Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Master Audience Engagement and Create Content That Clicks | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Wed, 05 Feb 2025
If you’ve ever felt like your content just isn’t sticking, you might not be speaking your audience’s language. But figuring out what resonates isn’t a guessing game. There are real strategies to find what connects, cut what doesn’t, and adjust on the fly. In this episode of the YAPCreator Series, presented by OpusClip, Hala Taha breaks down why analyzing audience behavior is critical. She also shares powerful strategies to help you better understand your audience and their preferences so you can create content that captivates, converts, and keeps people coming back for more. In this episode, Hala will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:45) Understanding Your Audience (03:24) Neil Patel on Finding the Right Audience (07:29) Nick Loper on Turning an Audience into a Business (09:11) Creating Value-Based Content with Julie Solomon (14:33) Engaging Your Audience with Oz Perlman (18:19) Mastering YouTube with David Shands (23:25) Leveraging Data and Analytics (25:18) Ken Okazaki’s “Toilet Strategy” for Viral Videos (28:21) Adapting and Evolving Your Content (30:55) Using OpusClip for Viral Content Try OpusClip for FREE: Visit https://www.opus.pro/clipanything Resources Mentioned: YAP E226 with Neil Patel: https://youngandprofiting.co/4gqjng0 YAP E325 with Nick Loper: https://youngandprofiting.co/40MTrVM YAP E233 with Oz Pearlman: https://youngandprofiting.co/42DkUMt YAP E292 with Julie Solomon: https://youngandprofiting.co/4jJTpXp YAP E230 with Ken Okazaki: https://youngandprofiting.co/3Ervwnx Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of audience engagement?
Hey, Young Improfiters, welcome to episode five of the Yap Creator Series presented by Opus Clip. In this series, we're diving deep into the art and science of content creation, how to create, connect, and thrive as a modern day content creator. Today, we're going deep into something that every content creator should master, understanding and adapting to audience preferences.
Chapter 2: How can understanding your audience drive content success?
This is the heartbeat of effective content creation, the foundation of building a loyal, engaged community that feels connected to you and your brand. In this episode, I'll break down why analyzing audience behavior is so critical, and I'll give you actionable strategies to help you understand your audience and their preferences better.
We'll feature podcast guests like Ken Okazaki, Neil Patel, Julie Solomon, Oz Perlman, and I'll even share with you how we use audience insights at Gap to create content that's relevant and impactful. Let's get started. First things first, before you can forge a meaningful connection with an audience, you need to figure out who they are.
As a content creator, understanding the balance between a broad and niche audience is crucial for growing your engagement and your business. Broad content allows you to reach a wider audience and potentially increase views and revenue, while niche content creates deeper and more meaningful connections with a dedicated community. The key is finding the balance that works for you.
And whether you're marketing a product, a service, or just yourself, it's useful to start by thinking in terms of your TAM, or your Total Addressable Market. But just how big or small should you start? This is what Neil Patel, an expert on digital marketing, told me about how he approaches a potential audience.
Chapter 3: What strategies does Neil Patel suggest for identifying your audience?
What makes a good audience market to me is a big TAM. So assuming you find something you're passionate about by just through trial and error, you got to make sure you're focusing on a big TAM. Everyone says the riches are in the niches. That's far from true. If you look at the majority of the large corporations out there like Tesla's automotive, right? People need cars in this world.
If you look at Microsoft, everyone needs software to run these computers and digital devices that we're on. If you look at Google, we're relying on search for anything. and someone organizing data and feeding it to us in a very organized fashion. If you look at Apple, we need all these hardware pieces that they're selling from headphones to cell phones to laptops, right? These are large markets.
If you look, again, look at the biggest companies in the world, they're going after large markets and not niches. So the key is to go after a big TAM.
Now you can start in a niche if you want, and there's nothing wrong with that, but you need to make sure that you can expand that niche into a large market because the amount of effort it takes to market a business, whether it's on LinkedIn or any social platform or even SEO, for a niche compared to a large market is almost the same amount of effort. Sure. It's harder in a large market.
It takes longer to see results, but it's the same process in the same time and energy that you're putting into it. So might as well go after something big because it's very unrealistic to be in a niche and being like, you know what, I'm going to dominate this niche and gobble up a hundred percent of the market share. or even 20, 30%. That's very hard to do.
But on the flip side, it's easier to say, hey, I'm going to go after this multi-billion dollar market and I'm going to gobble up 0.1% of it, right? You gobble up even something small, that's enough money where you're generating millions of dollars where it's meaningful, right? For example, if it's a $10 billion market that you're going after, you gobble up 0.1%.
That's big enough to create an amazing life and a business.
