Ep 255: The Videos She Made 15 Years Ago Are Still Making Sales with Mary Ann Bautista

SHOWNOTES

“In life you have to be willing to get your neck out there a little bit in order to learn something new and different.” That’s Mary Ann Bautista on how she and her business partner talked a client into letting them experiment with a fledgling platform called YouTube back in 2006. A couple of thousand dollars, a bit of leash, and a lot of what she cheerfully calls messing around later, that client has made hundreds of millions of dollars from the work — and some of those videos are still generating orders fifteen years on.

Mary Ann is the co-founder of TurboRank, a YouTube growth agency that increases visibility and revenue for its clients without spending anything on paid media. She has more than two decades in direct response marketing behind her, and nearly twenty years of working out how YouTube actually rewards content. More recently that has extended to something nobody had to think about before: how YouTube feeds the AI tools people now search with.

We Also Talked About

• Why YouTube is a pull platform rather than a push platform, and what that changes about the content you make.
• The diagnostic step that has to come first — understanding what your target client is actually searching for, down to the keyword.
• What a flywheel means in practice, and the pieces that keep it spinning beyond simply publishing more.
• How off-page engagement in communities like Reddit, Quora and Facebook groups feeds both YouTube’s recommendation algorithm and AI citations.
• Why that engagement work has to be done by humans, and the roughly-20-posts-before-you-mention-the-client rule.
• What to do if you’re not comfortable on camera, including faceless channels pulling millions of views.
• The publishing rhythm Mary Ann recommends: one long-form video a week plus five or six shorts, batch-produced.
• Why shorts run on a completely different algorithm, and why they should always drive back to your long-form.
• Whether to put your podcast on YouTube, and the marketing levers that exist in video but not in audio.
• Where AI genuinely helps in the process, and where it will get you found out.
• YouTube Shop, the Partner status you need to unlock it, and the platform fee it doesn’t charge.

Resources Mentioned

• TurboRank, Mary Ann’s YouTube growth agency — https://turborank.co/
• Mary Ann Bautista on LinkedIn, which is where she says to reach her — https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryannbautista/
• vidIQ, for turning long-form video into shorts — https://vidiq.com/online-business (affiliate link)
• Shopify, which connects to YouTube Shop — https://www.shopify.com/
• YouTube Shop — requires YouTube Partner status: 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours within a 365-day period
• Reddit, Quora and Facebook communities, as off-page engagement grounds

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👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

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Episode 255: The Videos She Made 15 Years Ago Are Still Making Sales with Mary Ann Bautista

[00:00:00]

Trudy Rankin: Back in 2006, Mary Ann Bautista and her business partner had a client who’d run out of paid media options, and they needed to come up with some way to actually help them find leads. So they had a couple of thousand dollars to play with, not a lot when it comes to ads and things like that, and a vague sense that this YouTube thing might be worth a look.

So they started, in her words, messing around, and that client has since then made hundreds of millions of dollars from the work they did, and there are offer codes buried in videos from 15 years ago that are still bringing in orders today. So in this episode, we get into why that keeps happening long after you stop touching the content, the step almost everybody gets wrong at the very beginning of a YouTube strategy, and how the arrival of AI search has very quietly, or maybe not so quietly, changed what it takes to get found, including one part of the work that has to stay really stubbornly human.

Now, Mary Ann is the [00:01:00] co-founder of TurboRank, a YouTube growth agency that has been driving revenue without a dollar of paid media for nearly 20 years.

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, and if you’re someone who needs a flexible work-from-home option, I help you grow the online side of your business so that you can earn more, stress less, and have greater freedom in how you live.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m your host, Trudy Rankin. And today I have got Mary Ann Bautista with me, and she is the founder of TurboRank, which is kind of a cool name, I have to say.

But it’s a YouTube growth agency, and the focus of what Mary Ann does is to increase visibility and revenue without using paid media. She helps people do that. And so welcome to the podcast, [00:02:00] Mary Ann.

