EP115: 16 Million Views on YouTube – Attorney Jeff Hampton’s Guide to Growing Your Law Firm with Video

We have a specific phone number associated with that video, and we have received over $650,000 in business from that video over the last two and a half years. Awesome. And we know that we can track it, and people will refer to it, and it's part of our intake system. And even now, two and a half years later, still getting calls, still getting calls. And Jay. Look, here's the best part. When you do this, it's not just you're getting calls, but if I get calls from an ad, the difference between that being a cold lead and a YouTube lead, a YouTube lead, I usually have at least a 20 to 25% higher conversion rate, because they already act like they know me. Do

Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules, Jay Berkowitz,

well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time you're listening to this podcast, welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. We have a great guest today, Jeff Hampton, and he's going to teach us some really incredible YouTube strategies, Jeff, welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast.

Thanks, Jay. I appreciate you inviting me, and I'm happy to be here. Awesome.

Thank you. And before I get going, Jeff's also agreed to speak at tgr live 2025 our live event. And we'll put a link in the show notes, and you can check it out. We've got an awesome slate of speakers coming together, and we're booked for March 10 and 11th, 2025, and if you're a regular listener, you've heard some of the amazing speakers from last year we had Justin lovely, talking about artificial intelligence, and Bill Biggs, talking about strategy, and myself talking about, you know, growth strategies for law firms. So we will be doing it all again, bigger and better, 2025 on the ocean this year at Delray Beach, which is adjacent to Boca Raton. We've got a great, great location. We were there with the team last week and scouting everything out. So I'm really excited about that. I'm really excited Jeff's going to be joining us. So without further setup for me, Jeff, tell us a little bit about your firm and your background.

Yeah, so I, I'm actually the founder of two different law firms. I have a criminal defense law firm where we have seven attorneys, a staff of 20, where we're in the Dallas Fort Worth, Texas area. And because I have a background as a prosecutor, I worked as a prosecutor for five and a half years doing, you know, everything from shoplifting the capital murder cases for a while, getting some trial experience.

That's great, right? That's great setup. And a lot of attorneys are very successful who saw the other side, right?

100% not only that, it's nowadays, it's really hard to get trial experience unless you go do something like that, because there's so few, very, very few jury trials. So it was good experience for me. I was able to quickly get 100 jury trials under my belt in that five and a half years I was there. So I got out and started that practice Hampton law, which ended up becoming fulgent criminal defense attorneys with my partner, Brandon Fulgham, and then what we did is I ended up a few years ago, I started a separate law firm known as STR law guys, where we provide nationwide asset protection strategies for it kind of really niche Airbnb owners, right? So specifically for Airbnb owners, and I got into this because I own Airbnbs, my myself. I'm a real estate investor when it comes to that. So as part of that, it was a natural kind of Insider's opportunity to work with other investors. So we're talking about, you know, LLCs, trusts, different strategies to help protect their assets and provide privacy and things like that. And so that's what those are. The two law firms that I started and eventually ended up kind of going on a personal growth journey where I grew when it comes to when it was really coming to marketing and just finding outsider ways, not just what people are doing in the legal space, but find ways that people are successful outside of the legal space, and implementing those strategies In the legal environment to really help scale the business.

That's a great tip. And, you know, the way I heard it expressed before, I was the director of marketing for Coca Cola in Canada, and they brought, they would always fly people in from other countries to work for a year or two, and, you know, get experience in those countries, and also fill holes in the management team. And they brought in this real superstar from the United States, and I think he'd just been in France for three or four years, and he taught us this lesson. He said, shop the other aisles. So like we always, you know, work for cola. You're always going to the grocery store. But he said, you know, go and look at what promotions are. On the cereal boxes or on the potato chips. And you know what, what end aisle displays. You know, did the did the potato chips? Guys sell through Publix or whatever? And you can gain more ideas by shopping the other aisles. So that's what you're saying. Is like, learn from other industries. What's working that you could apply legal

100% Yeah, that. I think that's the biggest thing is I somewhat and I love being a lawyer. I'll just be but I'll be frank with you, I don't, I don't really practice law as much as I used to. Now, my biggest thing that I do is I, my mental association is that I'm an entrepreneur that happens to be a lawyer, and I love being able to to be able to manage businesses in a in an environment where just, quite frankly, lawyers need to step it up and understand some of the really strong marketing strategies that exist that doing things the old way, just you're going to get kind of left behind if you don't start adopting some of those new philosophies and strategies.

Awesome. You know, give us a couple of those strategies. I mean, we'll get into YouTube in depth, but, you know, maybe touch on a couple other things that you picked up from other environments that you brought to law. Yeah.

