I've told everyone to build a YouTube channel. I never built my own.

⏳ Read time: ~4 minutes

For years, I have told franchise brands the same thing. YouTube is the best authority builder you can invest in.

Then I looked at my own channel.

Mostly repurposed podcast clips. Set up to feed AI search and nothing else.

Not one video was made on purpose to build my own authority. I have been preaching the thing I never did for myself.

So that changes now.

I have started putting real time into my channel.

New format, focused videos, my best advice on franchise marketing.

The first one in the new style is up.

Here is the process I have landed on:

Come up with the ideas.

Get them down as dot points.

Riff to the camera on the dot points. No script.

Send it to my video editor in the Philippines, who is great, to cut.

Go back and forth until the style is right.

The thumbnail is done by a Claude Code skill I built myself.

I paste in the transcript and it gives me a finished, on-brand thumbnail.

No designer. No waiting on a round of revisions.

To work out the format, I use Apify and Claude Code to scrape the channels I rate, pull their transcripts, and break down what makes them work.

The catch is that there are barely any people in franchise marketing doing this.

There is almost nothing to model off. So I am working most of it out from first principles.

That is the kind of thing AI is good for right now. Taking a repeatable job and removing the lag.

We have settled on a style, so this is the first one in it.

The videos are 10 to 20 minutes, focused on one topic, the best of what I know.

Not repurposed podcast filler.

Why YouTube, and why now?

YouTube is the best authority builder there is. The videos get consumed at any hour, they answer objections while you sleep, and they get surfaced in AI search for years.

I have watched it work at Jim's. Videos we filmed six years ago still recruit franchisees today.

I always pointed at that for everyone else's channel. Now I am doing it for mine.

The part most people get wrong

This audience is niche. I am not expecting big view counts. That is the point.

The goal is authority, not reach. I want to be the person franchisors in Australia and overseas come to when they want to know how to do this properly.

For that, I do not need 50,000 random viewers.

I need the right few hundred watching focused videos that answer the questions they are actually asking.

And barely anyone is doing this properly in franchise marketing.

That is the opportunity.

Views are the vanity metric. Authority is the one who pays.

If you run a brand, the same applies. You do not need a big channel.

You need the right people watching the right videos, consistently, for long enough that you become the obvious choice. That is the whole game.

What you should do this week

Monday: Write down the ten questions your prospects ask you most. Each one is a video.

Wednesday: Record the first. Dot points, not a script. Talk to camera for ten minutes.

Friday: Publish it with a title that matches the exact question someone would type in. Then book the next one in your calendar so you do not stop at three.

I will keep sharing what works and what does not as I build this out.

The honest version, same as always.

Let me know what you think of video?

Each week, I interview marketing experts or share insights from the strategies I have used to help grow Jim’s by 2,000+ franchisees.

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