← YouTube Creators Hub
YouTube Creators Hub
Why Adding Video to Your Website Changes Everything | Forrest's Creator Story
00:32:30
Join us for this week's episode of the YouTube Creators Hub podcast as Dusty interviews Forrest Baum, the creator of the Teach Me Personal Finance YouTube channel. Forrest shares his journey from transitioning out of the military to helping people...
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:00]
A
So I have, I have an ex SEO, kind of an engineer that helps with. He did my first site audit and he walked through a couple of things that I could do to improve the engagement on my site and one of the first things that he said was, hey, put a video on here.
- [00:17]
B
Hello and welcome to this week's conversation on the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. Dusty here as always and as last week, we have no sponsors for you. We are brought to you today by just everything that we have to offer. We have one of the greatest YouTube communities on the planet over on our creator community, Discord. You get access to that plus our monthly Mastermind calls. Also, I am now doing an exclusive 6 to 10 minute audio podcast that I'm releasing for those members over there. So you get three or four things each and every week exclusively for five bucks. It really does help support the show and it's really curating a wonderful group of creators over there. And, and I also have past guests of the show creep in there as well. So not only will you have the members, but you'll also have people that you've heard on the podcast. So go check that out if you haven't already. I also offer one on one business coaching, YouTube content coaching. If you're looking to launch a podcast, I also do podcast coaching. All of those links will be down below as well. And lastly, I want to remind you to check out our email newsletter. It's called the Entrepreneurs Minute. If you're looking to grow a brand or want to know what it's like to run a business, basically every Friday, I'm not going to spam your inbox. I release one simple and small compact email and I will basically tell you what I'm doing, what I'm learning in my life, what I'm reading, products that I'm discovering, new AI tools that I'm using. So anything I'm utilizing in my business, it's just a sneak behind the curtain as to what I'm doing to grow my brand and my business in hopes of helping you along your journey as well. So don't forget to subscribe to this show so you get notified each and every Friday morning when we go live with a new interview and an conversation. Don't forget to leave us a review. It's one of the best ways you can help the podcast grow and to get new listeners. And with that said, let's jump into this week's conversation. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's conversation on the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. Today I'm joined by Forest Bombover from the Teach me personal finance YouTube channel. We're going to be talking about how he transitioned out of the military and how he now strives to help regular people better understand financial matters from his YouTube channel and his website, how he makes money, how he's growing his personal brand, and how he plans to build this up to sell in the future. Forest, how you doing today?
- [02:31]
A
Doing great, Dusty. Thank you very much for having me.
- [02:33]
B
Absolutely. So Teach Me Personal Finance is the name of the YouTube channel that you run and are growing currently. Can you give my audience the kind of origin story of how this channel started and what type of content you feature on the channel?
- [02:49]
A
Sure. So I created the YouTube channel Teach Me Personal Finance in February of 2023 to help support existing content that I had for my website, also named teachmepersonalfinance.com and what I focused on was trying to create video content that would support existing articles on that site. Site video. We could talk about how I acquired the site later, but site at the time that I started the channel had a couple hundred tax form articles. Pick a tax form that someone is struggling with, I take the instructions, I break them down into layman's terms, user friendly language, and then have an article that would walk someone step by step on how to complete that form. So I created the YouTube channel because I felt that when there's probably a group of people that would appreciate just a visual walkthrough of that exact same form. So that's how the channel started.
- [03:57]
B
So as far as video knowledge, had you had any experience creating or producing video content before the channel launch?
- [04:06]
A
None.
- [04:08]
B
So you were coming at this from a very beginner phase of things. So you knew the website side of things. You obviously knew the financial topics that were going to be covered. But as far as the production of videos and how to implement it on the website and things like that, you were learning as you went?