Mary Ann Bautista: Thank you very much. Delighted to be here.

Trudy Rankin: That’s excellent because YouTube is something that’s always on my mind.

I have a YouTube channel. And it’s been an ongoing long-term experiment, which I have fun with, and I have to say that I take a little bit of a slow approach to it, which is fine by me. But I know that there’s lots of people out there, lots of business owners out there, who understand that being able to get onto video, getting onto YouTube, is actually kind of important.

But maybe it’s something they’re starting to do, maybe it’s something they’re dreaming about doing, but they just would like to know a little bit more about what to do and how to actually make it work once you do. If you’re going to put that much effort into doing something, you want to make sure it works.

So maybe just start by sharing just a little bit with our listeners your background, kind of how you got to where you are now, and then we can talk a little bit more about TurboRank.

Mary Ann Bautista: Sure. Sure. Happy to. I had an agency, a digital marketing agency, in the performance [00:03:00] direct marketing space, and just chugging along beautifully for a lot of years.

And we came up with this really great client that was quite a large client for us, and kind of ran out of paid media options fairly early on because of the category they were in. There were just places they couldn’t go and, hours of the day they couldn’t be. And perfectly legitimate, you know, legal entity, and very successful, but they were hungry to grow.

And so at the time, and this was in 2006, ‘7 they asked us, “What else can you do for us? Help us grow. How can we get more…” It was a direct-to-consumer business here in the United States. And so YouTube was just sort of a baby at that point, an infant. And my business partner and I kind of looked at each other and said, “You know, there’s this YouTube thing happening.

I wonder if there’s anything we can do for this client using YouTube.” And so effectively, we started [00:04:00] messing around and playing around in YouTube, and we learned over the course of a few years… It was lovely because the client gave us a little bit of leash and a little bit of money, which was really generous of them.

We figured out how to monetize this client’s content without using paid media, and we have done that very, very successfully ever since, so it’s been nearly a 20-year client. And we drive sales like you would not believe. We set up about 60 channels for them, all different flavors of what they do, and we’re able to keep about, I’m going to say about two-thirds of them to this day, and literally to this day, on a daily basis, they are getting sales that are directly attributable to those channels.

So it was, a great experience for us, and we developed so much knowledge that we decided a few years ago [00:05:00] to go away from the sort of digital marketing, we were in radio, we did TV, we did some digital, and just focus exclusively on what we now call the authority engine, which at the heart of it, at the center of the flywheel is YouTube.

And the reason for that is that YouTube’s content is the number one citation source in the LLMs. So they love YouTube. Google loves YouTube. They own YouTube. They love YouTube. And of course, getting ranking within YouTube is super important too because it’s the number two search engine in the world behind Google.

So that’s a little bit about how we got started. I hope that answers the question.

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s fascinating. Pardon me. And I loved the bit… This is just me, but I loved the bit where you talked about messing around. Because that is the most fun part of being able to start something [00:06:00] new, and that’s kind of that whole concept of being able to just play around a little bit.

Can you talk just about that just a little bit more? Because sometimes people might think that they have to already know all the answers or they’re afraid to ask their client if they can learn on them, basically. Talk a little bit about how you managed to work your way around that.

Mary Ann Bautista: You know, I think we were very lucky that we had this client where there was a lot of mutual sort of respect and affection. And it wasn’t a huge amount of money, couple thousand dollars, and in the beginning. And we showed just enough trajectory, just enough for them to say, “Yeah, let’s go a little further.

Let’s go a little further.” And that continued on for a very, very long time. And it just got to the point where we set up 60 channels. So, I think that in life you have to be willing to get your neck out there a little bit in order to learn something new and different. If you’re too [00:07:00] cautious, I just don’t see the payoff in that.