So, I mean, one of the things that I did is, as part of my personal growth kind of journey, is I joined other marketing groups and Masterminds with people that had nothing to do with law, and I started just really throwing myself into seeing what they're doing, whether it's email marketing strategies and it's it depends on your area of law. So one of the things I try to tell people in civil particularly in civil law, in areas like estate planning and financial financial strategies and things like that, is I'll say, hey, look email marketing lead, you know, lead magnets, things that you can do to start owning your own list and then leveraging that list and retargeting and remarketing, those are things that really transformed that. If you're already getting some warm traffic, and I'm not even talking about YouTube yet, and once you integrate this, integrate this into the YouTube strategy, boy, you can get leverage. I mean, you can start talking about serious leads coming your way. I that's what I looked at. Is I started looking at it first is visibility. And I say, How do I create visibility? That's the currency of exchange and marketing is you got to be seen, right? Then, after you talk about what visibility is, once I'm out there, then I start talking about, okay, how do I how do I start fostering and nurturing that visibility, where it starts creating trust, and building that trust and then being able to to retarget them again? Those are, those are some of the areas that I do, including artificial intelligence. I started creating different custom made bots that do specific things to help create, you know, good copy for emails, different things like that, to reach out. And a lot of attorneys are probably starting to latch on to this. But when you tie when you tie that into YouTube with it, you start talking about some really transformative results. That's

great. I just want to touch one one minute back on the Airbnb law firm, because there's a relevant question that a lot of people, you know, we discuss and strategically, is a lot of partners. I'm trying to think, oh, I met Stephanie from the lawyers this week, and I think her husband does criminal, she does mostly corporate or vice versa. And there's a challenge, right when, particularly from a marketing standpoint, from a branding standpoint, like, if you do two relatively different types of law, can you communicate that on one website? Can you communicate? You know, should you have two SEO strategies? Can they be on the same website? And you know, the counter argument is, you should have one website, because it's hard enough to SEO, optimize two websites to build links to two websites, to build Google reviews to two Google Maps, Gbps. So is yours because it's a different corporate entity with a different partner, or was that part of that strategic decision? Yeah,

so it's interesting. So the criminal defense side of things is so, so different. It's a local service based business, right? So there were our big thing is dedicated sites, super optimized. GBP, really trying to get the business places lined up, making sure the SEO and the ads all tie in, because it's all in Dallas, Fort Worth that's it. I mean, you know, we do cover some other areas, but it's so local based, you know, the asset protection business, we have relationships with other lawyers. So the great thing is, is it's nationwide based, and it's much more relationship marketing. So I thought this out from the beginning, is to say, who is an attorney should do this. Who is my customer avatar? Who are they really so who is my ideal customer? If I could create this avatar of who they are, what they make, their demographics, psychographics, and then I know what they're looking for. A lot of those. I built that entire business, seven figure law firm, business, not really from traditional digital marketing, even though we have that, but it was mainly through providing value to other influencers in that space, other coaches, other people who are already having access to people, and then being able to go in and say, You guys probably haven't heard the legal answer for how to protect all this, I can provide value to your group by bringing this in, because you can't speak about it, and as a result of that, you're also transferring your authority over to me, and I'm able to start building a relationship quicker. Well, needless to say, that leads to me hosting a webinar where I gather all those people's email addresses, which now goes into my email campaigns so I can retarget them, and that, by itself, made us a seven figure business in less than nine months, just by fostering those relationships with those those type of contacts. Yeah,

and the basic principle is, you own a property, you're turning it into an Airbnb, or you bought it to be an Airbnb, and you realize there's a lot of legal risk, and obviously people with these properties have some financial assets at risk, so you really gotta be careful, right? 100%

and they have the means to pay for it, because they've, they've already bought this, you know, half a million or million dollar property, and so they, they're in on it. It's not like, it's not like they don't have the financial means to protect themselves, so it's a great it's really just showing the value I might and I'm going to just say this, a lot of attorneys suffer from fearing that if they give away all their secrets, that they'll that the client won't work with them. That is a that is a fallacy. It's not true. If you give away your secrets, people will want to buy your implementation 100% of the time. And if they don't want to do that, you don't want the DIY people anyway, the DIY people that are coming in are going to be your worst clients. So when I give that stuff away, what I find is that customer avatar goes, Man, I've never heard it explained now I understand it. Let's work together.

That's great. And, you know, I'll quote another one of my, you know, mentors, friends, Jeff Walker, who wrote launch product launch number one New York Times bestseller, and teaches basically information marketing, and that's a lot of what you're talking about. I see a nodding your head, you know, Jeff and probably Frank Kerr and Brent Burchard and some of these guys who share their knowledge, and Jeff always said, you want to give away about 30% of the content and give away some of your really best stuff, because that's going to incite people to say, oh, yeah, I do want to sign up for that email list. I do want to download that white paper. I do want to attend that webinar. So do you have a 30% rule, or how much you actually giving away and how much, how much of the legal work still has to happen after the fact? No, that's

a great question. So I connect a lot of dots, enough dots to create curiosity and to create, man, I wonder if I could do this. Well, no, I just, I don't know the rest of it, right? So I maybe I sometimes violate the 30% and I go a little over, but there's not enough dots that are connected where someone can just go do it. There's still something that's sitting out there, but most people want to know enough of the insider information that they trust you know what you're doing, right? And so when they hear that, that's where I agree with Jeff Walker and Frank Kern, all the rest of them. You give that information that's out there. So few attorneys do this, so very few, they put it behind a paywall, and they don't even know what you're getting, and then you got to pay, and then they hand it to you, and you don't even always even know what it is, especially in the civil realm, this happens a lot that if you do it a little different and it's more customer friendly, then you're going to have referrals like crazy, and you're also going to have a lot of people coming in, you know, getting into your digital marketing and really wanting to work with you.