- [04:25]
A
I was. And I, I started doing research into how to do YouTube channels. Everyone's familiar with kind of the typical Mr. Beast story, or at least I have three teenage kids. So I'm familiar with Mr. Beast. And so I knew that just wasn't going to be me. But I also understood that the audience that was going to happen upon my YouTube video probably wasn't looking for a highly educated or highly published or highly edited video. They were looking for literally step by step instructions on whatever tax form I was covering.
- [05:08]
B
Yeah, they were just looking for the answers to their questions. And you already knew what some of this was, was as far as topics because you were already posting before this on the website, these articles. So you mentioned to me off air that you decided to incorporate videos once you realize the kind of the power of YouTube and the traffic generating source to the website, to your business. So I guess before we start talking about that process, let's just lead with this. How much money are you able to make each month on average? Obviously this is seasonal, but what are you averaging money wise from the channel and the website as the, as a tandem?
- [05:43]
A
So during tax season, probably somewhere between we're in the middle of tax season now and it looks like for March, it'll probably be somewhere around five or six thousand dollars of revenue from the channel. During the off season, which is pretty much during the summertime, it'll be one to $2,000. And then in the fall it ramps up a little bit, slows down for the holidays, and then picks back up again in January. It is seasonal in that a lot of the YouTube revenue, April 15 is the most viewed date by far, orders of magnitude higher than even April 14th. But in general, there are a lot of tax forms that people are still looking for that don't depend on tax season. So there is a it, there is a drop, drop off after tax season, but it's not nearly as much as I would have thought going into it.
- [06:40]
B
I think what intrigues me about your channel is that you do exactly what I teach my clients to do when I get on a coaching call. You really know your audience. You've niched down to a point to where you're not trying to reach the masses. You're not doing financial health, you're not doing much about retirement. Now there is stuff in there you're doing about Roth IRAs and tax forms and things like that, but your bread and butter is the tax forms and the information and knowledge. And the beauty of that is that these tax forms have a tendency of changing, right and evolving. And so that always gives you a running list of content, ideas and things to cover, questions to answer. You've got a really good base of a business and doing 3 to 5k during the prime season and 1 to 2k in the off season. That's a pretty good little system that you have set up. So let's go back now to what I mentioned. Now that we have that laid out, let's go ahead now and just discuss the thought process and system of you deciding to involve and incorporate videos into the website, which the website was a preexisting entity that you acquired. And we can discuss that maybe little later. But as far as the video side of things go, what made you dive into the video side of things and how did you incorporate it into the website?
- [07:56]
A
So I have, I have an example, SEO, kind of an engineer that helps with. He did my first site audit and he walked through a couple of things that I could do to improve the engagement on my site. And one of the first things that he said was, hey, put a video on here. You. He knows nothing. He's. He lives in Canada, so he knows nothing about U.S. taxes. But even to him it was kind of like not everyone has the same way of learning. So some people might read that article and say, great, but not your entire audience. So put a video component in there. And I thought if I'm putting a video component in there, why not YouTube? So figured out how to embed YouTube videos into that, into an article.
- [08:41]
B
And what was the initial response as far as what were things that you were seeing on the analytics side and just overall business side of things? I assume it was a pretty large uptick.
- [08:52]
A
It's hard to say because in 2000 I started this YouTube channel. In 2023, as the site was growing and as I was taking this abandoned personal finance site and changing the direction of it, I. There were a couple of trends. One was the YouTube channel. One was just growing a site, but then as it started ranking on Google, I won't say de index, but it was definitely deprioritized and almost delisted by Google. Even then, my website engagement was still growing, but I wasn't getting any, any traffic from organic search. It was all primarily either through a newsletter that I started or repeat customers coming back or eventually the YouTube channel where I would embed links to the accompanying articles. It's hard to pinpoint exactly like you know, out of the gate how much that trajectory was impacted by putting the YouTube channel up.
- [09:58]
B
Would you say that YouTube currently is one of your top drivers of traffic to your business and to your site?