So we were lucky enough to have that sort of a mindset, and then to be able to convince this client that it was worth a little bit of risk. It wasn’t a lot of risk. We were doing some other really great work for them at the time, so, you know, if it had not worked out it would’ve been, hey, just a test that didn’t work, which is fine.

And most businesses have a little bit of budget for testing, right? They have a little bit of budget to throw out there and try something new. So that is how it started. Truthfully, it’s absolutely how it started, and now here we are so many years later and focusing entirely on this business.

Now, a lot has changed. Don’t get me wrong. A lot has changed within the YouTube world and with the advent and the new integration of the AI bots and the, you know, the way that they collect data. I mean, the world has changed. I can go into that a little bit, how we’ve changed to adapt to that too and to continue to drive value.

But-

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, we definitely, and we will definitely get into that, as we move forward. But I want to come back to what something else that you mentioned [00:08:00] when you were talking about getting started, getting TurboRank started, or what eventually became TurboRank. And that’s you mentioned the, just the whole flywheel concept.

Now, we’ve talked a little bit about flywheels here with other guests as well, but it’s something that I think a lot of people don’t really quite understand, or if they understand it, they haven’t quite figured out how to make it work for their business. Can you just talk about flywheels and how you use them in your business?

Mary Ann Bautista: We have a lot of different flywheels, but I would say that the one that sort of works at the center of our business is great YouTube content that matches the demand that is occurring from search. If you start there in the center with understanding what it is that your ICP or your target customer is actually looking for from you and how they are asking that question very specifically, I [00:09:00] mean, down to the keyword level, then you can create great content.

And then out of that content comes all these other elements that form the flywheel. And you have to do a lot of things right. Don’t get me wrong. This is not an overnight snap, snap, can’t make it happen that quickly. It’s not like paid media. This is not renting anyone’s attention on somebody else’s audience.

This is developing and growing your own owned media asset that you get to keep forever. So it really is a little bit of a different animal. It can drive sales. It can drive leads. It can give you the authority you need to convince people to hit the buy button or agree to sign that contract.

But I would say absolutely the number one step and the thing that is at the center of our flywheel and for our clients is understanding what content needs to be produced, because that is not where most people start. [00:10:00] Most people start with, “What’s my initiative? What do I enjoy talking about?

What’s the newest promotion for the business? What’s the thing that we find fascinating?” And frankly, that is myopic, and it just doesn’t work very well.

Trudy Rankin: I’m laughing just a little bit because I am definitely guilty of talking about the thing that I’m most interested in.

Because I think as human beings we do that. But I think you’re so correct. It’s really about what is it other people need to hear about or want to hear about and that’s why they’re searching for it. I think that’s important. Let’s take one step back before we kind of move on to the next question, and that is maybe just for those people who maybe are just new to the concept of a flywheel, just what’s your definition of a flywheel?

Mary Ann Bautista: Oh, my goodness. A flywheel is a concept whereby once you get things spinning, then all of the parts feed into the continuation of that movement. That’s not probably a great [00:11:00] definition. What do you think? I’m not sure. That’s how we see it. I mean, I can visualize it. And by the way, I’m not a mechanic.

Somebody many years ago said, “Here, you know, you’ve got a flywheel. You’ve got to create a flywheel.” I’m like, Google.

That’s my understanding.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. I think it’s a good, that’s a good definition.

If I was to describe it in a visual way, I would think of it as being like a little bit of a heavier bicycle wheel where when every time you pedal it goes a little bit faster and faster and faster, and then you can stop pedaling for a while and it just keeps going. Or like a merry-go-round.

Mary Ann Bautista: Momentum, yes.

Trudy Rankin: Momentum.

Mary Ann Bautista: Yeah. Yes, yes. I would take it a tiny bit further and say that just pedaling harder doesn’t necessarily make it work. You have to do some of the other good things to make it work. In our case, you have to optimize your content properly. You have to know your content.

