There are founders making millions of dollars a year buying ads with creators on youtube and there's a certain strategy and way to do it.
So i bought it, brought on a friend of mine, cody schneider, to actually walk through all of this.
This is this is a tutorial that might feel a.
If you stay to the end, you'll know how to actually make money with creators.
And creators is how people find products nowadays.
So this is a really, really big deal.
And I'm so grateful for Cody for taking the time and actually showing us screen sharing the entire way through how to do this, step by step.
All right, I got a vibe coded app with no customers, Cody, and I need some help.
I love it, man.
Okay, so this playbook is super good for this, especially when it's like an SMB type of product that you're trying to sell, or like a tool that has like one killer feature.
YouTube creators plus affiliate marketing is like one of the best ways to go about getting your first customers.
And the reason for that is it's basically a product demo that's in disguise, right?
So when you break it down like what's happening is somebody, you're basically like reaching out to creators And you are getting them to create videos about your product.
And then you're giving them an affiliate commission.
So you basically pay them for the video and you're giving them an affiliate commission based off of the traffic that they drive.
And I'll break down why you do that, like why we see this work.
And we'll go into detail about the whole playbook.
And like I'm going to write out the actual emails that you should send, what tools you should use for the reach out, et cetera.
But that's the kind of the high level.
And the reason that this is a massive opportunity is that it's an inefficient market.
And what I mean by that is that If you say, for example, if you go to like one of these, like creator aggregators right, or like a creator network, or you hire an agency, the creators understand their real value.
But if I go and I reach out to enough YouTube creators, they don't know how to price themselves.
Right.
Like we'll see this all the time, especially with smaller creators that are like 10000 to 50000 subs.
They don't know what their value is.
And so if I reach out to 100, say I get 50 to respond.
And then of those 50, 10 are going to underprice themselves so dramatically that they're basically a marketing arbitrage.
Right.
I work with them and then I can go and find the winners of those 10 of that cohort.
And I put them on retainer.
And again, we'll walk through this whole thing.
I'm going to show you step by step.
And that's kind of the high level of like how you get this to work, why this works.
And then the last thing I'll say before we jump into this is that you can track the ROI on this.
Unlike when you're doing like short form creator marketing, right?
Like using TikTok or Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.
With that, the user sees the video, they go and search it on Google.
And then like, it's hard to track the direct ROI of the activity.
In contrast with this, YouTube like longer form YouTube video say, it's a 10 minute video you give them an affiliate link.
They click that in the YouTube description and you can see the exact dollar amount that somebody is providing to your company.
Like what is the value that they're actually providing with the media that they're making?
So, Yeah.
Questions before I jump into it or.
The only question I have is because I don't want people to listen to that and click out because they're like no, this is, this is small boy stuff.
How much can you make serious money by this strategy?
I have a friend that took his company from zero to six million ARR in 18 months only running the strategy. entirely bootstrapped the company is called ever be um i it's my friend cody mcguffey he's an absolute g um if you're uh trying to like really quickly now they're moving into basically um like e-commerce in in total like a like an e-commerce shop so if you're trying to build out an e-commerce shop as like quickly and easily as possible like that his company is basically doing that but this is the exact playbook the exact strategy that i've seen people execute this is not some like small thing right like imagine greg like you have a hundred creators that are posting a video a video about you monthly about your product right what happens if you do that within a category like you're going to be everywhere overnight right that is that is the game it's like what are people doing with these clipping agencies right it's crazy clipping short form why are you spending thousand dollars clipping short form when you could be doing this it's unbelievable cody Let's give the people what they want.
Let's get into the sauce.
Let's dispense the sauce.
I love it.
I love it.
Let's go in.
All right, cool.
So first part of the process is actually getting these emails.
So let's just break down how you actually go about this process, go about doing this.
So I'm going to go and let's do like Looker Studio, right?
So which is this basically a tool for like data visualization, right?
So there's tons of people that are basically making tutorials about how to do Looker Studio.
So say you're a data visualization, or you build some tool.
Actually, Google Ads might be a better one.
So say you're doing like you sell some type of software to people that run Google Ads.
So there's hundreds of these creators. that are making videos about Google ads.
