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Visit maxlawevents.com for full event details and to grab your ticket today. Run your law firm the right way. This is the Maximum Liar Podcast. Maximum Liar Podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking, and Tyson Nutrix. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to another episode of the Maximum Liar Podcast. I'm Tyson Nutrix and today I am with Jeff Hampton. I'm really excited about this episode. I've been driving all over the state I feel like today, so it's been kind of a hectic day, but I'm excited to be sitting here with Jeff and talking with you today. Before I introduce you, Jeff, I'm going to read your bio so people know who you are and what we're going to talk about today. So, Jeff Hampton is a seasoned entrepreneur and legal professional with a distinguished career spanning over two decades with a background as both a prosecutor and litigator. Jeff has handled more than 100 jury trials, garnering an extensive experience in the courtroom, which I'll tell you, Jeff, you don't look like you're old enough to have 100 jury trials under your belt, so that's very impressive because of these days. You are so kind. Yes, it's hard these days to kind of get a case trial, but I guess as a prosecutor it's a little bit easier, but as the founder of two successful law firms, Jeff has demonstrated a unique talent for scaling service-based businesses. He established Foggum Hampton Criminal Defense Attorneys and STR Law guys, each specializing in distinct areas, criminal defense and asset protection for real estate investors, respectively. Under Jeff's leadership, these ventures have flourished into multi-seven figure enterprises. We're going to get into all of that in just a moment. Jeff, welcome to the show. Thank you, sir. Appreciate the time. I'm very happy to be here. Yeah, so the topic that we have today is lawyers need to expand their thinking when it comes to marketing and how to share their expertise. YouTube is one of the best ways to do this, and I like that as a topic for today. So let me ask you, why this? Why YouTube? So let's talk about that. Let's start with why that first. Great question, so the best way I can look at it is to nurse engineer what I know I was able to do. I mean, look, everybody still relies. All lawyers still rely on Google, particularly if you're a local-based law firm. If you don't do nationwide services, you're relying on Google Businessplaces, you're relying on SEO ads. And as we can see, what's happened since May, that the rules can change instantly with Google. They can come in, they add search generative experience. We start talking about the AI component now. If your market's like mine, they put local service ads that look a lot like the maps, then they put ads, and that's before you ever even get to the maps. So essentially from a marketing perspective, it's pushing about 75% of all your clicks below the paywall. So you've got to literally, you're gonna have people clicking on the stuff that people are paying and on auctions for. So I started taking a different approach on it, and I'm saying, hey, what if I go where other lawyers aren't, and where those that do some type of marketing on YouTube don't really know what they're doing, and they create a lot of vanity videos where it's just all about, I'm the greatest lawyer in the world, and you should hire me, and it's like a two-minute video. So what I did is I turned that around, and I started doing this where I got really serious about it and saw it as a media arm of my law firm, and I started learning best practices of YouTube, and as a result of that, I mean, it creates an additional one and a half to two million a year for my criminal practice, and even with a very small YouTube channel for my asset protection law firm, that generates an additional 30,000 or so a month. I don't even have 4,000 subscribers, and that generates an extra 30,000 plus, sometimes more than that, and that's because there's nothing that builds the no, like, and trust factor than video, particularly long-form video, and so that's what got me into it. - So I'm actually, I'm gonna pull up your YouTube channel in a second, 'cause I'm gonna pull it up, but tell me how you, you're calculating that, 'cause how do you track that? And you're not talking about money you're getting from YouTube, you're talking about actually from leads, is that where we're talking, I'm gonna make sure we're talking about the same thing. - That is correct. So what we do is we have call rail numbers on our videos. So I will actually put a number that's on there, and I will admit that attribution is very difficult, generally in marketing right now, because most people find you at one place, and then, for instance, I get a lot of people who will see my videos, then they will go to my website, 'cause they wanna see what my reviews are, how many, you know, are you a good five-star reviews, 4.9, and then they will call from GPP, but all of my, I'll have all of my intake staff, one of the first questions we ask is, how did you hear about us? And overwhelmingly, we mark down, they'll say, "I wanna talk to the guy that's in the videos." Or, so about 50% or more of the calls that come in, come from that, and we track about 100 to 150 calls per month from YouTube, where they call in just specifically because they've watched the videos. - I've gotta ask this now. Why, or how do you handle the people that want to talk specifically to you? Do you talk to them, or do you have a team that knows how to address that? - Yeah, so we have seven attorneys. So the good news is, I pretty much do not handle much of any criminal. I haven't been in a courtroom in two and a half years. So I don't even really have to go to court much anymore. My main role is the media side of this, the marketing side of it. And so I'm out helping generate the face of the business and creating the brand. So when they call in, they'll know that it's me. All right, they'll ask for me initially, but then they, part of the one of the things that we do is we filter them to one of our other attorneys who's kind of our sales lawyer. And he's just as experienced as I am in the courtroom, and he does a great job. I don't really run into any opposition