- [10:04]
A
I would say that. I would also say that the. During the HCU update that tank my organic performance, the YouTube channel definitely kept engagement high and it definitely kept. It became my leading traffic source once the organic search component went away.
- [10:24]
B
Of all the SEO tactics that you've learned for your website and running that business, translating over to YouTube, what have you learned about SEO and optimizing search engine type of stuff with the YouTube channel?
- [10:38]
A
I've learned that you need to understand your audience and it really. It's not just putting up content to see who reads it or who watches the video. It's also engaging and answering every comment that you have so that you're curating more ideas for your next video and really just paying attention to feedback. Even just technical, hey, your sound quality is not good. Once I got that 10 times I got a new microphone. Just paying attention to basic things that, that don't take an SEO expert to pay attention to.
- [11:19]
B
Is that kind of how you learned early on is just receiving the feedback from the people who are learning from your videos and saying things such as your audio sucks and why aren't, why can't I hear you and things like that? Is that kind of how you were filtering what needed to be taken care of and when?
- [11:35]
A
Well, that, that takes care of some of the basic logistics, but also people like so if I put up a video, probably one of my most viewed videos is a walkthrough on how to fill out a W4. So if you get a new job, your employer will ask you to fill out this tax withholding form. Everyone uses that. I've probably got hundreds of comments on it that people will say, yeah, I got the video. How do I do it with my situation? Here's my situation. Tell me how I fill this form out. So if I didn't pay attention to all those comments and I don't get to all of them because I get the comments fed to me through my email and sometimes they slip through the cracks. But if I didn't pay attention to that stuff, then I would have missed either ideas for a really good article slash video, or maybe I would have not given that person a reason to come back. If I give them a good engaging comment that satisfies their quality question, which is really a follow up to why they came to the video in the first place. If I don't give them a good reason to come back, then they won't. But if I serve them properly each time they come and I give them what they're asking for, then they're going to come back the next time they need something.
- [12:53]
B
I think what's really interesting about what you're doing is your video process altogether as far as how you produce your videos. And I think it's one of the reasons why it resonates so well with your audience. You identified early on that the no frills method of recording of just simplicity of hey, my thumbnail is just going to be an image of the tax form that I'm talking about in the video. I'm not going to do some drawn out intro there's not going to be that many jump cuts. It's just going to be plain Jane simplistic answering questions of the audience that I know I'm targeting. Can you talk about that mentality of when you realize that, hey, maybe this is one of the reasons why the channel's doing so well and my business is doing so because I didn't try to overdo all of those production type things.
- [13:44]
A
So that's definitely it. One of the things that I thought about so going back to how you can niche down clients. So this is obviously focused for people that are interested in tax forms. But even within that, everyone does taxes once a year. But the people that outsource their taxes to an accountant, they don't care about this stuff. It's really the do it yourselfers. And then there's also a little tiny niche of accountants that may have never seen a particular tax form and they're googling it and they're finding the only video that's covering it. So once I pay attention to this is my audience is really the people that are manually completing a form instead of using TurboTax or whatever software. Then it was all right, what do I need to do to give this person what they want? And what is the shortest way to get there? And for me, the shortest way to get there is I work on a Mac and I just use the. I don't even know the name of whatever the embedded software is, but I can, I can do screen kind of shots and then I can record a video based on that and then I can just walk through the that's all people want. And then I do zero editing on the video. If I get through the first five minutes, then for me it's good enough. The reason I do all that is because my SEO guy told me, hey, you've got a basic formula. The difference between you and success is quantity. You might have 20 of the best articles out there. You need 500 or whatever the goal is. And I looked at that with the same thing with videos. Hey, if I none, no tax article is or video is ever going to go viral in the millions of views. But to me, success is I show up, I do a maybe 10 to 20 minute video per day and if I have to spend a couple of hours editing that, I'm going to get burned out. But if I Simply just spend 10 to 20 minutes on that video, plus an extra 5 minutes uploading it to YouTube, putting all the links in and now I can move on to the next thing I've got That day. That's a sustainable. I can do that for a very long time without getting burned out. And I'm able to create more content that people might actually appreciate.