Like if I go and I filter by four to 20 minute videos and then this month we're gonna see all of these creators that make videos about Google ads.
So this creates a perfect opportunity for me to reach out to all of them and be like hey, I wanna sponsor your video.
Have you talk about X products right?
So we can go into this.
And what people don't know is you can actually see the emails of these creators.
Okay.
So I go to their company or sorry, I go to their YouTube profile.
I click view email and I can actually see their contact email.
Okay.
So imagine I go, I find all these, I scrape all of their YouTube channels and then I can go individually and get all of the emails of all these creators.
So the challenge with this is it's behind a captcha and YouTube limits you to only about like eight email, like opens per time that you do this right.
Or per session, it's like a 24 hour rolling window is how it works.
So there's a couple of ways to get around this.
One, you can go hire somebody off of Fiverr.
If you just go and like, I paid a guy like $125 to scrape 10,000 emails for me in a category.
That's one way to do it.
Another one that you can go do is use.
There's this endpoint from Rapid API, that is YouTube email scraper.
Yeah.
YouTube channel, email scraper.
You pay the subscription.
You can do calls to the API.
He basically has like a don't quote me on this, but this is the only way that this would be able to function.
But you can pay these offshore CAPTCHA validation.
So it's a real human that's like Clipking the CAPTCHA.
Yeah.
So that if this is the robot's ass, they like do it in like India or Pakistan or whatever.
That's honestly brutal, bro.
It's crazy, man.
It's crazy.
But anyways, see, there's like these, it's really like, it's actually an API that you can call.
It's actually insane.
Like we, in a different life, use this at a point.
So this is how I'm assuming this works um, but yeah so uh basically uh, this allows for you to go and do api calls for the individual youtube channels.
You get all those emails back.
So those are two different ways.
You can do this manually too, like you don't even have to like do it any, like technically, what i just showed you you can do.
You can do eight a day, so in a week, whatever that translates into right.
Like you can do uh, in the range of, we'll say, like 50 a week.
Right, that's more than enough to in a two-week period, you reach out to all of them.
You've contacted 100 people, so you contact those hundred people and the email that you send is stupid, simple.
We've tested everything.
This is the best one that we always see perform.
So the subject line ends up being paid collaboration.
Um, super, super dumb.
Uh, we just all lowercase, right?
And then it's like, Hey, or I was just like, Hey, uh, um, love the content.
Uh, you're posting on LinkedIn, sorry, posting on YouTube.
Can I get a cost breakdown for a three video package?
And I'll give you an affiliate commission of 30%.
So I just used a super whisper to basically do that transcription.
I always get asked like what we're using for that.
Um, And so let's break down why we're doing this.
Like, why are we all doing a video package of three and also giving them an affiliate commission?
So there's strategy behind this.
And then what I'm going to do is basically send like 10 follow-up emails, because these creators are constantly getting blasted, so you just like literally have to follow up with them so much.
It's ridiculous.
It's like actually a pain in the ass, but it it, it it.
This is like what we do and it works so.
But to take a step back, so why the three video package?
So the three video package?
Why we're asking for that is we've seen better results than just doing one video.
When it's one video, it's like a flash in the pan to their audience.
In contrast, when I do that three videos and they do like different like angles, it gets their audience to be like oh, like this person actually like uses this tool.
Right.
And so that's like one component.
You spread that out over like a six to eight week period.
So it's not like they're doing like three videos, you know, week after week.
It's like, you know, kind of mixed in with their other content.
And then the other piece is the commissions, the affiliate commissions.
Why do we give them the affiliate commission?
One, we want to be able to track the ROI they're producing for us.
And then two, it creates this lock in with the creator so that long term they won't increase their prices on you because they're like oh shit, I'm making 10 grand a month in affiliate commissions from this company.
Like that creator, if they're good, they're naturally going to grow.
And as they start to work with new brands, they're going to increase their prices.
Right.
And for you, it just creates this relationship lock-in so that those prices don't increase.
It just creates an uncomfortable conversation for them, which is great.
And then the other component is as brands will approach them for exclusivity.
Hey, I don't want you to work with this other competitor.
