so to say. There is an interesting effect, by the way, that after a few months six to nine months, it becomes apparent. If you really focused your video around a commonly asked question, a question that people continue to ask in the coming years all the time, for example, how to tie a tie, or how it went to mow my lawn to not have to mow too often me again. I don’t know. I’m not an expert in that field.
Dane Golden:
How often to mow my lawn?
Nico Kamenzky:
And this is a commonly us question, and if you really focused your video around that, then after a few months those videos, sometimes, start to rank again, and then continue to drive a lot of views more and more and more over time. That is a really a true evergreen that makes use of the search algorithm.
Dane Golden:
And I should say that when you search for an item, it’s not necessarily the same as when anybody else searches. This sort of, I sort of think the easiest way to determine an absolute ranking is by looking at the incognito window. But am I correct in saying that the different people’s searches are different?
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly. That’s really important. You, as the creator of the videos, you want to have the best possible neutral result for the ranks that you have. And since such results are customized a little bit, not too much, but a little bit, for each user, each viewer on YouTube, you have skewed results if you are locked in, when you’re searching your search terms in order to look up your ranks.
Dane Golden:
They’ll be generally in your favor.
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly.
Dane Golden:
Be ranked higher for yourself.
Nico Kamenzky:
Absolutely, yeah.
Dane Golden:
When you’re logged in your own account. How does ranking on YouTube without explaining all of Google SEO has-how does it relate in general to rank in YouTube search to rank on Google search? Because you can have your video on YouTube rank on the phase of Google search.
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly. It’s actually really interesting, I recently did a study looked at two thousand channels to see where the traffic is coming from, and there was a clear result that those channels that drive a good amount of YouTube search traffic, automatically also drive a good amount of Google search traffic. And the reason actually is that Google introduced everyone out there who is a Google SEO expert heard about that Google introduced their universal search, where different types of results are interweaved in the search results page on Google. And in particular, as you just said, the video carousel is a quite new thing there. It’s I think introduced in July 2018, so it’s very young still, and the interesting thing is this video carousel usually shows YouTube videos there, just because YouTube is the biggest video platform but Vimeo videos can show up there too.
Anyway, this is prime real estate for videos. When Google determines that a search term is well-suited for video results, then it decides to show a video carousel and the videos that show up in that carousel do not compete with any other search results you see on Google. So you have like a prime real estate to rank your videos there, and the interesting part here is that you don’t have to do any different SEO for YouTube in order to rank your YouTube videos in the Google video carousel. It’s really interesting in my study, which I just mentioned, I saw that even without those people most of them didn’t even know how to optimize their video for Google, it happened automatically. The YouTube SEO best practices work so well on Google as well, that the only thing that you need in addition to do in order to rank your videos, also on Google is to make sure that the search term that you are targeting is also one commonly searched on Google as well.
Dane Golden:
Right, right, right. Okay. I wanted to ask, one last question here and it’s about suggested videos. So as any YouTube channel manager will know, across all of YouTube most views come from suggested videos and it is sort of a Google mindset to think of YouTube as SEO. But what I see happening on a lot of channels is that when you rank high for an SEO topic, essentially a video SEO topic, you’re coming up high in search. Generally, you also tend to get a lot of suggested videos showing up for viewers who had searched for that or had looked at videos similar that are ranking essentially high for those search terms. Do you find that, and is there any other correlation between YouTube search and suggested videos?
Nico Kamenzky:
Yes, exactly like you say, that’s 100 percent true. Actually, YouTube went on record to say that they designed the suggested videos algorithm. You have to understand that the suggested videos algorithm is a different algorithm than the search algorithm that just-
Dane Golden:
And that’s what comes up on the right hand side or below on mobile.
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly.
Dane Golden:
Those other videos.
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly. And that suggested videos algorithm does work completely different than the search algorithm. However, they explicitly build a mechanism into that suggests videos algorithm to look at other ways how videos can get discovered outside of the suggested videos. And if they detect videos, for example, doing really well in search, then those videos have a higher chance to do well in suggested videos, too. So optimizing your videos for search is really your foot in the door, because then the whole promotion machinery of YouTube will start to work in your favor.
Dane Golden:
Fantastic. This is fantastic, to get this information Nico, and I’m sure people who currently use the product will want to know this and people who want to use the product will want to know this.
Nico Kamenzky:
Absolutely, yeah. Perfect.
Dane Golden:
So it’s Nico Kamenzky, K-A-M-E-N-Z-K-Y. How can people find out more about Morningfame other than just clicking the link in the show notes?
Nico Kamenzky:
Yeah, the link in the show notes leads you to my website. At the bottom you see my YouTube channel as well as my Twitter, and of course my favorite Facebook group where YouTubers meet is the Tube Ritual group and I’m active there as well as Nico Kamenzky.
Dane Golden:
We’ll add that in as Brian G Johnson’s group.
Nico Kamenzky:
Exactly.
Dane Golden:
And he’s a big supporter and rightly so it’s a great service. So thank you Nico Kamenzky of Morningfame, I appreciate it. And you will be able to find this video by searching for HEY and Morningfame.
My name is Dane Golden and I want to thank you, the listener, for joining us today. HEY.com is about helping you grow your customer community through helpful how-to videos. And how do you do this? By sharing your expertise, because when you share your expertise in a way that helps your customers live their lives better or do their jobs better you’ll earn their loyalty and their trust and their business. Thanks to our special guest Nico Kamenzky of Morningfame.
Please give us a review on your favorite podcast app, follow HEY.com on YouTube, but wherever you see social video, our LinkedIn, or wherever you want to follow us. And this podcast is brought to you by our affiliate sponsors including Morningfame, so please check those in the description, until next week. Here’s to helping you, help your customers through video.