- [16:11]
B
It's the reason why I started this show over 12, 13 years ago was people like you who are able to take what YouTube offers, which is a platform to share knowledge or entertainment and joy and help people through a hard time. There's a number of reasons why people watch YouTube videos. Education being one of the largest, obviously, but, you know, you taking note of who your audience is, answering their questions, getting into the comments section, doing a deep dive into the ones that you can do, and like you said, not keeping the main thing. And you're not trying to confuse the audience. They come there to get their answers. They're in a stress, stressful moment emotionally. They're probably dealing with financial things of, okay, I don't really understand this tax form. I don't want to hire someone because I can't afford to, but I've got to do this the right way or else I'm going to get audited by the IRS and things such as that. So how do you. And how did you take such a. In my opinion, a bland topic such as tax forms and things of that nature. And how did you add your own flair to it to make you stand out from the rest? Because I did Google and YouTube and there are other people doing similar things not exactly to what you're doing, and there are some obscure forms that you cover, but how did you add your own spin to it and make it your own to where people trust you in that time?
- [17:30]
A
I think the best way to think about that would be to consider myself maybe the. Everything that you learn about Mr. Beast, it's. My approach is pretty much the opposite. Teach me. Personal finance is not really, I guess it's a brand in that it's the name of the website that I bought a couple years ago. But people just search for whatever they're searching for and they come across my website or my YouTube channel. I don't really try to make myself the center of the brand. Most of the people that I engage with don't even know my name. And that's intentional. It's out there. And certainly there are people that watch a video or read an article and they say, hey, I want to hire this guy to do my taxes. Okay, that's more of a tangential intention. The reason I even offered to do tax preparation is because last year I got so tired of trying to find referrals to a CPA that I just decided that was the next step in serving my audience that wanted me to do their taxes. So I guess the point is I don't make it about me. It's literally about what's this person googling. I'm going to create my titles, my descriptions. Everything about this video is going to be answering that question or addressing that tax form. I've got a couple hundred tax form videos. I've got probably as many, if not more that cover IRS notices, which is what do you do when you get this letter from the irs? And a particular letter might be you owe us taxes. Another one might be we tried to send your refund out to you. When I read these, when I read these notices, they look self explanatory. Call this number, take this action. But a lot of people still get paralyzed by that. So just creating a video that literally walks them through that and lets them know that they didn't skip a step probably gives them a little bit of reassurance that let me follow this like a recipe. And if I follow the recipe then I'm going to get to where I need to be. I think that's probably just peace of mind for someone that is reading the instructions and still feels like they're missing something.
- [19:51]
B
So you just mentioned that you now offer tax services yourself. So that's obviously one of the ways that you make money from the channel, from your audience. Can you just break down the ways that you're making the income from the channel and from your brand?
- [20:07]
A
Sure. So there's YouTube ad revenue, there's the on the website. Even though traffic's grown consistently since I bought the website about three years ago. And at first it was about 150 articles of very plain generic personal finance content. It looked like a lot of it was outsourced to overseas VAs and writers that where you could just tell that Google's algorithm was screening all of this stuff out of search results. Just not good quality content. And so I started writing the ship and it took about a year just to get that cleaned up. But over all of that time, as soon as I started putting stuff on the website, I noticed that there was just a consistent growth. And even if when I go through my I keep track of all the metrics and everything and when I factor out seasonality, I can still look at year over year growth of the traffic, where it's coming from and all that. I could tell that in 2023 and 2024 the website got hit a couple of times by either A core update or the HCU that everyone loves to hate. But then In December of 2024 it started picking back up and all the pages that were dropped by Google started getting put back into organic search. And from December to March the traffic just went up. And I eventually qualified for Mediavine proper. I was under Mediavine journey for the people that are under 50,000 sessions per month.