You have to feed the beast in other ways. You’ve got to understand what’s the best time of the week and the day and the hour that [00:12:00] seems to get you the best results. We believe in off-page marketing, which is how we’ve sort of gotten into this whole authority engine thing. That helps to feed the flywheel.

So it’s multiple elements, but there’s always something at the core, right?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Let’s take that just a little bit further because we’ll get in a little bit more deeply into the whole AI side of things in terms of kind of how you use it.

But we all know that AI’s changing the world. It’s changed already how search works. Can you talk just a little bit about the sorts of things that you need to think about in terms of content that’s created, but also in terms of how do we show up these days, you know, in the AI search and all of those things that nobody ever used to have to think about at all ever before but now they do.

And it can feel like an extra load.

Mary Ann Bautista: Oh, yeah.

Trudy Rankin: It feels like there’s more that we have to do these days to be able to show up online. And it’s important to show up online because otherwise we’re not going to get found. [00:13:00] But could you talk a little bit about the approach that you bring to that whole concept of showing up online and wrapping it into that concept of the flywheel, which you started to touch on already?

Mary Ann Bautista: Sure sure. Okay, so with the advent of the LLMs and AI as they relate to search, okay, it really threw general search and SEO on its ear. The old tactics, while they still work for some parts of search, they do not work with AI. The LLMs just don’t work that way. So we very fortunately had already figured out that when you go out to communities online communities that are having conversations about your category, your subject, your product, your brand, and you engage with them, and I call it stirring the pot.

You go out to these high authority sites. When you [00:14:00] can share, at the right moment of course, because we could talk about when it’s appropriate and when it’s not appropriate, but when you do it properly and the traffic that starts to come back into YouTube from those sources feed the YouTube beast even more.

You will get higher ranking, more targeting, and into their recommendation algorithm, which is a separate algorithm, a separate piece of the flywheel from just the regular search algorithm. So that is something that we learned early on. I mean, we’ve been doing that for nearly 20 years, okay?

But then when AI became a part of the search world, we realized, wow, weren’t we fortunate to be in that space, because that is also a very, very tactical, best standard way of feeding AI to get your business or your name or whatever it is you’re trying to [00:15:00] accomplish into the citation.

Because you can’t just be in one place. It’s almost more important who is talking about you and what they are saying than what you have to say about yourself. So that is becoming so very important. So we were already sort of doing that for just the YouTube purpose, and now we’re doing it for the purpose of getting everyone into AI.

But you know what’s really important for people to understand? This world is moving very fast. Google is still the number one search engine in the world. Number two is YouTube, and then behind that would be all the AI. You know, the Perplexity and Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT. But what is happening is it’s those sectors are growing very fast.

So you need to be ready so that when they are eclipsing other forms of search, that you are not behind the ball. You can’t sit on the sidelines and wait, because this is coming at us all and you want to be [00:16:00] there

Trudy Rankin: So we have talked on the show a few times about just the whole concept of a lot of people feel quite uncomfortable with creating videos.

They don’t like their face. They don’t like the way their voice sounds and all that sort of stuff. But just assuming that somebody’s managed to kind of get over that discomfort with themselves, and they are wanting to help promote their business and start to build a flywheel. Flywheels don’t get built overnight. They take time to put together. How would you suggest that somebody who is running… We’ll just make up an example here. So somebody who’s running a business and their focus is on maybe physical products, or maybe they have a service business or whatever. What would be the first steps that they might need to take in order to start building this kind of a flywheel where the focus is YouTube?

Mary Ann Bautista: Let me address the earlier part of your question first, which is people who are uncomfortable getting on video.

That’s okay. [00:17:00] We’re all not cut out for it, I get that. We all have different skills, and we should lean into the ones that serve us best, right, and that we feel most comfortable with. There are all kinds of other ways to create great content without putting your face on the video. So you can pay someone.

You can do faceless accounts. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite YouTube channels is an Australian channel. It’s hilarious. I’m not going to be able to tell you the name of it. It is a guy who has a drain clearing business, and he goes out and clears these disgusting… It’s a plumber basically, right?