Have you actually done a product launch formula as Jeff's product? So

I did it with a group of myself, a CPA, a construction guy in the real estate space, where we provided a whole wide solution for asset protection. And, yeah, we did it. It worked really well. It made it I mean, I think it was like over 300,000 people in revenue that signed up in a 30 day period on a launch. And so it did really well. Thank you. Yeah, it was great. I mean, it was good working with them too, and it was a comprehensive solution that no one else was offering and really needed in the space. Yeah,

the pleasure of working with Jeff on a couple launches. We created a internet marketers blueprint, and we also created internet marketing club. And I'm going back about 10 years, so you can't find them. But the good news is, all the content we created is now on a product we call 10 golden rules tgru. 10 golden rules University, which is a training platform that our new employees access, and our clients have access to if they want Awesome, that's great. And you know, just before we leave that topic, two or three tips like, what are the things if you have an asset, you. And you're thinking of renting it out. What are the most important things to protect or how do you protect it? Yeah, I

mean, if you're talking about rental real estate, you know, one of the things I tell people is the very first thing is, you got to get your insurance. Right now with short term rentals, it's crazy to realize that 65 to 70% of short term rental owners have the wrong kind of insurance. They have residential coverage without commercial coverage. And so true asset protection in this country is primarily making where you disincentivize the lawyer from wanting to sue you individually, and they go down to the insurance. And so then that's when you get into differences in LLC laws. People think, you know, so that's tip. Number one, is insurance. Number two is people think that any LLC from any state is good. If you know anything about the laws in California or New York, you'll know that LLCs are borderline worthless there. And the reality of it is it's not hard for lawyers to pierce the veil. There's a lot of really bad law for property owners. So that's when you start talking about holding companies. Whether it's a holding company from Wyoming, Nevada, there's some good law in Texas, Delaware. That's when I start trying to educate investors to say, hey, look, if you're a multi state investor, you need to have a comprehensive strategy of not just having insurance, not just having an LLC, but a holding company that actually provides some some multi state protection for you, for privacy and charging order protection. That's exactly the kind of stuff where I, when I educate real estate investors on that, their eyes kind of blow up. They just go, I've never heard it clearly explained why that matters.

Another question that I always have for people with like, couple different businesses, do you do, like, one one business in the morning and one business in the afternoon, or how do you allocate your time?

Well, no, for me, and this goes back to what you've got back there on EOS and traction. For me, it's easier to do when you have a good integrator. So one of the things I absolutely you know, whenever I get a business going, I want to establish the proof of concept once we're into that seven figure business range where we're really getting some revenues. One of the biggest hires for me is hiring a top level integrator. And if that integrator can really run that business, then I focus on the things I'm really good at that already kind of work within the same realm of my other businesses, which is the marketing, the YouTube, the relationship marketing, the building of relationships. That's where I have my my strengths, and I want the integrator to be the one that's working on the SOPs, the operational situation, stuff which really makes sure that the business is growing.

Yeah, and if you haven't experienced Eos, we did a great webinar and podcast on EOS. Mike Morris, the $200 million law firm in Detroit was one of Gina Wickman, the author of tractions first customers, first clients. Yeah, Mike was on that. And our implementer, Gerardo escolano, who's phenomenal, was on that webinar. So check out our EOS webinar and podcast if you want want the basics. And I always tell people, don't buy the book. Traction, like for most, most of the people who we're probably talking to today are the founder, the visionary type. And I recommend the book, get a grip, because that's actually written for the the visionary, for the founder, for the CEO, the Rainmaker, in a firm. And if you read, get a grip, then you'll get it because I had traction 10 years ago and I struggled with it, because that's really written for the integrator. Yes, well,

that's a great point, because I've read both of those, and I completely agree with you. When I read traction, I was overwhelmed. I just looked at it. I was like, How can I do this? But, yeah, get a grip that that helps you, which is a great title. You do have to get a grip and understand there's a certain way that you have to manage this and run it otherwise, you you know, visionaries cannot usually do both at all, and you've got to make sure and create that distinction. And I'm the best thing I ever did was get a good integrator so that I'm not running around with my head cut off and just feeling like I'm out of sorts, you know, fantastic.

So let's take this to the part of your journey where you started discovering YouTube. And really, the, you know, the thing that really excited me about Jeff agreeing to do this and and speaking at our conference, is talking about YouTube. He's got really amazing YouTube strategies and a great, you know, sort of presence on YouTube, huge numbers. And really what differentiates is, he's doing business. He's really getting lawyer clients, legal clients. So tell us about your YouTube journey, and then we can get into some of the strategies. Yeah. So