- [21:51]
B
And what is Mediavine? Can you explain that to the audience?
- [21:53]
A
Sure. When you operate a website, you may participate in ad or ad placement companies. The most basic level would be Google Adsense and then there are other vendors such as Ezoic and mediavine and Thrivent I think is now. So some of the premium publishers require a certain baseline of, of viewership sessions per month just so that they can have something to take to add to advertisers and say, hey, place your ads here and we'll guarantee you a certain minimum amount of traffic. And so the premium services pay a little bit higher.
- [22:36]
B
So I want to talk just briefly. You mentioned you bought the website.
- [22:40]
A
Yes.
- [22:41]
B
So it wasn't something that was just you got a URL or a domain name and then you started it from scratch. You actually bought an existing, I call it Internet Real estate is what I often call it. There's websites such as Flippa, F, L, I, P, P A and other third party sites where you can buy and sell already existing domain names, web businesses, e commerce stores. So explain briefly why you went that route and what you learned from that process.
- [23:10]
A
So when I was researching what to do with a website, one of the things that I learned about was domain authority or domain ranking using AHREFS as like a site analysis tool. And if you start a new site from scratch, you have a ranking of 0. And this is on a scale of 0 to 100 being something completely ubiquitous like Facebook or Google. And then most media sites would probably be in the 80s or 90s. But when you start with a blank slate, you're starting with zero. The website that I found was probably around 30. The way I found it was not through a broker. I actually personal finance sites are pretty hard. They're quick sellers, so it's not really a buyer's market for them. But I, what I did was I had been going to a conference, an annual conference for personal finance people known as Fincon. And they've been around for about 15 years. And every year they do an award ceremony, best new website, best personal per best website to talk about student loans or taxes or retirement. So what I did was I just built a spreadsheet of all the previous best new website of 2010, 2011. And I went site by site to each of those and I I was looking for a site where the person had given up but really didn't do anything with it. So I was looking for. Oh, the last article that was posted was three years ago. This might be if I can find the contact information, maybe I can reach out to this person directly. And so once I built up my Excel spreadsheet of couple hundred sites, I just went and cold emailed people until I reached the owner of Teach Me Personal Finance and I got his story. He was doing this as a side hustle. It was too much work for him given the typical job, family, all the other priorities and he wanted to get out from under it. So I was able to offer him a little bit of money. And that wasn't a huge sum of money, but at least he got some money for the work that he had put into it.
- [25:36]
B
Would you say is it a few hundred bucks or.
- [25:38]
A
Yeah, it was about $3,000.
- [25:41]
B
That's about.
- [25:42]
A
Yeah, that's probably. I just looked at a flippa email this morning and that's probably maybe about the range of a typical starter site. So I was getting ahead of starting from scratch. So that basically saved me the first year or two of having to build links and do all of the typical SEO stuff.
- [26:05]
B
It gets you ahead of the game. I bought a couple of websites in the past 10 years myself. Some of them, one of them in particular, even more than the $3,000 you paid. And I found it to be a good quick start, a good learning experience. And it is really Internet real estate. There is something to be said about the work and I it link juice, but you can call it whatever you want to call it as far as. And something that is big now is that people buy and sell YouTube channels. It's not against the terms of service if you do it the right way. Have a good friend of mine who's in this, he's like a broker, a middleman between people who are buying and selling YouTube channels. And there's some YouTube channels that are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. People who are just burnt out or they want to sell out and move on to something new. And it's interesting and it's why I wanted to take a deep dive into that conversation. The next question I have for you in regards to YouTube channel is what is something that you wish you would have known sooner now that you've done this for a while and you're looking at what you've done up to this point, what is that one thing or two that you can say, man, I wish I would have implemented this sooner and the channel would have grown quicker or whatever it may be.