Disgusting, backed up drains. Oh, my Lord, that man is so hilarious, and you never see his face. And he has millions of views. And I bet you gets lots of business from it. But anyway, so that is my answer to that part of the question. And then the second part of the question was how do you get started?

What do you start thinking about?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah.

Mary Ann Bautista: Okay. Okay. Step number [00:18:00] one is the diagnostic, the audit, the evaluation period. You must understand what it is that your client, target client is looking for. And then out of that you can build a content calendar that addresses those, because that’s the low-hanging fruit.

All right? If you can create content and then properly optimize it so that the algorithm knows who the heck you are and who you’re serving, then that’s golden right there. People think that YouTube is a push platform. It is not a push platform. You don’t just throw a video up and it pushes it out there.

Doesn’t work like that. It is a pull platform. You put up content that matches existing demand, and the algorithm helps you to pull that viewer in to see your content. Okay? So that’s, understanding that is really critical. Then you need to get on a regular commitment of publishing. And I know that’s hard.

[00:19:00] Everybody, you know, some people love routine and some people hate routine. But we recommend batch producing so that you are always in a situation where you have a couple of videos in the bank ready to go. All right? So then if the world blows up and you’re a mess and you’ve got some client fire going on you’ve gotta deal with, then you’re okay for a couple weeks.

We strongly recommend one long form per week and about five or six shorts, most of which are derived from the long form. Now, if that is just way too big of a lift for you or your business, do one every other week, but do it consistently. Do it consistently. So get started. You have to know how to title, you have to know how to tag, you have to know how to meta tag and title tag and describe correctly.

That’s huge. There’s a lot of little tweaks and little things that we can do to make it show up better. Great organization, great playlists, all that kind of thing, all of that stuff really helps. And then of course what we [00:20:00] do, which is a little bit harder, you might be able to do some of it on your own, but is the off-page marketing.

The going out to these other third-party sites that are high value, Web 2.0, high authority, and stirring the pot and slowly and gently engaging such that we get that traffic flow back into YouTube and that AI picks us up.

Trudy Rankin: I’ve got a number of questions that we could go off on a whole bunch of different tangents, but-

Mary Ann Bautista: Sure.

Trudy Rankin: I think one of the key questions that I want to ask, and it’s partly for me, but it’s also partly because I do kind of follow that rhythm on YouTube. You know, once a fortnight I have a video goes up, and then every week I have, like just about every day I have a short that goes out.

Recently, one of the shorts that for me, my numbers are very small, and I’m actually okay with that because it does what I need it to do.

Mary Ann Bautista: The right people. It’s not about how many, it’s about the right people seeing your content. So good for you for realizing that.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. But one of them took off, like more than normal, for me. And it was [00:21:00] actually, it was a question asked that was focused around, or it was a short that was focused around podcasting. So I want to ask this question because I think that people are actually interested in this, and that is that it’s, a lot of people do just audio podcasting.

And then some people are going, “Well, hang on, wait a minute, maybe I should be doing video podcasting.”

Mary Ann Bautista: Yes.

Trudy Rankin: And what would be your recommendation in terms of having your podcast up on YouTube as part of that content?

Mary Ann Bautista: Yes, do it.

Trudy Rankin: That was quick.

Mary Ann Bautista: And the reason is that there are levers to be pulled in the video world that do not exist in audio podcasting.

It’s, there are just not as many marketing tactics that can be employed in audio. There’s really very few, frankly that you can do to get yourself discoverable within the audio world. And most of them rely on you to share the message. You know, send [00:22:00] out your newsletters, tell all your friends, do all that kind of thing.

But it is really, really difficult, and it’s slow-growing, right, to get a podcast to take off and to get numbers that are significant. In the YouTube world, there are just a lot more levers to pull on. And people love video.

They love watching video. In fact, I have this great stat to share.