I want you to only work with us.
It also has this where it's like, if they, if they change from working with you, again creates this awkward situation for them, where it's like oh, I'm getting paid out 10 grand.
I don't want to like hurt that relationship with this person that I built over, you know, whatever it is, the last 12 months.
So that's the email that you send.
Send just like 10 follow ups, basically like asking them again over and over, in different ways, for this pricing in this package.
Yeah, the other component of this is the actual like strategy behind why uh, we're reaching out to like 100 creators simultaneously.
Okay, so if i reach out to 100 people and actually let's do this in a google sheet just to like show, like fake data, so it's like we'll say, like you know uh, channel one, uh channel two uh, channel three, etc.
Um, and then we'll say, like their cost.
And so imagine that I reach out to all of these channels and they come back to me and we'll say, you know, we'll say subscribers.
So, like twenty two thousand subscribers, ten thousand subscribers you know, and then you know thirty thousand subscribers, just to give numbers.
And imagine I have, you know, a hundred of these.
Right.
So they're going to come back with their cost for a three video package.
Say they say something like sixteen hundred.
They say something like, you know, two thousand.
And then they say something like we'll say, you know, three thousand.
I can start to identify who is underpricing themselves in the market.
And so, because this is an inefficient market and people don't know what the value of the services that they're about to provide you, what you're going to naturally find when you reach out to enough people is that there's a subset of people that are basically underpricing what they're doing.
So again, just to put numbers on this, what I would do is basically take the cost of the three-video package divided by the amount of subscribers that they have.
You could also do average views per video.
That's another way to do this.
Typically, we do a composite of both.
But just for the sake of simplicity, we'll just do the subscribers on the channel.
And then we can start to see basically how much we're paying for the like to get in front of their audience right, and from that i can then start to rank stack who is the cheapest.
So of the 100 people i contact, here's the 10 cheapest, relatively cheapest, based on what they're saying their, their like value is, and again, when they come back with a number, you can negotiate down like.
I guarantee it, i would cut that in half, Like work your way up from there or just come to them.
Like a lot of the times they'll just say something like, like, what can you afford?
What can you pay?
Because they just don't even know like what the price themselves.
And I just come in and be like hey, creators of your size, we typically pay them X amount per video.
Is that interesting to you?
They'll come back and say no, they'll say a higher price.
And then, you know, it just turns into negotiation.
And what about like CPMs?
I haven't heard the word CPM before.
Yeah, I don't think about it like CPMs that much.
I'm way more focused on like, is this creator making content already within the category?
Because that means that they understand the audience and like having some, you know, marginal success in that space, because they understand how to talk to this audience.
And if I get a thousand views, but it's like an extremely engaged audience that's listening to what this person is saying.
Like if they suggest this tool or show this tool to like accomplish the outcome that they're looking for, like we're going to see extremely high conversion rates.
This is basically like a video sales letter or like a product demo or a webinar that's happening like asynchronously, like at scale, with multiple people you know simultaneously.
That lives forever.
That lives forever.
That's evergreen.
It's insane.
One quick little tip is don't look so much.
I mean you could look at views like directionally, but the likes and comments really show people's propensity to, or love for a particular creator.
By the way like, like this video if you haven't already liked it uh, and comment, you know, like for the algorithm and comment for our souls.
Thank you.
Um, but yeah, I think if you look at the likes and comments, you'll, you'll get a better sense as to how valuable thing, uh, how valuable someone is.
And I want to say one more, one more thing.
You use the words I think, mispriced attention and uh.
I want to take a step back and just explain why that is such an important term.
Some of the biggest businesses of the planet were built on top of mispriced attention.
Like when you think of how many multi-billion dollar businesses were built on top of five cents.
I can give you an example that's really finite, right?
So Wish.com, which doesn't really exist anymore.
Wish.com became a billion dollar company in like 18 months with Facebook ads in the early days.
And the reason is you could get like one cent link clicks on Facebook ads.
And there was nobody else running ads to like cheap shit that was being basically imported from China.
And Zynga too.
It's the exact same strategy.
Exact same strategy.
And so that's the scale.
This isn't like, again, this small boy thing, right?