So you're saying you need a big, sort of more broad market. You don't want to get too in the niches because they're really hard to find. That's like finding a needle in a haystack. When you're a marketer, you want to find your audience in mass. You want to target them in mass. That's how you're going to target them in the cheapest way, most effective way.
If you have to find like 10 people here, 10 people there, it's like you are just going to exhaust yourself and it's going to be very expensive. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How can an audience become a profitable business model?
In fact, none other than Mr. Side Hustle himself, Nick Loper, shared with me how he now considers building an audience on channels like YouTube to be one of the most promising side hustles around. Something that I read of yours that I thought was really interesting is that you actually consider a side hustle being growing an audience, right? You call it an audience business.
So talk to us about why having an audience in itself can be a side hustle with multiple avenues.
Yeah, this is probably, you know, tier three, you know, tier one services, tier two products. Tier three is this really flexible hybrid, you know, content based business, audience based business where it could be a social following. It could be a blog following, a podcast following, a YouTube following. And. once you have people paying attention, like the entire playbook opens up. Yeah, sure.
You could sell services, you could sell products, you could sell attention in the form of advertising or affiliate partnerships, but it really is a powerful place to play.
And that's really where I've spent the bulk of my side hustle and entrepreneurial time over the last 10 years to try and figure out how to get more traffic, how to get more listeners, how to get more email subscribers and plan in that space. Because yeah, The scale is almost infinite, right?
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Chapter 5: What are the key elements of value-based content?
It takes, as you know, the same effort and energy and investment to create an episode, a podcast episode that 10 people listen to or 10,000 people listen to or 100,000 people. And so it's a really unique platform in that way. And the same thing with social content or video content.
Whatever content arena you decide to play in, it's not just enough to turn up and churn out content. Julie Solomon, who's the queen of influencer marketing and an expert on how to break through on platforms like Instagram, explains the critical distinction between simply creating content and producing content that genuinely drives results with your audience.
When it comes to Instagram, because that's really been my platform of choice since 2013. So I have been there through the ups and downs and the in-betweens. And I think that where most people get it wrong is that they get so lost in having to have to do it a certain way or trying to beat some kind of system or some kind of algorithm.
And what I have noticed throughout a decade plus of supporting people on Instagram and coaching them in order to build a brand and visibility there is that, yes, it's important to understand things like hashtags and SEO and viral hooks and all of those kinds of things. But really, at the end of the day, it just comes down to, do you have value-based content
that is specifically talking to the person whose problem that you solve? And are you showing up as an authority and as someone that can educate them as being that solution provider as consistently as possible? And most of the time, people aren't doing that because they're so focused on these things that really just don't matter at the end of the day.
You know, it doesn't... And that's why, Hala, you know, I have a lot of people that will come to me and it's... wild that they've got tens, if not hundreds of thousands of followers and they make no money. And I'm thinking, how do you have all this and you don't make money? And it's because maybe they figured out a way to go viral or maybe they figured out some kind of
you know, giveaway process to gain a following, or maybe they did some collabs, but because they weren't creating that value from the get-go, because they weren't thinking about, what do I specialize in? What is my offer? Why do I want to pick up this phone and post something every day? It's like they completely missed the boat.
And before they know it, they're three months in or three years in or 10 years in, and then they come to me and they're like, Julie, I don't understand how I've kind of been trying to grow and piece milling it together. And maybe I've gotten to a thousand followers and nothing's happening.
Or maybe I've gotten to a hundred thousand followers, but still nothing's happening because I'm not making any money. And so what's happening here? And so I think that for growth on Instagram, you really have to think about that through line. Are you just creating content just to create content? Because that is just a hobby.
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Chapter 6: How can performers like Oz Perlman teach us about audience connection?
to really build a brand around the reputation that they wanted to have. They were just creating content for the sake of creating content and doing it on TikTok and blowing up, but now they don't have anything to show for it.
And there's a lot of creators that that has happened to over time that have gone on to maybe get a Sephora makeup deal, but then a year later, they don't have any makeup in the stores and it's because it can't sell.
So how do we figure out exactly what will resonate best with our target audience? To truly connect with that audience and create content that genuinely serves their needs, you need to understand what interests them, what drives them, what thrills them. Understanding what your audience wants is the foundation of creating content that stands out.
even since the dawn of time when early humans were telling their first stories around the communal fire. Of course, nowadays, most of our audiences are online, but we can still learn a lot about how to shape and respond to an audience from those who are gifted performers and make their living by delighting live audiences.
The magician and mentalist, Oz Perlman, is one such performer, and he shared with me some fascinating insights into how he uses deep knowledge of human behavior to read an audience.