In the world of search engine results, when you do a search and in the organic space that there is a regular written, verbal or whatever, you’re going to read this result, so it’s going to take you to a site and you’re going to read something, and then right below it there is actually a video result that will take you to a YouTube channel or maybe, a Vimeo channel or something like that, you get two to three times greater click-through on video. People like video. They love consuming video. And we can have a long conversation on another day about whether that’s a good or a bad thing for our world, but it is what it is. So you want to be in [00:23:00] video for sure.

And there are ways to do video with a podcast without you having to appear on the screen as well, if you’re shy or you’re just not comfortable with your face, or you don’t feel like you have the right equipment or whatever it is. Although you would be amazed at what kind of content one of these little babies, I don’t know if you can see that, one of these babies can produce for you.

Although we have sort of a basic package that we recommend. I mean, you’ve been doing this long enough, Trudy, you know that it’s better to have just a slightly upgraded equipment. But it doesn’t even cost a lot of money. I mean, you could probably get set up for under $1,000.

Trudy Rankin: Oh, well and truly, you can get set up for quite a lot less than that actually.

If you’re just getting started, yeah, definitely. And talking about equipment or tools and things like that, for people listening, if you’ve been thinking about doing a podcast or you’ve been thinking about starting a YouTube channel, there are tools out there that actually help with that. I mean, I don’t know. I’d be interested to know kind of what your favorite tools are that you use with that whole process of either creation or publishing [00:24:00] or management of it, basically.

Mary Ann Bautista: I have to tell you, we use a lot of tools of course.

We’ve developed some of our own tools, but I will tell you that the best thing to do is to go 100% human on your content. There’s no question it is absolutely the best thing. People can tell and the bots can tell. There are all kinds of bots and agents on all the platforms now that are dinging AI content.

So we really recommend being as credible and authentic as you possibly can be. I can’t give away all of our trade secrets. We also have a data scientist on the team. She’s an amazing, amazing tool in our cache of tools. But yeah I would say lean into authenticity and credibility as much as you possibly can, because there’s a lot of slop.

I think I just read the statistic that within social medias right now, it’s something like 40% fully AI generated. And people don’t like [00:25:00] it. They can figure it out. Certainly use AI in the process of researching and there are some AI thumbnail tools that are pretty good.

You know, there’s a lot of good tools out there.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, for myself personally, I wasn’t able to do the Shorts. I’ve known for a long time that I should be doing video, you know, the short-form videos. I just couldn’t make it happen until I actually used vidIQ. Until I was able to start using that, and it got the AI part of that which recognizes where you should chop up your video, got good enough that it actually can work pretty well almost all the time.

Mary Ann Bautista: That’s a great tool. Something that’s really important to understand about Shorts, if you don’t mind me inserting this here-

Trudy Rankin: absolutely, please

Mary Ann Bautista: is that the Shorts work off of a different algorithm. They are not the same. It’s not the same algorithm as the classic long form horizontal aspect ratio. The Shorts are vertical, and what happens is it’s almost like a lottery. When you put your Short up, you publish a [00:26:00] Short, the algorithm is looking at all the Shorts that have been published within a few minutes, and it shares them out, and the ones that seem to be rising to the top and getting more views and more engagement are the ones that it pushes.

So Shorts are a little bit of a, I don’t know, kind of a test. You can have a great Short that doesn’t do anything, and then you can have a very mediocre Short that does phenomenally well. But the key, key thing about Shorts is make sure they are linking to and driving to your long form.

Because if you are a business that has anything that’s more than a knee-jerk decision, any kind of complexity, any kind of a bigger commitment, any kind of more of an evaluation phase, those people are hungry for more information and detail, and they’re only going to get that on the long form video.

You don’t have enough time in a Short. I think the average Short is, like, 30 seconds now. I think you can go up to three minutes, but nobody watches a three-minute Short, so don’t do it. Keep it under a [00:27:00] minute.