Like this is some small boy thing.
If you find attention that is like high quality that's relatively cheap, it is one of the most powerful growth levers that you can pull as a marketer.
Yeah, I just wanted to highlight that, that this is like, this is...
This is huge.
Absolutely.
And I think that it's like again when you think about the best, like tactical growth people.
This is what they're doing is they're trying to find misaligned things that don't make sense and then exploit it as aggressively as they can.
And by the time you're hearing about it, I'm just going to bluntly say this so that everybody's listening.
By the time you're hearing about it, it's already cooked.
Like that channel has probably already been exploited.
I'm not saying that this one is.
It depends on the niche that you're in for this like this strategy, this specific creator strategy.
But like do not buy a course.
Do not like go and like pay somebody for this.
They're just reselling their like used clothes basically, right?
Like that is what's happening.
They're saying it's new and it's not, right?
So...
Anyway, but this can be really effective though, if your product's in a specific niche, a specific category, that there aren't a lot of people already doing this.
If you're in the dropshipping category, as an example, it is going to be so expensive, man.
This is not going to work.
There's so many people going after that.
But if you're in some niche tiny thing, that's super random.
I don't know what that would be off the top of my head.
But maybe it's like a Depop resellers or something like that.
There's a massive opportunity to go after those types of markets with this strategy.
Yeah, I think where it's probably cooked is the most highly competitive market.
Yep.
But if you're if you're not in the most competitive space, that's insane.
Then, you know, yeah, there's probably some room there.
And the truth is, even in the most competitive space, there is opportunity.
It's just harder to find.
Right.
There's always you just have to message more people.
Right.
Like real estate.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Literally like real estate.
Like, you know, there's there's in real estate, even if, you know, in 2008, for example, when everything was sky high, you know.
There was still opportunity in 2008.
There's still opportunity.
You just have to be able to find it and have that process to identify it.
And I think that, again to talk through this strategy here if you contact enough people, you're going to find people that are underpricing themselves.
But it just comes down to how do I contact 1,000 people?
How do I contact 10,000 people?
You're going to find people that... are saying, yeah, I'll do it for $200 a video.
Hell yeah, I'll do it for $200 a video.
And in reality they should be charging you a grand, but they just don't know that like, their value is actually that thing.
And that is what you're looking for is inefficient markets, inefficient distribution markets where people are underpricing their value.
So.
OK, so you found these people.
You've now reached out to them.
You've got that three video package in lock and you're doing the affiliate commission.
So you give them that affiliate URL.
That's going to be able with that.
You're going to be able to track the actual ROI of the person that you like worked with.
So imagine I reached out to 100 people and I ended up working with 10 of them.
And of those 10, what you'll find is two to three will actually be like 80 of the revenue that's driven from all those people that you worked with.
So at the end of this cohort, you basically look at your affiliate commissions.
And for the affiliate, sorry, I didn't mention this already.
You can use something like Rewardful.
I think that's kind of like one of the best price ones.
Like if you're just like a vibe coded tool.
There's tons of these out there though.
All of them kind of function in the same way.
So-
But anyway, so you have identified your like two to three best performers.
At that point you go back to the creator and you're like hey creator, I want to work with you long term.
Can I get a video per month and we'll pay you on a basically on a retainer to make that video?
They're going to 100% say yes because they all want recurring money to come from this.
And now you have, we'll say, two people that are doing a video per month.
You restart that cycle now.
So I go contact 100 more people.
I find the 10 that are underpricing themselves.
I work with those 10.
I find the two winners.
I add them to my retainer, right?
So now I have four people and then you just keep scaling this up.
So what this translates into over time is you go from I have nobody posting about the product on a monthly basis to I have a hundred people that are on retainer that I know every time they post is ROI positive and I have it directly trackable to them and 100 videos drop about my product on YouTube within my niche, within my category, on a monthly cadence.
So that's happening, right?
You're basically creating this astroturf of content, right?
You're astroturfing this content to make it take over this ecosystem.
The knock-on effect that comes from this is that every once in a while, one of these videos will go viral And you're going to get 10 other creators to make a video about the video that you paid to get made by the creators that you have on your retainers.