for me, you know, this started for me back in the in the pandemic, and you know, everybody was, there's a period of time sitting around, and I found two types of people during the pandemic, one who just kind of sat around and waited it out and watched Netflix or just waiting for things to get better, and then others that are just sitting around saying, What can I do now that I've got all this extra time to create a differentiation for myself in the market? And I'll be frank with you, I love Seo. I love ads, but I was looking at it. Saying everybody's playing the same game, and what is there a different game I can play where there's very few fish in this pond, and I can quickly differentiate myself from everyone else. And that's when, when I learned that YouTube was the second largest search engine in the world, I looked at it and said, Wait a minute. Okay, I'm going to start creating content like I would for blogs, but now I'm going to do it through video, and I'm going to look to optimize those same videos, those same videos that are on what I call narrow content, and I'm going to now see if I can rank on YouTube. And so what I did is, that's what I started doing. I the 8020 principle. I took, what is the 20% of my practice areas that make me 80% of my revenue. And I turned around, and I started creating that type of content. And as I did it, I created a list of some FAQs. Started figuring out, what is, what are my my clients, what are the type of people who come in that I would like more of? What are their concerns? What are the things I hear about all the time, and what can I do to address those through video? And I'll be afraid with you at first, it was an experiment, and there was very few other attorneys at all doing it at all, because I saw it as an opportunity like you know, that's usually one of two things, right? If no one else is doing it, it's either there's no market for it, or there's just there's a gap in the market, and the market hasn't caught up to the reality this is an opportunity. I started doing this, started creating at least one video a week, and literally, in less than three months, I started getting phone calls because I put call rail numbers, I put specific call call numbers on those videos where people would call in, and I started to be able to track calls coming into my office and people mentioning, hey, who is that guy on YouTube? I'd really like to talk to the firm about this, because I watched a few of the videos. That's exactly the kind of information I need, and that's what started me on the journey. All it takes is a few of those calls and you go, whoa, wait a minute. Totally organic. Never ran a single ad for any of it, and it they just find you in search. So that, that was where it started for me.

What's an example of some of the content? Just to give people context that really resonated earlier or best?

So one example of that is I did a, you know, as a criminal offense firm. I did an aggravated assault deadly weapon video, and it essentially is, you know how to beat an aggravated assault deadly weapon charge in Texas. Now I put that together, and I treated it like a consultation. I looked at the camera, and when I was talking to the camera, it might as well have been the person that came into the office and they've they're asking me about what they can do. I addressed their fears, their frustrations, the desires of how they want this to be resolved, addressed all of those things in that and gave them value. I provided them the value. Don't make these vanity videos. If you do it that way, and you're actually providing value, and you explain the process that I did that video, terrible video back, by the way, if you go back and look at it the if I can do it, anybody can do it. If you go back and look at it, the actual video and audio quality was awful, right? But we have a specific phone number associated with that video, and we have received over $650,000 in business from that video over the last two and a half years. Awesome. And we know that we can track it, and people will refer to it, and it's part of our intake system. And even now, two and a half years later, still getting calls, still getting calls. And Jay, look, here's the best part. When you do this, it's not just you're getting calls, but if I get calls from an ad, the difference between that being a cold lead and a YouTube lead, a YouTube bleed, I usually have at least a 20 to 25% higher conversion rate because they already act like they know me. I've literally had clients come into my office and they said, is Mr. Hampton here. I just want to meet him. And when I come in, they're like, oh, it's Mr. You're the same guy on the video. And I'm like, you know, this is kind of weird. You know, they're acting like I can't believe I got to meet you, and that they're already paying. So that piece of it right there, not only do you get leads, but your conversion on those leads are higher, which means the ROI is so much better. Yeah,

it's amazing. This medium is it looks like TV, and we're kind of like mini celebrities.

Well, I mean, I don't know if you've seen most recently YouTube's push this month, October of 2024 their push is to make YouTube more available and push creators out on television. YouTube now has more viewers, more watch time than Netflix, Disney, all of them. And we know what cable television is doing. It's dying. So I do believe that's a big part of this, and it's going to only continue to grow. I'm not surprised,

and maybe you know something about this, like I've been asking people this question for you know, 12 months, YouTube's algorithms have gotten so good at feeding me stuff I want to see you. So, you know, it feeds you the political stuff you want to see. It feeds you the, you know, I get Miami Dolphins and Winnipeg Jets, and now I don't want to see the dolphin stuff. We already talked we went off the rails early this year. I get marketing stuff. I get legal stuff. That's what I get in my feed and YouTube, basically off of the videos I've clicked, on the videos I've watched length of they just start feeding me all of that same stuff. And so a lot of times I choose YouTube consciously if I've got five or 10 minutes to film, you know, like if I'm waiting in the bank or wherever you wait these days, you're on a call and the other folks haven't joined the call yet. Someone says, give me five or 10 minutes. Like I know that YouTube will give me if I'm looking for entertainment at that time. Well, you know, not clearing out emails will give me that five to 10 minutes of the stuff I want is there. Have you heard about that from the YouTube side, from from other creators?