about it not being me, not that they have to talk to me. On occasion, they'll come into the office. Maybe somebody will wanna hire us for a big case. And they'll say, can I meet Mr. Hampton and I'll go in and I'll go and talk to him and introduce the team and talk about how the team's gonna take care of him. But very transparent at the very beginning, setting expectations that we are stronger as a team than you would be with me. That when we have a team approach of what we're doing, you were going to see better results, period. - I love that. Okay, so I've got to tell you something. I watched one of your videos recently. I didn't, it's funny. So this is so funny. I saw, it was just an interesting topic. And it popped up into my feed because it occurred to me after we started talking that I had seen this video. And I was like, wait a second. I've seen one of the videos and I was frantically going through all of my history to find it. It was the lawyer how to stop cops from searching your gun case. So it is for those of you listening on your phones or wherever you're listening, you heard part of it, but for anyone watching this, I'm actually going to show it to you. I, it's the same backdrop that you have, but it's the same video. And it was not only, was it entertaining, which I did like, but you were very detailed and it was something, and I did criminal defense back in the day. It's actually something I didn't know about. This was something I'd never encountered. So it's really interesting to see, it's just funny because the, I didn't know that I was actually going to be, I'd seen this video, I didn't connect the dots. I think it's just really interesting. But it's also an example of like how this works though. It's really, 'cause like, this was a, I don't know what the views were on this. So you have 278,000 subscribers. You have 12,000 views, really good video. So I do want to talk to you about this though. Let's use this one as an example. So you have, now I see that there's no chapters on this one. Do you normally put chapters on yours? - So I do, I do sometimes, and look, where I'm at now is way different than where I started. And I will, I'll be frank with you. That's actually a good example. I need to get onto part of my team. They needed to add chapters to that, that will help. But I mean, once you launch a video, it's had, it's almost 600,000 views in four days. - Yeah. - That's 12,000 likes. So for me, I don't want to touch it if it's going almost viral. So for an educational law channel, that's almost viral when it comes to criminal defense. In terms of the path that it's heading, it'll get anywhere between seven to 20,000 views an hour. And so as it's moving in that direction, you can see all the interaction, all the comments below. For me, yes, this is the back end of the project. When you first start, you go narrow. You go into your practice areas. You talk about things you know you can provide specifically that create you revenue. When that is the first part, which is to build your authority, your expertise, and to optimize for search. But once you've covered all of your practice areas, which I have done, you can go back to see all my old videos. - We're going to, we're going to go into your channel. Absolutely. - Okay, fair enough. I'll stop talking. No, no, no, no, no, no, keep going. I want to hear it, I don't want to interrupt that thought, so keep going. - So, but you have to start narrow and then go broad. Once you've gone narrow and you've covered those main areas and you optimize for search and you know what you're doing there, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. So behind Google is YouTube, and many, many more people, particularly the younger population, they are searching more through video platforms. TikTok is right behind YouTube. So there's more people searching through that platform than they are through Google. No one wants to read a blog post, no one. No one wants to spend their time doing that usually. Now, some of the stuff that I will do is repurpose this onto a blog post with the video on my website, but this is the product of what I do once you've gone narrow. After you've gone narrow, you go broad and you start kind of tying in more pop culture themes or more factual scenarios to the law and you established your legal expertise and it also was able to hit a broader swath of potential viewers and it grows your channel. - I think it's great advice. And the reason why I left this on the screen is for people that are not watching this on YouTube, there are 2,696 comments on this. I mean, this is incredible. I mean, you definitely hit the nail on the head. Do you read the comments and do you use that to repurpose any content at all? - Okay, and I know at the end of your stuff you do here, you ask for a tip, but I'm gonna give you one right now. There's gonna be lots of tips that I'll give you. Love it. One of them is you take all of those comments, you feed them into chat GPT and you ask chat GPT for the viewer sentiment of the concerns and things they liked about this video. Chat GPT will give you a summary of all the sentiments from those comments and the main points that the viewer was looking for. Now, I really like those because those comments also give me ideas for future videos because this is my viewer avatar. These are my viewer avatar. So if they're responding to this saying, okay, but what about a backpack or what about this? How does the Supreme Court rationalize this? And then it gives me an idea of what my viewer avatar, particularly ones where you'll see one comment like you on that video, you'll see there's a couple of comments and then there's like 200 likes and then like 25 or 30 comments about that comment. You'll see multiple people talking about and something that someone brought up. That gives you more ideas to pull from for additional content. - Yeah, so like what you're on here, like you've got like there's 1,700 here, there's 1,300 there. Yeah, and then like 177 replies on this one alone. - Right. - Yeah, so that's good. So I pulled up this, I had this kind of hidden, I can't actually, what the name of this is, but it's this little side thing that actually accesses chat GPT. So I wonder if you could actually do that from this. I