So it creates the spider web effect, right?
Where it's like, oh, I'm paying these people.
But then, because their videos are going viral talking about the product, all of these other people now are willing, basically.
And it's not even willing.
They're just doing it because they're going to get views and they're going to sign up for your affiliate program as well.
Because they're like, oh, they did this.
And they're driving to an affiliate.
I can also get paid doing this as well.
And so this is how you scale up this whole like process.
And it's really effective again for these types of tools that are these like they have a specific pain point that they're solving.
It's one killer feature, et cetera.
So.
But yeah, so that's the whole playbook.
The challenge with this is the actual relationship with these people as time goes on.
If you have 100 people you're working with, it gets hard really quickly to go and basically validate they're actually doing the work that they're saying they're doing, like the video is actually dropping, etc.
But a lot of the times what people will do is build... Basically, when a video drops...
They have a form submission.
That form then goes into like a make automation.
They'll track and then they'll like build a spreadsheet that's basically pulling in the views from those videos so that they can see like the volume and then actually like graph that out of like.
Here's the actual impact that's happening in the background, you know, while this is running.
And from a reach out perspective... like are you automating any of that cold reach out?
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
Like I would go and I would use like rapid API to scrape.
We drop them into, you know, instantly to send the cold email.
Like you can set up instantly bots.
There's actually this company I just learned about called Stormy AI.
So gangster.
The founder, I know him, his name's Robert.
He's just killing it.
He's like the classic, like just you know, Cracked founder, that's building something super interesting.
So what this does is it allows for you to search for people in like a category.
So you could say like, you know, we'll look for like Claude Code, you know, as an example.
And I want people, you know, smaller creators, right?
Basically what this does is it goes and it searches for individuals that have made videos already about these products.
Right.
And it finds them.
It finds their email addresses.
And the crazier thing that it does is it will actually negotiate the pricing with them.
So it basically is an AI agent that does like the research itself, the reach out and then also the negotiation, to like come to a deal.
Once you've arrived at that deal, it will then go and basically, like you know, circle in the human.
That's like yes.
Right.
So it basically just found all these creators.
I can go and like draft an email.
The email is happening within the application.
Right.
Um and then uh, the uh, like that whole process that we kind of described.
It's almost handling a lot of that heavy lifting for you.
So if you're just like you know, a one man band and trying to figure out how to do this, this is like a way that you, that you can do this.
So go sign up for it.
Um, it's they're like early stage company.
They're actively building out new features to like make this more and more automated.
So it's super, super powerful tool.
Cool.
All right.
Thanks.
Thanks, Cody.
This is, this is really cool.
I mean, I, I assume people know this, but most people actually don't.
I think a lot of people are like yeah creators, I should be doing something with creators, but it's probably so competitive or it's too hard.
And they don't realize that now is the time to actually make this happen, before it gets fully cooked.
We're at medium rare right now.
Totally.
I think the other thing with this too is that people think that...
Like people think that create like this is how people discover products now, actually.
Like I don't like people don't they passively discover things.
Right.
Rather than like actively discovering them is a lot of what we're seeing.
And so you have to like.
This is what, for you, pages have changed about the entire like entirety of the Internet is basically, you have to find this like middle ground, equilibrium between like it gets the distribution on that channel so that it can get passively discovered.
Right.
But it's also like, like Pat, you know, providing enough entertainment, enough value, so that it gets the reach.
Right.
And this is why I always like try to, you know, tell people like, don't hire somebody for this.
Find somebody that's already doing this and work with them, because they've already figured out like the algorithm for that specific category.
It is so much harder to train somebody to like understand an algorithm or how you know the YouTube algorithm functions, rather than finding somebody that's already having success and then just giving them you know the resources to basically like include your product within that.
So don't like, do not start from ground zero, right?
Like that is the worst way to go about doing this.
Absolutely.
Well, Cody, thanks for spilling the sauce.
We appreciate you.
I'll include links where to find Cody to follow his journey, his company's journey, graph.com.
And that'll all be in the show notes.
And dude, I'll see you next time.
Thank you, G. Stoked to come back and talk more about this type of stuff.
All right.