Yes. So I can tell you right now. And this is really important to know, you really have two different tracks with YouTube. One is search, okay? And that is important because search, if you rank well on YouTube search, you also have a tendency to rank pretty well in Google Search, because Google will sometimes for longer tail keywords, they will put videos out there, and it'll also push you to your website traffic. And I like to put videos on my website because people will watch those and it'll keep dwell on time for the page better. You'll get less bounce rate and different things like that. But then the other side is the algorithm. Understand this. You know, I just crossed over the 300,000 subscriber mark on my Hampton law channel. I had congratulations. That's awesome. Thanks, man. I've got 16 million views a month right now on that channel. And and what does that mean? 98% of my traffic is algorithm driven. What that means is the algorithm is serving up the content to audiences and suggesting that they need to watch this. So the algorithm is my friend. Most people think the algorithm is this. Mean, bad algorithm. But if you learn what the algorithm does, it's not that at all what an algorithm. The primary purpose of the algorithm is, number one is to predict what the viewer wants to watch. The reason why you're getting all of that and you're getting those suggested videos is because YouTube is relying upon what you've recently seen, and they're going to serve you up more of that. Now, there may be content you watched a few months ago that you like to watch, but you're not seeing it suggested to you because they the algorithm knows we're kind of we have a short memory. We want to watch what we want to watch now, and maybe not what we used to watch. So they're going to keep serving up content that they know you want to watch now.

And then recent recency is an important part of the algorithm, absolutely. And then

the second part is they want you to stay on YouTube. They want you to watch as long as possible. So that is the primary goal of the algorithm. So what that means is videos with what's called an average view duration that's longer YouTube says, Oh, this is good, because the people we're serving this up to, let's keep serving it out more, because it keeps them on the platform, as opposed to, like, a lot of my videos, have at least a six minute watch time average. Okay, if that's if, on average, even with a million views, they're watching for six minutes. You can do the math. YouTube's like, yes, we can serve up more ads. We can make we can continue to build our platform. That's really what the goal of the algorithm is all about. So you have to get your strategy in alignment with that algorithm, and then it's a tailwind. It's not a headwind. Yeah, we're

fortunate, and we're just a baby YouTube site compared to you, I think we're up over 350,000 views on these types of podcasts and our webinars, and we've got about an eight or nine minute view time. So people are definitely, you know, watching if I teach a webinar and how to get ranked in the local service ads, the people who are interested seem to watch like 45 minutes. And then I'm sure some people watch 45 seconds, and it averages nine minutes, but that's definitely part of the algorithm. We've known that for many years. But the most unique thing I've learned from you is that creating this longer form content, I just sort of throw my webinars on the platform, but you're creating 1020, minutes of content, solving a problem for people, answering your question for people, really, that's the that's the gem there, right? Yeah,

so this is really good, so I'm going to walk you through very quickly. They're shorts, right? And then there are long form videos. Now I don't want to completely dog shorts. There are benefits to shorts. I tell people, when you first start YouTube, it's a great way to get started. You got to get comfortable in front of a camera. Those are things that you need to do there. And I've learned some recent strategies that if you use shorts the right way, you can use them as a mini commercial for your long. Video. And for example, I just tried out a new strategy last week on one of my videos on that short form content where I only gave them. Here's what I did. I did a hook to grab their attention. I gave them a short little story about what they're about to see, and then I left them hanging at the end, and I said, Hey, you don't want to miss how cops are using Apple vision Pro. Check this out. And then what happens is, I had as much as a 20% conversion rate on that short for people to go watch the longer video. That was 12 minutes. Okay, now, now imagine that when you look at your video now you're getting a multiplier effect if you have, if I can get couple 100,000 people watching that short and then 20% of them watch the longer form video. One is creating synergy for the other. So it's not that shorts aren't important, but that creates awareness. Longer videos are the number one thing to create trust with people. And I'm not doing this for vanity sake. I'm doing this because I want to make money for my business. That's the number one reason why I'm doing it. And when you have those longer videos, people go down the rabbit hole. On average, a viewer who comes to my channel, they watch 3.8 videos, 3.8 I mean, some people are watching a lot more than four, and some people are watching less. But if you watch four minutes, or if you watch for my videos, and they are, on average, 10 to 12 minutes long. You spend almost an hour with me, and if you've spent an hour with me, that's a warm lead once they call in, and that's the kind of example of what you want to end up

trying to do with your channel. Yeah, we've been doing short form videos for our clients for four or five years. We haven't evolved to this longer form and essentially, we've been coaching them to answer a question, what do I do if I get hit by an Uber right? What do I do if my son gets arrested on a DUI? Answer a question. And I've heard this over and over and over, thankfully, Jay, thank you for getting me to do the videos. We just got a great client today, and she said she watched eight or nine of our videos, and we knew we were the right lawyer for her, so that that's essentially what you've you've figured out and done a great job at right?

Yeah, I mean, and the great thing about it is, is you'll get now it's getting to the point where even locally, where I'm at, if I go out, I met a guy at the I was at the post office the other day, and a guy walked up and said, You're Jeff Hampton from Hampton law. And they start saying, Man, I watched your content and man, let me just tell you, I do it for business. But he also said, When I watched your content, I didn't, I couldn't afford you, but what I learned from you was to make sure I didn't get taken advantage of by my current lawyer, and I was able to avoid going to jail. Well, that made me feel good, because another good reason behind this is people do need to know their rights. I want them to be educated on it. And there's so much misinformation out there on it. So to me, my why, part of my Whys is, yes, I want to do it for business. There's also a really good why out there to say this is good information. People need to know about their constitutional rights, and it kind of feeds my heart knowing that from a just from a position of being able to educate people, it's a good thing to do.