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Chapter 7: What mistakes do content creators make that hinder monetization?
Every show is different, which is great because every audience is different, right? Think about it. If you're watching a movie, the movie is always the same versus what I do is not like watching a singer or a band where, you know, they can change the song a little bit, but it's still the same song. For me, everything I do involves audience interaction. My show is the audience.
Cause I like, if I'm doing a show for a thousand people, 50, 60, 100 of them will be a part of it at some point. I throw Frisbees around the audience. We hand envelopes. We pick people out of the whole crowd. I've done arenas before with 10,000 people. And what my show is all about is audience reactions.
Watching someone's face and that shock and that amazement and sometimes that just absolute silence When you've done something that seems impossible or you've told them something, there's no way you could have known or anticipated. And that's really the product I'm selling is very memorable moments, usually with a lot of emotional impact. And so it's helpful in certain parts of everyday life.
But it's funny because not as if I can just walk into a real estate negotiation and be like, I know their bottom line. I know how much money I'm saving. Like it works in certain ways. It's helpful. It's an edge, but it's not the same. It's a... It's a facade. You know, it's an entertainment pursuit because in my shows, I'm the director. I get to call the shots in a certain way.
So I wish I could tell you, I'd go to the poker table and just make millions. You know, funny enough, a lot of casinos, they have people trained in what I do going against me. You know, they're the ones who are making sure that I can't cheat.
Got it. Got it. And that reminds me of something that I've also heard you said, where you say that your profession is more like a comedian than it is a magician, because you're actually feeding off the audience and not just like doing the same thing over and over again.
Totally, and I can't, it's hard to practice what I do. So a magician, think about it, can practice, like I use the example of a card trick. You can practice a card trick at home in front of the mirror for days, weeks, years, and perfect the moves that are required, right? Same thing with a juggler, let's call it. But- A comedian has to tell their joke. He or she tells their joke.
And the only way you know if it's funny is if an audience reacts, right? The audience is your canvas. So the exact same thing applies. And that's the reason right there why there's so much fewer mentalists than magicians, because the learning curve is so steep. You can't get better without first bombing. So you need to be bad and start doing it and getting better and better with audiences and
And a lot of people don't have that stomach. They can't deal with that level of rejection over and over and not be good for years at times.
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Chapter 8: How can you create content that resonates with your audience?
Just like Oz Perlman, you're responding to what your audience is telling you, even when it's through nonverbal cues like likes, shares, and comments. Every interaction is a signal and your audience is showing what they relate to, what they're curious about, and sometimes what just isn't clicking. At times you may bomb just like a standup comedian or a live performer might.
The magic happens when you take the time to interpret these signals and respond to them. That's when your content goes from good to great. But figuring out an audience, of course, takes time. Perhaps nobody I've spoken to knows this better than my good friend, the entrepreneur and the host of the Social Proof podcast, David Shantz. David is one of the hardest working people I know.
And as you'll hear, he knows his audience down to their daily routine and their habits. So I have to ask you for anybody who's starting their YouTube journey now, like you said, you started in 13 years ago or something like that. But 2023, it's a whole different game. You're still crushing it. You still know how to get views and all of that.
So how can we get more engagement on YouTube, more views and subscribers?
One, you have to be good at it. It's not like I don't have a one, two, three step for someone that's not good. that doesn't ask good questions or put up amazing content or come out with shareable stuff. There's nothing I can do for you. You have to practice the craft. It's really cool because for two years of actually doing the podcast and putting it on YouTube, I wasn't thinking money. 10 years.
So I started 2010. I didn't start monetizing until 2020. For those 10 years, I'm not even thinking that YouTube makes money. I never even thought about it. My only thing was, are people liking this content? Are they sharing it? Are they commenting? And I was focused on having a good show and being a good interviewer and being engaging.
So that's where I'm blessed because I came before the era of jump on YouTube to make a million dollars. I had time to perfect my craft. So one, you just have to be good at it. I don't care if you're super consistent, you have the best camera, best lighting, best. If the content isn't amazing, It's not going to work. So practice your craft. You really need to find a niche
that you're passionate about and that other people are passionate about. And you have to brand yourself around this conversation. So I brand, my whole world is branded around podcasting and entrepreneurship. One, I've been doing it for 10 years or longer than that, my whole life really. But this whole podcasting thing and entrepreneurship, my whole world is that. My bio says it.
If you talk to me long enough, we're going to talk about podcasting or entrepreneurship. That's my brand. So I have a niche. I have an audience. I know all the things that my audience is struggling with. That's how I can tell you. All right. So you got to stop stopping. You got to stop.
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