just can't remember what it's called. - That's a great idea. - It's a nice little tool that you can, and you can change it. You can actually change the settings, which one you want to use and all that, but I did not know that you could export the comments. How do you do that? - Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, so you can do that through YouTube Studio. You can also just do a straight, you can do an export from Studio, but you can also just do a straight copy of the videos. And I like to really, I mean, of the comments, I feed them in and then, and it depends. I mean, you know, there are some comments that are just pretty bold on its face. And if that comment has 500 likes and then there's people wanting to know more about it, but the other great thing is you can get good title ideas. We as lawyers overthink what we're talking about. And so when you listen to people respond to things on there, they're putting it in much more layman's terms. And if one of the biggest mistakes I see lawyers making, and not just lawyers, but professional services, 'cause I've helped CPAs and I've also helped financial service folks with some YouTube consulting to help them understand how to improve this, one of the things that I tell them is, thinking like a lawyer, thinking like a financial advisor or a CPA, you've got to use more traditional terminology like on this one, like some of the videos. And you can see some of them are terrible. I've learned over the years that there's my old one. When I went narrow, you notice that is it illegal to record and arrest? - Yeah. - That's me going narrow. You know, it only got 1500 views, but it was the right viewers. - Sure. - You don't have to go viral as a business. You can make money off just the right eyeballs. - Let me ask you. On this one though, is it illegal to record and arrest how to beat an interference with public duties charged? And then it has in parentheses 2022. Is that so you can update it every year? - It is, yeah. And as you can see, I haven't updated it and I should. But notice it's under Texas penal code. So under that one, I was super narrow. I know it's not going to get a ton of views. I was only limiting it to Texas, 'cause that is where my firm is at for criminal offense. And so I could get super narrow. I would even mark the location as being in the Dallas, Fort Worth, Texas area. I would want everything hyper local. So that way I would get more search traffic from it when people getting arrested would do a search for interference with public duties. The best example of this, if you pulled up my aggravated assault deadly weapon, and this is the proof that anybody can do this, anybody. - Oh, real quick. Before we get to this, I got to ask you, 'cause actually this is part of this and actually getting to what you're going to talk to. - I see that it's marketed in your name and it's not in your firm name. Is that correct? Is that how you recommend doing it? - That one is, yes, that's correct. - Okay. - Now, well, let me explain why. Let me explain why. Now the Hampton law, I started before I had any idea what I was doing. - Okay. - That was just the name. It's what it was. It kind of became branded that way. And that's how people knew who I was. Jeff Hampton, the asset protection channel there, that one is, I've learned people follow people. They don't follow businesses as much. So they have a tendency to follow people. So when I did, I started doing this, it also created opportunities where people would refer me business under the umbrella of seeing that I already run other law firms and there were other opportunities there, but it did not take away one bit from what I was able to do with my asset protection. And the great thing about asset protection compared to criminal is you can actually use things like lead magnets and sales funnels and email marketing because the actual sales cycle is different. It takes them longer to make a decision. You can actually, they've already reached out to you. They want something from you. They've asked for the ability to be able to follow back up with you. And so it's a way to foster a relationship with someone. - Love it. Just related to the naming too. Would you recommend, so the Jeff Hampton one, you've got 3,750 subscribers approximately. You've got, but you have 431 videos quite a bit. And then on the Hampton Law, you have 278,000 subscribers. So I mean, have you considered though, and I know you gave a good example as to why having it as a law firm would make sense too. Did you ever consider changing, just changing the name of Hampton Law to your name? - I have thought about that and I may do a full rebrand, but if I do that, it's going, I have to warm up my audience to what I'm doing. Because what people don't understand is that not all of those subscribers always know that you launch a video. There's a huge misconception that people think that just because you have subscribers that as soon as you launch a video, they all know about it, the algorithm doesn't work that way. They will, the algorithm will only recommend videos to you based upon your recent watching behavior, your viewing behavior. So if someone really likes my content, but then they haven't watched it in a couple of weeks or three, four weeks and they've been watching political content or whatever it is, that's gonna be recommended to them because you have to remember, there's two main priorities for YouTube. YouTube is concerned with number one, predicting what the viewer wants to watch, and then number two, keeping you on the platform. It's all it cares about. Doesn't care about anything else. And so the best way to do that many times is to keep feeding you stuff you've already been watching recently. And so that's why sometimes I wanna make it real clear to whoever is watching that, hey, if I'm on a rebrand, here's how and why I'm gonna do it. And like you looked at the number of videos, probably 85% of those are shorts. So I don't really count shorts as videos. And by the way, I see, they are, but it's short form content creates, it doesn't create no like and trust, it just makes awareness, it creates awareness. It makes someone know you exist, but it doesn't really build you much as a business. - Yeah, 'cause I wanna ask you