That's awesome. You mentioned the hook, and it sparked my mind. I've been listening to a lot of Alex hormozi Lately, other great thought leader and educator, information marketer, and he uses the three P's, promise proof and plan that, I guess you need that hook the here's the promise, here's what I'm going to teach you, the proof, why it works, and the plan, how to make it happen. I'm probably not explaining it as well as you might, or Alex will. So talk to me. Do you have a model for the shorts and the longs, like the hook, the thumbnail, the name of the video, the content and the delivery. So I

think that's really good, one of the things that Alex does, and it's easier to do that with financial based stuff, like when I look at when, like, because I also have my STL logos channel, and that's a really good way to do it, which is to say that the promise, which is to say, Do you know there's a way that, if you follow the right plan, you can assure that you can protect yourself from greedy lawyers. You know you can make the promise, like if you do this. And now I'm going to show you the proof, and here's how you implement it with, I think it depends on your niche. With criminal defense, there's not a promise, per se. What there is is my hook is to establish intrigue and curiosity from the beginning, whether it's a question, whether it's something that grabs their attention. And then once that's in place, I then lay out either through story, and the plan can be a story, because a lot of it is people don't want to just know legal concepts. That's why First Amendment audit channels are so popular. Because people want to see the body cam. They want to see the story like, Ooh, what happened here, right? They don't really care about the First Amendment auditor. They just want to see somebody in a real life situation. So by first setting the hook with intrigue and then going into a story with a payoff. But here's what's key for long form videos. Here's what I like to do. Number one is set the hook by creating the curiosity, whether it's through a question or something that grabs their attention. Number two, I want to set the stakes. Like, what does it mean to you as an individual if you don't learn this information? Here's what could go wrong, right? Like, oh, I can't miss this. I need to know this if I get in this situation. And then, thirdly, I want to lay out, if you stick with me on this video, here's what I'm going to deliver for you. Here's your payoff. And if I give them the payoff and a long form videos, people love this. I have a video that now has 5 million views since end of January, and I can watch that retention curve on there, that retention graph, and I'll see, boy, it's super high when people are looking at that because they know if I stick around, he's going to deliver this for me. And then that retention graph, it doesn't look like a hockey stick now, it looks like a slow, slow, slow drop. And that's how it has 5 million views.

That's great. So maybe put this in a context for, you know, an attorney or even any business, yep, that wants to start out and get their YouTube going. So you mentioned, like, do some shorts. Can you lay it out in three or four steps? Yeah,

yeah. So the first thing I would do is absolutely sit down and do you know the biggest part of YouTube is you got to do planning. Ultimately the recording actually becomes one of the easier parts of it as you go along in your journey, the first thing you want to do is feel comfortable in front of a camera. So you want to do shorts. And I recommend start off doing 10 to 20 shorts and making them about, you know, short, little 62nd clips. And we could get into talking about effective shorts, and don't give the payoff until the very end. If you give the payoff earlier in the short, your retention will tank, and you won't get very many views. So if you put this together right do 10 to 20 shorts, you'll get some practice. It also makes you feel better, because shorts get pushed out more to more people, because it's swiping, and you don't have to worry about the title and thumbnail as much. Because the biggest thing that that people have a problem with their thumbnails. Lawyers have no clue how to do a thumbnail. And a thumbnail is what it's the art. It's the visual art you see on YouTube that you decide, am I going to click or not? Right? Well, too many lawyers just put this vanity picture of them in a suit staring at someone. No one wants to click on that. If you go back and look at my stuff, most of my stuff on my channel. My face is not on there. It's an action based still photo of something that grabs someone's attention, that earns the click, right? So you don't have to worry about any debt when you do shorts, when you do shorts, it's all about just swiping, and you get to put your best foot forward out there. That's the first thing I would do to 10 to 20 of those, and do them on your 8020 principle of what your 20% making you 80% of your revenues, of your service area, service practice areas that you're doing. And

by the way, if I can just interrupt for one sec when you say, Just do it like for someone just starting out. And I've said this for years, the iPhone is like, better than whatever they shot Star Wars on, like the it's a phenomenal camera, right? And you can just get a tripod and a good microphone, because I've said this, you know, many, many times like we'll watch, like skateboarding cats, but someone's talking, you've got to have good audio. So, you know, just get a lavalier mic. You can get a cord, it's like $8 on Amazon, and clip the mic on your lapel. The audio is good. The video is great. You just need a tripod again, 15 bucks on Amazon. And when you say just, you know, just do it like it's as simple as that, you can, you know, press record, and then you can get an editor online to clip the stuff up. There's now dozens of guys in and Opus and several other AI platforms can do tremendous editing for you. So there's no the just do it. Part of it used to be complex is now very, very simple. You've got the tools, or you can order the Lavalier and the tripod from Amazon,