And link-

Trudy Rankin: Keep it short.

Mary Ann Bautista: To your long form. Keep it short, yes.

It’s the, you know, the flipping, the, scan, the… What do you call that? Scanning, the thumbing through your content

Trudy Rankin: Scrolling, yeah. Doom scrolling maybe.

Mary Ann Bautista: Doom scrolling. Doom scrolling is the word I was searching for.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, yeah. So, I’m just aware that our time is rapidly slipping past.

It just goes so quick. I do have a little bit more of a question around AI. You’ve mentioned the fact about using AI in the process. So talk a little bit about how you use AI to help your clients, and if you’ve got some examples, yeah, please share them.

Mary Ann Bautista: Well, we have some tools internally and I would say that probably the thing that we do the most is once we have our keyword list, we use AI to help us generate scripts, generate titles, generate tags. Those are the kinds of things. Now, we always review and put a human touch to [00:28:00] it. You can’t keyword stuff, that doesn’t work, and AI makes mistakes all the time, right?

We’ve all seen it. That’s probably the number one way that we use it. We have not found that AI is very helpful in the engagement element of what we do. When we go out to Reddit, Quora, Facebook communities that are having conversations about our clients’ topics and we engage and get involved, it has to be human.

It really does. And so we have a staff, they are overseas, they are amazing digital marketers, and they are not, US and Australian paid folks. But they are great and they love the work and it’s great for them and it’s great for us. But we actually do it that way as opposed to any attempt to use AI bots or agents to engage in that way.

They will suss you out and boot you [00:29:00] quicker than I can say goodnight. So you really have to be authentic there as well.

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s a really, really good point because I know that just the whole idea of having to engage with something that’s AI kind of gives most people the icks. And they just don’t…

There’s just come some sort of this instinctive rejection of they were expecting human-to-human contact and they got a bot instead, and that makes people cross.

Mary Ann Bautista: Well, and I have to tell you, our policy is that we never engage in these platforms from the position of the client. We do not assume the role of the client.

We are out there to encourage conversation and to stir up a little bit of conversation and guide it towards touching on a subject matter that maybe our client really needs to explain or, you know, sharing… Oftentimes we will do 20 or so engagement opportunities, 20 or so posts before we even bring up the client.

You have to get warmed up. You have to let your presence be known. You [00:30:00] have to become trustworthy. So this is really, really important work that you don’t go in with a sledgehammer. You do not go in that way. Does not work.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So just before we wrap up, maybe share your favorite story about, you know, maybe one of the clients where, who’ve, rags to riches.

I’m joking a little bit, but, you know, what’s your favorite story about how you’ve been able to help a client?

Mary Ann Bautista: You know, I have to go back to that initial one that I told you about. We started in roughly 2007, and that client has literally made hundreds of millions of dollars from our work within YouTube and with our off-page authority engine.

It has just been an amazing… I mean, and you can’t turn it off. That’s the thing about it. It doesn’t turn off easily. Not that you should ever stop, because you always want to kind of keep going and feeding the beast a little bit, but literally we have offer codes that we embedded into that [00:31:00] content 15 years ago that they still get orders on.

We haven’t really touched that since. So it just goes on and on and on, and we’ve had many, many clients for a number of years that just get great success. We’re reporting every single month. We’re showing them where they’re getting into the AI citations. We’re showing them how.

It’s pretty much like a hockey stick, right? You start off and the views will grow and the subs will grow, and it just continues to go up and up and up. And as they develop new capabilities within their product line or, adjacent products and stuff, we can feed that in. So I would say that that one account really, really honestly just kind of blows most people’s minds, you know?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah, that’s-

Mary Ann Bautista: Oh, let me add this, and I didn’t get a chance to mention this. I know, I’m sorry, to the end here. YouTube has something called YouTube Shop, and a lot of people are not terribly aware of this. It’s not as big or as popular or well-known as TikTok Shop But [00:32:00] YouTube Shop is amazing because once you get to YouTube Partner status and you can connect it, and that’s usually a midterm goal for us, is get our client to you know, if they have an e-commerce offer and they’re on Shopify, the Shopify platform, we can connect YouTube Shop. And the beauty of that is that people get to purchase from within the video environment. Very simple. I just recently bought an eye pencil so easily, right? But here’s the coolest thing. High value clients because there is no platform fee.