about that too. So if you had a recommendation of people about shorts versus longer form, or is it a combination of both that you should be doing, and if it's a combination, what should the mix be? If that's even a factor that you even look at. - So yes, and when I have attorneys and other service business people reach out to me, professional service businesses, one of the first things I tell them is if you ever created videos, if you have not, the best place to start is shorts. And the reason why is because you don't have the practice in front of the camera. And secondly, it's easy to get deflated when you put in a bunch of time and effort into a video, and it's eight minutes long, only to get like 40 views. And you're like, I'm not doing this anymore. Whereas if you do shorts, you can do a lot of shorts pretty easily, you're gonna get practice in front of the camera, you'll start growing subscribers. There's no doubt about it. You can grow subscribers much quicker through shorts. I've got some shorts that have over 6.5 million views. There are some shorts that have gone viral from a legal perspective that help grow the channel. And so I think it's a great place to start, and I like to test video concepts from shorts. For instance, if I'm thinking about launching a long-form video and I use a short, if that resonates, there's a good chance that a long-form video on the same topic will also do pretty well because of the topic and what I'm presenting. - That's a brilliant idea. So you're kind of beta testing over here. Like, I mean, your titles are great. There was one I can't, let's see, where is it? How cops are using flock safety and invasion. Like, I don't know what flock safety is, but it's like, okay, I wanna look and see what that is. Like, what does that actually mean? Like, so I think that's pretty cool. Then you got your videos over here. So I'm for people that are watching YouTube or those of you that are listening, I've got all of his videos up. And the art that you have on them is really good. It's really good art, it's catchy. I wanna click on it. So can you get people advice on that part of it? And then I wanna shift to where you were headed with the playlist 'cause you wanted me to go out and click on a playlist. So I'm gonna go over to that 'cause you were gonna talk about that. But the, like, what is your advice to people when it comes to the actual cover art? So, yeah, so when we're talking about thumbnails, so here's the key. Most people, and this is an area where, and you don't know what you don't know, but attorneys, professional service businesses don't think about the title and the thumbnail. So you can have, and I've seen some attorneys that are amazing wealth of knowledge. Like, they could get on there and I hear them start talking and it has like 50 views. And I'm like, this should be out there for people to see 'cause it's amazing content. But the problem is, it's the art of the psychology of when you have thousands of videos to choose between and YouTube is suggesting all types of content to you, the reality of it is you have literally half a second to grab the viewer's attention. So if your thumbnail is just some pious photo of someone standing there like a lawyer that really, why would they click on it? If you notice almost all of my thumbnails that have gone viral, some of my videos, 4.6 million views, my face is not on it. I'm not on there at all. So what it is, is notice what it is. Are you tired of the marketing guessing game? Does your website feel more like a digital billboard than a client magnet? If you're nodding along, you're not alone. And it's time to stop the uncertainty and start getting real results. Let's talk about your marketing spend. Are you just shelling out money every month and crossing your fingers? Do you ever wonder what impact your marketing is really having on your revenue? Well, it's time to take the guesswork out of the equation with rise up media. We've been working with them for over a year and the feedback from our fellow members has been fantastic. Rise up media is here to take your marketing to the next level. They'll even perform a full audit of your online presence, giving you the good, the bad, and even let you in on what your competition is up to that you're missing out on. And the best part, there's no obligation, no catch, no pressure. If you decide to work with them, their contracts are month to month. That's right. No long-term commitments tying you down. So what are you waiting for? To learn more about how rise up media can transform your firms, visit riseupmedia.com/maxlaw and rise is spelled with a Z. Riseupmedia.com/maxlaw. - Is a interaction, what is my channel? You first have to know who your audience is. My channel is a law enforcement and citizen interaction channel. So people wanna know when I face off of law enforcement, what are my rights and how do I protect myself? So if you go to popular, click over on popular on Hampton Law, you'll see some of the example of most popular videos. That one's 4.6 million and look at it. We won't ask again. So it's an officer standing at your front door. You know what that means. It's intimidating, it's fearful. And then what do I say? Five tips whenever cops want to see your guns. So when I launched that video, it had almost a 20% click-through rate in the first hour and it had over 560,000 views in the first 24 hours. And the reason why is because number one, people who love law enforcement content or want to know about their rights are gonna click it, but people who don't even know if they're interested and at many times will also click it because if it's so engaging, it creates, here's the number one thing you wanna create on your thumbnail, curiosity. You've gotta create curiosity. - So I recognize, I don't know if you noticed, I started to watch this one or I did watch and I went back 'cause I recognize, I remember seeing this thumbnail. And so that's interesting. Can we just click on it for a second and play out? - Yeah. - I wanted to be the beginning of it. - Of course. - So I'd already started. So for those of you that are not on YouTube, you're listening. So the way it's the actual thumbnail says, we won't ask again. And then the title is actually lawyer. Five tips whenever cops