SDH 448: How to Get Started on YouTube with Trena Little

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Hello my beautiful friends! I am so excited because today I am sitting down with Trina Little, a YouTube Strategist with a master's degree in business who helps online owners business owners develop a YouTube strategy that allows them to scale their business by driving more leads using the right videos. Being a busy business owner herself, she understands the importance of making videos simply and effortlessly, but effective and lasting at the same time. Her YouTube videos are her sales team and they do the heavy lifting for free working 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Trena has a background in business and she began to see exactly how powerful the YouTube platform was while watching videos. She also saw all of the limiting beliefs a lot of people had surrounding YouTube and decided to make her mark by helping business owners learn to use the platform in a very simple way, by making it easy to understand and helping them to create the right videos to get their content to show up in Google searches and last longer.

One thing Trena also recognizes is the rat race that is social media and while on other platforms content has a shorter shelf-life YouTube videos can last much, much longer. Being able to help business owners realize that if they put the time into creating a quality video it will absolutely live a much longer life than other social media platform content. While an Instagram caption takes only seconds or minutes to write, YouTube media takes significantly longer. The difference is that the YouTube video’s shelf-life is significantly longer. Here is what Trena found:

Shelf-Life of Social Media Posts:

Instagram grid post: 48-hours
Facebook post: 6-hours
YouTube video: 20+ DAYS

In fact, Trena has a video on YouTube that she posted in 2018 and still drives traffic to her email list now, 3 years later.

Before Trena took the YouTube world by storm, she worked for the federal government (one of the largest employers in her town). While she did that she was still on the ‘hunt’ to find a way to create her own future the way she wanted it. The problem was that the path she was on was the ‘safe’ route. It came with a 401k, a retirement plan, and medical benefits. It was what she should be doing, according to everyone around her. Except it wasn’t what she wanted to do. Eventually her job began sucking her soul and she became more and more detached from her day-to-day role.

After her daughter was born she decided to teach her daughter how to forge her own path and live life doing something she loved. She no longer wanted her job to affect her mental health and using her daughter as one point of inspiration, she decided it was time to create something of her own.

Trena had watched webinars about creating courses and convinced her husband that she could do it too. She was determined to replace her income and two weeks before Christmas, Trena gave her two-weeks notice and left her job on New Year’s Eve.

While being a stay at home mom is an amazing responsibility Trena knew it wasn’t her calling. She needed something else to call her own and it to be something she actually enjoyed doing. Trena had dabbled in some client work and taken a few courses but wasn’t ready to put all of her eggs in one basket. She launched a course and had only 3 sales, one of which was a friend who wanted to support her.

Backing up to when Trena was still pregnant, she had spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos researching items and other products she would need for her newborn. In 2016, not many businesses used YouTube yet and Trena realized she was really investing her time into what these people on the platform had to say and really bought into it. There was something here and saw how YouTube could be used as a marketing tool.

With Trena’s first launch not doing as well as she had hoped, she feared she had made the wrong choice in leaving her 9-5. Her saving grace was that one of the clients she had been working with remembered her and she became known as the ‘YouTube video girl’. People began to reach out to her to help them with their own videos and through several of life's twists and turns here we are. No matter what, Trena just kept going. She eliminated what didn’t work and tweaked what did. She put on her blinders to keep herself from focusing on those around her and what they were doing so she could focus on what she needed to do.

During that time the hustle mentality was in full swing. Trena’s challenge was that she was competing with those around her who didn’t have to balance launching an empire and raising two kids. She knew the hustle mentality wasn’t going to work for her so she needed to find something that did. Finally in 2019 she felt like things just started to click and she became even more pumped for 2020 (we all know how that turned out).

2020 totally changed how Trena operated as a business owner and she learned how to transform her business to operate in the way she needed it to so she could balance her passion for what she did with her family’s needs. She learned what she needed to focus on each day to accomplish tasks and reach goals and how to really dedicate her time in a new and efficient way. Thus, 2020 was a banner year for Trena and her team and she was able to hire her first full-time employee.

One of the biggest lessons Trena has learned along the way is that mistakes are inevitable. She says:

“I think one of the biggest lessons is [that] you're going to make mistakes all the time. But you have to be able to recover from them. If I would have let myself sulk over hundreds of mistakes that I've made, or hundreds of failed pages that went up or didn't redirect, I literally would have been out of business years ago. So I think the biggest lesson is mistakes are always going to happen. Just learn from it and figure out how you can correct it moving forward.“

Trena is also highly focused on showing up in the most authentic way possible, even ditching the use of Instagram filters (big props here!). She wants others to see her show up as herself so that her clients (and everyone else) learns they too can show up as themselves, whether it’s on YouTube or otherwise.

Another message Trena shares is that whether we like it or not, video is here to stay so start showing up there.

“The only way people are going to buy from you or work with you is if they like you. And the only way they can figure out is if they like you is if they see you on video.”

Trena also wants to share a few key steps someone can take to get started using YouTube:

Use ‘greenlight’ videos
Prepare a video game-plan
Create a video thumbnail and title

Unsurprisingly, Trena draws her inspiration from YouTube. She enjoys seeing what others are doing, seeing their successes and journeys and gaining inspiration from their stories and seeing where they started and where they are now.

Finally, Trena also dished with us her YouTube vs her Instagram strategy when it comes to posting content:

“One thing that I have been doing on Instagram is taking our YouTube video on the day it goes live. We have a carousel post and then the next day we do a reel from that video. We just chop it up and use the reel then the next day we do an IGTV. Then the following day we do a quote. We have about five pieces or five posts on Instagram and every Tuesday I've been trying to post like a selfie photo or taking a more personal picture and sharing more of a story. So it's not all informative but it's a way for people to connect with me. That's the only way I've really been using Instagram right now because I'd rather put the time that I have, again, like onions, add the layers that you can right now we just have the time to repurpose the YouTube video and create one special Instagram post a week.”

To connect with or learn more about Trena check out her YouTube channel or reach out to her on Instagram.

Until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

“Trena’s YouTube videos are her sales team and they do the heavy lifting for free working 24 hours a day and seven days a week.”
“One thing Trena also recognizes is the rat race that is social media and while on other platforms content has a shorter shelf-life YouTube videos can last much, much longer.“
“Trena knew the hustle mentality wasn’t going to work for her so she needed to find something that did.”
“Trena wants others to see her show up as herself so that her clients (and everyone else) learns they too can show up as themselves, whether it’s on YouTube or otherwise.”