- [27:14]
A
I don't know that there's any one thing that I can put my finger on. I think that if I define sooner to be like, up until now, problems that I'm still trying to get my arms around would be what are other ways that I can monetize my channel without. If I go back to the definition of my niche, people that are looking for a single piece of information and then probably leaving and going about their day, then that precludes the possibility of creating like a membership forum. Like I. That's a trendy thing where people like to group together and talk about a common topic and then the moderator or the curator of that forum collects a membership fee. That's not really practical for people that are looking for one thing and then leaving. And it's not really something that I'd be interested in doing. So I guess the problem that I wish I addressed, that I'm still looking to crack the case on, is what are other ways that I could monetize the channel that also deliver value to my target audience? So that's a running. If I can figure that out, then I'll be 100% happy.
- [28:34]
B
And I think the good thing for you is that you are already averaging the two to three thousand dollars a month. So there is proof of concept. There is the ability to make money from this audience that you're trying to reach. It's just like you said, trying to diversify, not put all of your eggs into one basket and find ways that maybe are more passive in terms of not having to do people's taxes actively and things such as that. Really good point there. In closing, what's next for the channel? Speaking of that, other obviously forms of monetization, you just mentioned that. But as far as like short and long term for the channel, what are you looking to do moving forward?
- [29:09]
A
So I think I have a sustainable, you know, model that just requires me to show up every day and put a little bit more effort into it. And the goal would be over the next five to ten years figuring out an exit strategy that involves everything that I built, whether it's the YouTube channel and the website, or maybe I grow a tax practice. And now I'm selling a tax practice with a pretty powerful marketing arm, trying to figure out, like, how I can do this to sustain my lifestyle and then figuring out what the exit strategy would look like over a five to ten year time frame. And I think that this is something that I can do for a while. If I was looking for a one to two year exit then I'd probably get bored and want to go back into doing something else. So I'd rather just keep the flywheel spinning on one thing instead of selling it to start the flywheel on the next thing.
- [30:13]
B
Absolutely. Forest, you have been an awesome guest. It's people like you is the reason why I started this podcast is the uniqueness of your niche and your space. It should let the audience know listening to this that it doesn't matter what you want to talk about. Whether it be different types of wheels and tires on vehicles or different types of fishing boats or whatever it may be, there's no space or niche too small. If your willing to do the research, the due diligence, find out, you know, how you can entertain or educate that group of people and reach them to where they click on your videos and consume them. And so again, thank you Forest for being a guest on the show. Again, it's Forest from Teach Me Personal Finance. It's the website. Teach Me Personal Finance over there on the the website as well as Teach Me Personal Finance over on YouTube. All of that will be linked down below. Anything mentioned throughout the show will also be there as well. And for us, we appreciate it and we'll talk to you next time.
- [31:09]
A
Thank you very much Dusty.
- [31:10]
B
And that's a wrap on this week's episode of the show. I hope you really enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Forest, thank you again for coming on the show. Would also like to remind you guys that we offer a ton of stuff for the community, the creators community, Discord Group, the exclusive podcast that I do each and every week. Also the monthly Mastermind calls. I offer YouTube coaching one on one. All of those links are down below, but I do want to emphasize that but one of the things that I'm growing and has been growing the fastest for me is my email newsletter, the Entrepreneur's Minute. If you're an entrepreneur looking to grow your brand, grow your business. Content creator looking to launch a podcast. It's a behind the scenes look of what it takes to succeed. I tell you my different failures throughout the week. I tell you things that I'm learning, products that I'm discovering. It's simple, it's compact and it's not going to spam your inbox. Go check that out if you haven't already. Huge thank you and shout out for you. Listening, Downloading the show. We're growing the YouTube channel around the podcast that's almost at a thousand subscribers now. Just starting it at the beginning of this year. A lot of really fun, exciting guests coming down the pipeline as well. So if you're not already bought into what we're doing here, please, I encourage you, just subscribe to the podcast. That way you get notified every time we go live with a new episode. Don't forget, keep hitting that record button. Don't give up. Talk to you next week.