want to see your guns. - So you jump right in with a question. You've clearly trimmed it so you're jumping right in. When it comes to the actual creation of this video, so you've got the idea of it, you've got the thumbnail, all of that. This one is about 20 minutes in length. I'm assuming you need to have some sort of notes. You may not have a script but some sort of notes that you have to, unless you go off the top of your head, I don't know, you can address that. But how long the total time of actually creating this, that's your time, how much time does that take? - So it's gotten easier for me now because I have a team and I have people that help support me in this regard. But let me walk you through for that video, good example. So for that video, I'm a huge believer you should script the first minute of your video. And the reason why, as close as possible, here's the thing. Just like, there's recency bias, there's all these biases that exist. People make a decision if you were worth their time in the first 30 seconds when they watch a YouTube video. So here's the number one mistake attorneys make. Almost everybody makes. They'll get on there and go, "Hey guys, welcome to the Hampton Law Firm. "Welcome to my channel today. "If you like what you hear, subscribe and like my channel. "No one cares about that. "You're gonna see a retention. "Your attention graph looks like a hockey stick. "It just goes like this." All the way down and cuts across. That is where you make mistakes. Attorneys wind up too much at the beginning and they take too long at the end. And reality, if you jump in, what is the first 30 seconds supposed to do? Someone saw your thumbnail, they saw your title. You need to reaffirm they made a good choice by the first 30 seconds, by reaffirming the title and thumbnail in your beginning hook. So as you start, people go, yeah, he's gonna talk about what he promised you to talk about when I clicked this. Now let me see, what is he gonna deliver on? If you listen to the rest of that intro, you'll hear me say, we're gonna cover in this video, I'm gonna teach you X, Y, and Z. And at the end, I'm gonna teach you how to protect yourself if the cops come knocking. - Well, let's do that. Let's listen to it, Jeff, 'cause I wanna, so people have an example to go for 'em. So I like, I'll say, I love it. Like, so you've already, you've addressed what the topic is about, which matches the thumbnail and then you talk about what you're gonna address in the video. I think that's, it's very clear what I'm gonna see. And what frustrates me is that sometimes you'll have a nice setup like this, and then you'll listen to the video or watch the video, and they didn't answer the questions. So have you had, have you done that mistakenly before where you just screwed that part up, where you didn't answer the actual questions or talk about the stuff you said you were gonna talk about? - Oh yeah, yeah. Like if you were to go to that aggravated assault video and see when I first started, it's embarrassing. It's like the example I give to people looking back on it is like if I could make money, I have tracked that I've made over $650,000 off of one video, that aggravated assault video in the last two and a half years. And I know because I've had the average case value runs between five and 10,000, and we've had, I mean, I can track how many people have signed up very easily. 50 to 60 people have signed up. Well, I did it completely wrong when I first started. There's nobody out there to teach you how to do this right, but I started looking at other creators and other niches, and I started saying, why can't the educational side of things for professional service businesses and law firms, why can't we adopt these same best principles, these same best practices in the educational side, and in the process, create all kinds of trust with potential clients who then call in. And then I also get calls from CNN and other players. You get all types of media outlets that will call you and say, hey, can we ask you some questions? We wanna see you as a reference for something that you talked about here. So it really builds your brand, and it also builds traffic to your website. - I love it, so I went and searched your channel. So which of these is the aggravated assault when you're talking about? - It's that one, notice I actually did update it to 2024, but it's three years old. - Okay, yeah, so yeah, you've got, that's funny that you, it's the same day of video, but you just updated the, that's cool idea. So there's a couple of things I noticed about this one, right? So this has got, you know, 1,700 views. - 17,000, yeah. - Or 17,000, yeah, 17,000 views. And so it's from three years ago, you have 54 comments. The background is, looks nicer, you're dressed nicer than a lot of your other videos. Your audio sucks, it's very echo-y, it's terrible. You know, but it's interesting because it looks prettier, right, than the other ones, but it's not performing nearly as well, which I think is interesting. The actual background doesn't matter as much. I don't think, I guess, well, I guess what is your opinion? Let me ask you about that. What does it matter the way the video looks? What's your opinion on that part of it? - So I'm gonna tell you this, I do believe it, I mean, everything depends on your brand. So if you are a lawyer and you are selling services that you believe would be, I mean, I'm not a cheap lawyer, I'm going to demand, you know, prices near the top of the market, not at the bottom. So brand, your brand does matter. So I tell people it's really important. If I look back at that, that was in the throes of COVID. You also saw I didn't see I didn't get a haircut 'cause it was in the middle of COVID. I looked all scraggly, looked like a mess. And so the reality of it was I was sitting in my office and I was like, I can't go anywhere. What am I gonna do? And I have a webcam while everybody's doing Zoom court meetings and I'm like, you know what? I'm going to pretend I'm having a consult with somebody and I'm just gonna look at the camera and I'm gonna have a consultation with the camera and I'm gonna lay out exactly what they should be thinking about if they are facing an aggravated assault charge in Texas. And what happened