yeah. And if you go back to my early videos that are still making me hundreds of 1000s of dollars. I found a guy on Fiverr in the Middle East, and all I wanted was, please understand we are educational creators. You don't have to have Mr. Beast level editing going on. As long as you have some decent captions, you are the star of the show as a personality. You're sharing the data, or you're sharing the information and your expertise. It doesn't have to be anything super crazy, and just by doing it that way, it fostered that trust and created a ton of new clients. So I completely agree with you. I think the hardest part people have is getting past the mindset of recording, right? And so like, Well, how do I do this? Well, you start off, you're not going to be great, and that's okay, and no one cares, right? And they're not measuring you off of you being an actor, the person watching your content is measuring you because they have a pain point and they're freaking out, and they don't know what to do, at least in my context, as a as a criminal attorney, criminal law firm, and they just want to see. Solution, and when you provide some sort of ease to that pain, they're gonna call you. And I've never had a single person go, yeah, man, I was thinking about hiring you after watching your video, but, man, I hated your production quality. You suck, right? No one ever did that, not one time. So I remind people, start simple. Don't read your comments at first. Don't let that stuff bother you, and just start putting out content. But then what you do is this, when you do 20 of those shorts, you'll find out there's probably three or four of them that did better than the other 17. What you do now is do longer videos based on those higher performing ones. That's great, yeah. And then you've tested the market, you've already figured out the market really liked these three videos, let's turn around and do longer form content for that. And now you're making it easier on yourself. You can actually test the market with your shorts to figure out what you feel comfortable doing on your longs.

I love it. So that's how you get started. You know? Get the simple setup. Do the 20 shorts, see what works. Do some longs off of the shorts.

That's right. That's exactly right. 100% simple as that's

what I said. But yeah, hopefully people can figure that out. Can you give us one or two advanced tips now? That's the starters, like, if, if you've got a channel, and, you know, maybe for ourselves, we've got, you know, 350,000 views, how do we go to the next level?

So the next thing to do is you need to create the binge watching effect. The simplest, easiest way to do it is to make you don't want to create any friction on YouTube for the viewer. And the best way to do this, and I see almost no lawyers doing this at all, and very few marketers actually doing it in the educational space, is you need to use the end screen. So when you go to do to launch your video. Let's say you do this, this particular one, Jay, you put this out there and it's on YouTube. At the end, you come over and do a voiceover saying hey, or do a quick recording saying hey. If you really liked what Jeff had to say today about YouTube, you would really love to learn about funnels, sales funnels in your business, which would complement what Jeff just said, check out this next speaker who talks whatever about X, and what happens is, someone who watched all the way to the end is now going to say, Man, I really love this content. Wait a minute. They're going to give me a value add if I watch this next video, and then all they have to do is click one little click. Well, let me just put it this way, I was able to see a 25% increase in my views the moment I added in screens, the moment I added an end screen, and it created that binge watching effect. And the great thing about YouTube studio, better than almost than any other platform out there, they give you data on the performance of that end screen. So you can go into YouTube studio, and on some of my videos, I have as much as a 20% click through rate on that end screen. And now you're talking about that that's called a compounding effect, right? One video led them to another video. And so now you start compounding like you do interest you can compound the effectiveness.

And the end screens are like little ads you shoot, and it's like something you post in YouTube, and then it, it automatically puts it at the end, or you've got it.

But a good question, this is super easy. It's not even an ad. So what I do if you go watch one of my videos right now, what you'll see, and I record those at the same time, I record the video, and it's not anything separate from the video. So one of the examples I'll give you is, I'll say I just did a video recently about cops using Apple vision Pro to spy on you, right? And it's true, they are. And at the end of the video, I said this. Now look, we've just been covering how cops are using Apple vision Pro to spy on you, but did you know they have a new technology where they can also see through walls to spy on your home? Check out this next video where I break all of it down for you, from A to Z see you over there. And when I point YouTube pulls up a screen, and I literally, I put my own end screens on here. Sometimes, if I'm if my staff is busy, it takes literally 30 seconds to add an end screen to a video, and it doesn't create any extra work. It's really easy to do. So my point is, when you add an end screen to a video, you are going to immediately make it easy on the viewer that loves your content to keep watching. And then what do you think the YouTube algorithm is going to do? Ooh, this. This Creator knows what they're doing. Let's push their stuff out more. And the best part, last thing I'm going to say, you know, if you ever watched on YouTube, where you're watching a video, and then over on the right hand side, it suggests you other videos YouTube, you are making a Data Association for the YouTube algorithm that this video is related to the one they're watching. It will automatically suggest that video for whoever's watching it.

Jeff, this has been so fantastic, and you know, we could do like eight hours on this, and we will, or you will, you're producing a course, you're producing training coaching system, and we're hopefully going to work together on that with some of our clients. So lots more to come from Jeff, and definitely look into tgr live 2025, growth strategies. Law firms our event in March, and Jeff's going to be one of our keynote speakers. So with that, it brings us to our quick one liners at the end of every podcast. We've been doing this for 10 or 15 years, tell us some apps or techniques used for personal productivity.

So so first of all, for me, everybody I know is using AI, but it transformed my business when I started creating custom AI bots that I'm able to feed a lot of my content in. So one of the things that I do is all of my old scripts for my YouTube videos, feed them into a custom bot. And then I also, here's one big one, I'm sorry, I know this goes to YouTube. Take all of your comments on a video. Feed it into AI. It will give you that viewer sentiment and the avatar of that viewer, and it'll help you. It'll help you create new video ideas from that. But that's that's been a big one for me, is being able to do that, and now that, when you say,

just clarify on that, when you say, feed that into you, into like, you just copy all your comments and write some prompts for like, chat, GPT, and say, you know, give me the viewer sentiment, some ideas for other videos based off of what people are commenting.