So unlike Walmart, Amazon, TikTok, which charge you in the upwards of 20 to 25% for every sale you make, YouTube charges zero currently. So it’s a very, very high revenue, high value sale. So that’s another huge thing that we do for our clients if they’re in that e-commerce space and that is something that they want to achieve.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, that’s interesting because I’ve noticed that YouTube’s got this YouTube Shop and I [00:33:00] honestly, I didn’t know that much about it, so I’ve been looking into it. So yeah. So if somebody was going to get involved with that, the first thing of course is they have to be at the Partner status.

And then do they-

Mary Ann Bautista: That’s right. It’s not that hard. 1,000 subs and 4,000 watch hours within a 365-day period, we can get you there.

Trudy Rankin: And then people just basically just go ahead and sign up for the shop? What is that step they take?

Mary Ann Bautista: It is an integration between your YouTube channel and your Shopify platform. E-commerce site.

There are a couple of other platforms that they also integrate. Shopify’s huge, and obviously that was the first one they did, and they have others that will be coming online. And there are some workarounds, just so you know. In case you don’t have Shopify and you’re really interested in this, ring me up and we can explore and I can tell you what it will take to get you there.

But yeah, it is a new channel of revenue in an era where what’s happening with paid CPMs? They’re going up. What’s happening with response rates? [00:34:00] They’re dropping down. So you know, everybody in that space is really squeezed right now for where are they going to get their orders from, and these are high value orders because of the lack of that platform fee.

Trudy Rankin: Interesting. Very interesting. Mary Ann, it’s been great talking with you. If somebody was wanting to reach out to you, ring you up and say, “Hey, get me onto this thing,” where’s the best place for them to reach out?

Mary Ann Bautista: You know, I really think LinkedIn. I’m big on LinkedIn, at it every single day, and it’s very simple.

Mary Ann, spelled the old-fashioned way, M-A-R-Y space A-N-N, and the last name is Bautista, B-A-U-T-I-S-T-A. And then of course, if you can’t remember all of that, go to TurboRank and then you can see who the co-founders are and just hit me up with a connection request and we can certainly start a conversation. I’m more than happy to give advice, share some tips, whatever.

We really, really love YouTube and we love to see businesses be successful on YouTube, whether they’re clients or not. [00:35:00]

Trudy Rankin: No, fantastic. Thank you so much for that.

Mary Ann Bautista: My pleasure.

Trudy Rankin: There you have it, and if Mary Ann has got you thinking that you should finally do something about YouTube, here’s a way to start that takes just about 10 minutes and doesn’t cost you anything at all. So open up YouTube, click into the search bar, and start typing the question that your customer would actually ask.

Not the way you’d phrase it, the way they would phrase it. Then let the autocomplete finish it for you and write down every suggestion it offers. Now do that with five or six different openings, and what you’ll have at the end is a list of things that people are already looking for in their own words, which is a far better starting point for your next video than whatever you happen to feel like talking about.

And I do say that as someone who is entirely guilty of talking about the thing I find most interesting, not what I think my viewers might find most interesting on YouTube, although I’m getting much better at it. Now, Mary [00:36:00] Ann’s links and everything else we mentioned are in the show notes, so have a look there.

And if this one was useful, hit follow so the next episode just turns up without you having to go hunt for it. And if you’ve got an extra 30 or 40 seconds, a quick review really does help the right people come across the show and start to listen to it. And when you want some practical help building the online side of your business and you’d like that help to land in your inbox each week, come and grab my newsletter at onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter.

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