was, here's the amazing thing. When I did it, even though it was still not good, the audio was awful, right? It's just really bad. But when I put it out there and it's optimized for search, if you do a search, the last time I checked, for aggravated assault charges Fort Worth or Texas, it ranks number one on videos on Google, but it also ranks in Google search. So one of the things that'll happen is people can find it on Google, they can find it on YouTube. And then we end up having a good number of cases that come in the door. It was three months after I made this video, I got my first call from that video. That's my partner right there, where it says full gym law firm. That's me on that video. I did videos for his channel too, because he became my partner, if you go below that, where it says. - Yeah, right here, yeah. - Yeah, if you click on it, you'll see right there my face, that's me. - Yeah, there you are. - So I was doing videos for that channel as well. That channel right there still creates, I still get about 20 calls. I haven't done a video on two years on that channel, and it gets about 20 calls a month. - That is incredible. So these are evergreen pathways for leads. Once you create them, and then you optimize them, why the professional service industry has not caught onto this, is beyond me. Instead of trying to compete against 50 lawyers for a local service ad, I don't have to pay any of this. And ultimately now YouTube pays me to make millions for my law firm, because I get paid for AdSense. I get paid for the videos. - So let me ask you about that. I know that on us we have the ads turned off. My channel's not nearly as successful as yours, but would you, I mean, when you're first starting, let's say you're starting from scratch, would you recommend that people leave ads on, turn the ads off, do you have any opinion on that? - So you really don't even have a whole lot of discretion with ads. You have to reach a threshold with YouTube at first. You have to hit 4,000 watch time hours, and you have to hit 1,000 subscribers to be monetized. So if you don't have 4,000 watch time hours and 1,000 subscribers, you can't get paid by YouTube anyway. And here's what other people don't realize. You can turn off ads and say I reject monetization, but YouTube's gonna run ads anyway. Doesn't matter. - Oh, you're kidding me, what? - So YouTube doesn't need your, no, no, they don't need your permission run ads. - I don't need an interest aid. - They don't need your permission. It's their platform. - Yeah, so you can reject getting paid, but they're gonna make money on you either way. It doesn't matter. So YouTube, in their terms of service, if you go read them, that's how they make money. They do ads, so they don't need your permission to run ads. - That's hilarious. - So that's something that many people don't think of. They're like, "Well, I'm not gonna let YouTube leverage me." You're being leveraged. I mean, so that's the way it works. - That's wild. I do know attorneys that are making about 10 grand a month. That is crazy to me. It's very clever by YouTube to think, "Oh, this isn't gonna run ads, "so I'm not gonna don't have to worry about that." But not realizing that they'll do it anyways. That's very interesting. I wanna shift gears a little bit 'cause I would be, I think it'd be crazy not to talk about this. You've mentioned lots of different data points that you track. If you're gonna point to three things that are the most important data points that you think people should be looking at, what do you think those would be? - You mean for a successful video on YouTube? - Correct, yeah, so if you're looking, well, let's look at video. So two different questions, I guess then. To see that a video is successful, what do I need to make sure that I'm doing from a data standpoint? And then from a channel standpoint, what are the most important numbers I should be looking at? - Okay, let's talk about it from a video first. So the first thing is, and this sounds very fluff, but it's the reality, which is you need to really hone in on your thumbnail, your title, and your hook. Because most of us that are on this that are listening, we're lawyers, we've been educated, we're already an expert. So what you put out there for your prospective customer, or the viewer avatar, should already be somewhat impressive, and you already have the authority because they don't know it. They don't, you're the one that's been educated in it, but most of the reason why I see people quit YouTube is because they are looking at the viewer, they're just looking at the views, and they're saying I'm not getting enough, so it's not worth it. So I, on every video, I come up with the title and the thumbnail and my hook before I script any of the rest of the video, any of it. Because if I can come up with a really, there's videos you could go through and see that I thought were gonna be amazing videos, but I couldn't get a good thumbnail for it, and I felt like it was confusing, I scrapped the video. We're not even gonna do it. Because if I can't come up with something that works that I know is gonna get the click, I would rather spend my time focused on a concept that I know will work, even if it maybe is not the thing that I'm most excited about at the moment, and then I'll shelve that idea until I come up with that good thumbnail. So to me, if I was gonna focus on what I'm just telling you what I know, having done thousands of videos that I put together, which is title, thumbnail, and the first 30 seconds of what you're gonna say and do. Because psychology is, if I like your intro, and you hook me with something that's curious, that creates curiosity, and then you're clear with me what I'm gonna get if I stick around, the psychology behind it is I'm likely to invest in you now. I'm gonna continue to wait it out and see what you have to say. But when you screw up the first 30 seconds, people will bolt, they'll just run. They won't even wanna, they'll say forget this, I'm listening to something else. And if you're title and thumbnail aren't right. So I tell people to really hone in on that, and that's one thing to start researching and looking, and don't look, for the most part, don't look to other lawyers as the reason why you'll do