Yeah, and what it does, it'll come up and say, the primary concerns of these viewers are x this is an area that we, you know, maybe saw 20 because I have 1000s of comments on some of my videos. And it will say there multiple people were asking about this question. Here are some video ideas based upon the concerns that these viewers had and and I've used that before on different videos subsequently, and had, you know, 700,000 800,000 views on that type of content.

Artificial Intelligence is more intelligent than us. That is correct.

That's correct. Yes, especially when it comes to mass data. It's exceptional,

fantastic. What are your best business books?

So, I mean, for me, it has been in the areas that are in my in my blind spots. So for instance, you know, I it took me a little while to realize I can't do all this by myself. And so when I read, who, not, how, which I love that book? Yeah, I love, of course, I love traction. I love the books related to that. I, you know, there's also, there's also a book I'm trying to remember the name of it. It's about storytelling. And that has really transformed it. Attorneys have a tendency, the tendency that most attorneys tend to have is to speak like a lawyer. And when I was reading the storytelling book, and I'm going to look it up real quick, when I was reading it, one of the things that it did is it transformed. For me, the reality that it's called story worthy is what it's called. It's a great book by Matthew Dix. Really good book, because what it does is, once you realize that everything in life is is telling a story, you've got to tell a story. You're giving a narrative of some sort. When I realized that, it helped not only transform the way I do videos, but it transformed the way I do sales, and it allowed now for me to see this, not from a lawyer standpoint, but to see it more from an empathetic I'm telling a story, and you're a part of the story approach that really made a big difference for me when I read that book.

Yeah, and you've done a great job with that, and you mentioned that a few times, and made me think of something we mentioned earlier in the podcast, and what, what that is, is like you talked about in your videos, telling it as a story, that the law could be pretty boring to most of us and even most lawyers, but if you tell a story about here's what happened, here's what the judge said, Here's what The insurance company said, immediately makes it much more interesting and compelling in video and, frankly, in person too. And the example we used earlier was we both read the book traction, we both found it too detailed and confusing, and then we read get a grant, but it's like, Aha, get a grip. Was told as a story. It's told as a fable. It's told as a parable. It's told is a case study of one of Gina wickman's first clients using EOS and visionary mind gets that, but most people are for a story. Now your integrator is going to read traction and love it, that's right, blogs, podcasts and youtubes. What do you subscribe to and what do you absolutely love? Like when it hits your feed, you go immediately to that one.

So there is a, there's a guy by the name of John you shy. He's a, he used to work for YouTube, and he has a, he has a podcast that I really love, because he'll bring on people. I'm at a place right now. It's called created with John you shy. I like it because he used to work for YouTube. He brings on high level creators, but they get into the weeds about how they grew, where they came from. I'm at the place now. I'm trying to look as much outside of legal as I can, to adopt practices of things that people aren't thinking about doing in the legal space. That's one I like to I also like to look at there. Another one that's out there. I know it's old school, but magnetic marketing podcasts with Dan Kennedy. It's all of his old stuff, all of his old Dan Kennedy content. And Russell Brunson puts all of that. He bought that podcast, and he puts all of his old content on there. So it's Dan Kenny Kennedy talking about all the sales techniques, copywriting techniques, all the stuff that's out there. I can't get enough of that stuff, man, I just sit there and listen to that such good content that you used to have to pay for. You had to be a part of his Admiral club, or whatever it was to get access to that. That's all available to people. Those are the two outside ones. There's another one called Creator science. That's a really good one, because it's all about from a creator mindset. And here's what I want to encourage people to think of once you get to a place like now, I do not see my YouTube channel as my as my law firm. It's the media arm of my business. So I treat that as such, and you have a different mindset about how you run it, and you treat that as almost a separate business that complements your law firm. It's not just a side thing, a side gig or something. It's a legitimate business. Listening to this type of content really, really helps get your mind right about understanding the discipline and the importance of having that note.

Fantastic. Well, this has been really great for me. I've got like eight pages of notes in like 45 minutes, so I got a whole bunch of things to do, podcasts to listen to, and books to read. Thank you so much. What's a great introduction for you? Who could we all refer you to? So

I mean, first of all, I have you can always reach out on my YouTube channels. You can reach out to me personally on LinkedIn. I do have a brand where I do work with some folks. It's called YouTube brain makers. We have a website. There's, there's a course that's coming out here within the next six weeks that we're going to be launching for professionals. I currently work with some lawyers, also some CPA, some financial service folks, where they want some coaching, but they want to know how to really get this going. If, if you ever, you know, if anyone ever wants to look into that and have free resources about how to get started, you can reach out to youtuberainmakers.com and I'm happy to share that with you.

Awesome. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to everything we're going to be doing over the next several months

together. Same here, man, it's going to be a blast. Awesome. Thank you. You bet.

Thank you for listening to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 golden rules.com that is podcast at t e n golden rules.com you.