good. Most attorneys are doing this garbage. They have no idea what they're doing, it's bad, it's not put out well, don't always model it. Now you can, that brings me to the channel. What are some of the things you can do for your channel? For the channel, know your audience. Who really, what are you about? Don't just chase views, you need to know what it is that you're about. When I started, I was just putting out criminal defense content, right? The problem was, not everybody wants to care about every part of criminal defense. So what I had to do is know who my audience was. Once I realized I was a law enforcement interaction channel, then I could wrap it, and this is important, I use this term all the time. The rapper matters. When you go to Christmas, many people want kids, want to open the most beautiful wrapping paper gift, you want to walk up and open it, the wrapping paper matters, which is the title and the thumbnail. And remember not to frame everything you do from a lawyer's perspective. You have to make it as layman's terms as possible. And as you grow, that's when you can see your channel. I mean, my channel 10xed in like six to nine months when I started to go broad after I started narrow. It just started to blow up. - So how did you describe a law enforcement? What was the, how did you describe it? - Law enforcement interaction. - Okay, so I like that. I want to get your, I'm going to pick your brain. So let's say that you were running an injury firm. So I'm asking this selfishly. Like what would you, how would you then redefine it? Right? 'Cause we do a lot of specific type of videos. So if you were going to redefine it where like what your audience is, 'cause you've got yours, how would you do it when it comes to personal injury? - So the first thing I would do is we need to know what's working on YouTube right now. - Interesting, okay, yep. - So if you were to tell, if you were to tell me, hey, first thing I'd want to do is do a channel on it. I'd want to see your channel. And I want to pull up which of your videos are the most popular videos. And I would see which ones had the most views. And here's the beautiful thing about YouTube. You'll start to see patterns. So what I would do is I would first look at your most popular videos and I'd create an Excel spreadsheet. And what I would do is list those most popular videos with your thumbnail and your title. Then I would go through, and there's a way to do this, where you can search for other creators that are personal injury lawyers, just like you, that provide content on YouTube. And we can find out, I want to look at their videos that have done well in the last six months to a year. Not old stuff. I don't care about stuff two years ago, because that's not relevant today. I want to know what's working right now on YouTube. And here's what you'll find. Creators that do really well, for me, I did 20 creators. I came up with 20 attorneys that do this stuff, or it's not always attorneys. Sometimes it's former cops who do law enforcement channels. Sometimes it's First Amendment audit people, which drive me crazy, but they do really well. They'll do the First Amendment audit stuff. And you can see similar viewing behavior, and YouTube will kind of give you an idea if that is the same type of avatar watching your content. Then what I do is I take all that data and what you start to see are patterns. Like you'll start to say, well, this guy who's doing really well looks like he's talking about three or four different areas. So for example, what I found is police and guns. Police and traffic stops. Police and so police and traffic stops. Police and technology. So you come up with what I call content silos. And from those content silos, you can come up with video ideas beneath it, where you can stay true to what you know is already working on YouTube, based upon coming up with ideas that are not out in left field. Now I always do have an experimental bucket to an experimental silo that I use where you can experiment and do new things. But I learned, if you see the video before it, I really wanted to do a double-jemperty loophole video, 'cause I really thought it was crazy. I don't like it as an attorney. But it's not in one of my buckets and it only got 67,000 views. But the video after that got almost 600,000 views in four days. So, and that was completely within my content silo. The other one wasn't, right? So it sometimes, once you know who you're talking to, you're going to have a much better message and you're gonna be able to repeat certain titles, certain thumbnail concepts that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every video. If you look at a lot of my titles, five tips, five tricks, five ways, three tips, how to stop. There's different ways that I use similar titles and thumbnail ideation that creates really good videos. - I love it, yeah, I'm like looking at mine. It's insurance adjuster, settlement, accident, which is funny 'cause I refuse to use the word accident in my videos because it's like car crash, not accident, right? So like, there's certain things that like, I may have to just change the things like the way I say. Like, accident is like, so I can just look at it, right, insurance, insurance adjuster, settlement, accident. Those are the ones, like you're talking about all the words, those are the ones that I should, I need to find a way to focus on those. That's really interesting, that's great. - Well, the best way I can analogize this, if you ever work with an agency or somebody who does SEO, a lot of times if you do ads, 'cause I remember years ago when I first started looking at this, I was like, I don't want to target that keyword. And they'll say, yeah, but Jeff, even though they don't say, even though there's not a DUI per se law in Texas, it's DWI, it doesn't mean that the people searching say DWI, they say DUI. So you have to get into the mind of the search, the person who's searching, not what you know the law is. You've got to reach them where they're at, they're never going to come to you. You have to make sure they understand. If there's any confusion, confusion leads to click away. I'm not going to pay attention. - Yeah, that's interesting. 'Cause I think in Missouri it'd be DWI. I think that's what people would say, not DUI, but that's interesting. All right, we're at the wrap things up 'cause I know we're over time, but you had a lot of great valuable, I can talk to you for like three hours, but you have a lot of valuable information and great tips. So I do want to wrap things up. Before I do that though, if people don't reach out to you, let's say if they have a referral for you, if they want to get advice from you about videos, how can they get in touch with you? - Yeah, so the easiest way is you can reach out to me at jeff@fhloggroup.com. F is in Frank, H is in Harry,loggroup.com. Or you can hit me up like on my YouTube channel. In fact, there's a contact on there with my email address. And I really hope some attorneys think about this because doing YouTube now, it's only going to get harder as more people figure this out. If you get in now, which I still see as more of a first mover advantage, if you do that now, you can create differentiation in your market immediately. - Immediately, that's good advice. - All right, before we get to our tips and hacks of the week, we are going to, I just want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group if you haven't already. We would love to have you in our community to mingle with us and share in our successes and share in your successes. So it's nice to be able to share with people and we can share what works for us and you can share what works with you and the rising tides raises all boats kind of feel. So we would love to have you there. We also have the guild, maxlawguild.com or we have just some amazing people there that are all willing to share their best stuff. A lot of highly successful attorneys in there as well. So maxlawguild.com. I know that when this one airs, which will be in October, it's about a month before we will be in Vegas. We'll be in Vegas in November, which will be fantastic. So if you joined before then, you can actually join us and see us in Vegas. So we'd love to have you. Jeff, we always ask our guests to give a tip or hack of the week. What you got for us? - So my big tip is to get started, you can get your phone. You don't need a bunch of fancy equipment. Now phones are really high quality, good resolution is to get your phone and do less than 60 seconds. Make it a little less than 60 seconds and start practicing, start a YouTube channel and put out just a few videos. Because once you get started, you get over the hump and that's where it starts. You'll start feeling comfortable sharing some of this information and after a while, this is something that if you give it three months, you'll start getting phone calls, at least in my experience, that what do you have to lose? Google's gonna change its algorithm again and it's gonna continue to happen and what I have right now and I've been investing in can help you avoid becoming, you know, being ravaged by some Google algorithm or change to the search engine. - Yeah, that's great advice, love it. For mine, mine's a little simpler than yours. It's probably not as cool as yours. But one of my favorite recent prompts, I wanna use one for a chat GPT, it's actually using it for tables. It actually is really good setting up tables and if you give it in specific instructions as to what you want the headings to be or the rows to be, whatever you choose or however you want to set up, it does a really good job, surprisingly, of doing it. I actually had it prepare, I'm coaching two soccer teams, one for my daughter and one for my youngest son and I want the rotations to be fair and we have six slots per game and I gave all the names and positions and it created the entire lineup for the entire year for me and so there's things like that and I use it, I'll put data, or not data, I'll put information, I haven't used it for data yet, but for information that I need to put in there for a case, I'll actually, has somebody's haven't organized it for me so it's a really easy way of organizing stuff that otherwise you'd be typing into a spreadsheet so you can take that and actually put it into a spreadsheet, that's why it makes it so valuable but that is my tip of the week. Jeff, thanks for coming on, really appreciate it, a lot of fun, I think it's cool that I get to talk to the guy that I was watching the video of not too long ago, so it's just funny that that just happened to click with me but thank you so much for coming on and lots of gold in this episode so I really appreciate your sharing. - It's my pleasure, thanks for having me. - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to maximumlawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time. - Hey, before you go, stick with me for just a minute 'cause I have a discount that is exclusive to Maximum Lawyer Podcast listeners only and I wanna make sure you know about it. As you all know, it is absolutely crucial to stay on top of calls with clients, with court staff, with judges. I even had a client the other day say that the provider was calling him saying that they've been trying to get ahold of us and they had left us a couple voicemails, well, that's impossible at our firm because we don't have voicemails. It's extremely important to us that a live person answer the phone and so we got rid of our voicemails a long time ago. That's where Lex Reception comes in. They're a 24/7 virtual receptionist service that specializes in legal clients. That's you, attorneys, law firm owners. They answer your calls, they screen callers, they schedule appointments and get this. They can even handle new client intakes. On top of that, you can customize the service to fit your firm's needs. 'Cause let's face it, state planning is different from personal injury. Personal injury is different from criminal defense. We all have different types of practice areas so you can customize these scripts that fit your firm and you can even set the hours that you want them to answer the phone. So for maximum lawyer listeners only that are new to Lex, you'll receive $250 off your first month. So, as I always talk about, the best part about an idea is taking action. All you have to do is quote maximum lawyer when you reach out to Lex, go to lexreception.com. When you're talking to them, say maximum lawyer to get your $250 discount. (air whooshing)
