Book Marketing Mentors
Jam-packed with smart, easy and simple ideas, this weekly podcast features experts who share proven techniques to add power and zest to supercharge your book marketing plan. Hosted by Susan Friedmann, CSP, international bestselling author, and founder of Aviva Publishing, this new and exciting podcast aims to rev up your marketing efforts with fewer struggles, and more success. Start listening today and discover how to get noticed in a crowded marketplace.
Book Marketing Mentors
How Nonfiction Authors Can Use YouTube to Sell More Books and Build Authority - BM478
You’ve been told YouTube is for influencers, but what if it’s actually the smartest way you can grow your book brand?
This week's guest expert is Louise Brogan. She’s a LinkedIn expert, YouTube creator, and author of Raise Your Visibility on LinkedIn. She also hosts the Raise Your Visibility Podcast.
Louise Brogan has over 100,000 YouTube subscribers and nearly 3 million video views. In this episode, she shares how she became a thought leader, starting as an accidental YouTuber.
You’ll learn how to use video to grow your audience, build authority, and sell more books.
Key Takeaways:
- Become the go-to expert. Answer specific, high-value questions instead of pushing your book.
- Turn questions into content. Use reader feedback and Google suggestions to create videos people actually search for.
- Beat the algorithm. Short, focused videos that solve one problem keep viewers watching and coming back for more.
- Get more clicks. Strong thumbnails and titles spark curiosity and drive discovery.
- Build loyal followers. The more useful your channel, the more people subscribe without being asked.
Tune in to transform the way you use video to market your book and connect with your ideal readers!
Here's how to connect with Louise:
Download your free guide on how to use LinkedIn
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Your Story = Your Sales Superpower
Want to attract more clients and grow your business fast?
My friend Lisa Bloom’s Selling Through Story program shows you how to use storytelling to stand out, build trust, and boost sales.
Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books.
Today, my special guest is Louise Brogan. Louise helps people to leverage LinkedIn to raise their profile and generate leads and sales. She's the author of Raise Your Visibility on LinkedIn. She's also the host of the Raise Your Visibility online podcast and YouTube channel. With over a hundred thousand subscribers, she shares actionable tips for growing businesses online. Louise has been recognized as one of The UK's top 100 small businesses and top 100 female entrepreneurs.
She had the honor of representing The UK small businesses at Buckingham Palace where she met King Charles.
Louise, it's always delightful to welcome a Brit to the show, and all the way from Belfast, Northern Ireland, thanks for being this week's guest expert and mentor.
Louise Brogan [00:01:20]:
Thank you so much, Susan. I'm really looking forward to this chat today.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:24]:
As I said to you before we went on air, this is the first for Northern Ireland. Yay. And we've done all over the UK. We've done other countries in the world, but never Northern Ireland. So you're a first. Memorable. That's great.
So Louise, you're an expert on LinkedIn. However, it's your YouTube channel and the dynamism of your channel that I really, really want to sort of delve and dig deeper into on our interview here. Let's start. How did you actually decide that having a YouTube channel was, like, this brilliant marketing tool for you to share your LinkedIn expertise?
Louise Brogan [00:02:12]:
It was actually accidental, Susan. If you had said to me five years ago that I would be a YouTuber at the age of 50, I would have laughed in your face. It kinda started well, it did start during the pandemic. In the first lockdown in 2020, my kids were all at home doing schoolwork from home, and we were only allowed to leave the house for an hour a day here in The UK to go for a walk, and you weren't allowed to walk very far. We're lucky enough that I have a home office, and my husband occasionally had work from home. And the three teenagers were all in the house, and the kids had loads of work from school. So they're getting their day through by doing schoolwork, and I'm trying to keep my business alive while everyone's having a meltdown. Interestingly, it it picked up quite quickly once people realized that, you know, you can still do all this stuff remotely.
Louise Brogan [00:03:05]:
But I was in a mastermind group of five people that started just towards the end of '2 thousand '19. So it's five of us. I call them my English mastermind because they all live in England. And two of the guys in the mastermind are YouTubers. At the very start of the lockdown, when everyone was like, what on earth are we doing? It was really panicky for small businesses. We were meeting regularly, like, maybe once or twice a week on Zoom calls, kinda supporting each other. Everyone was dealing with really different large stresses. But it became a regular weekly meetup that we did.
Louise Brogan [00:03:44]:
And a couple of weeks in to the lockdown, one of the guys, Tom, said to me, Luis, you should do a YouTube channel. And I was like, really? And he says, yeah. You should do content about LinkedIn on YouTube because there's not a lot of it on there. And I thought, well, like, I've got loads of spare time because what am I doing with my whole day? I can't just make pancakes all day. I'm gonna turn into the size of a house. So I thought, well, okay. Let's give it a go. And I love learning things, Susan.
Louise Brogan [00:04:12]:
I like figuring things out. So it's a bit of a challenge. It was a bit of a project. And to my surprise, it started to take off very slowly at first. Like, a lot of these things, you've got to be consistent. So I was doing videos. I was learning as I went. Lots of the first videos are terrible.
Louise Brogan [00:04:32]:
And then I got into it. I started to see things happening, and, actually, I started to get business from it. It was a slow growth, and I was at the start of it, to anyone who has a YouTube channel, there's certain levels you want to reach. So you want to get to your first one thousand subscribers, and then your next goal is to get what they call watch hours. So So how many hours in total people are watching your videos for. And at that time, you needed to have 4,000 watch hours across a year. And when you hit those two markers, you could monetize your channel. So that was my initial goal, and it took me about a year to get there.
Louise Brogan [00:05:12]:
So a year to get my first thousand subscribers, and that was literally me going on to my family and friends laugh at the at the numbers now because I go on to Facebook and I'd say, I'm about five people off 300 subscribers. Please, you know, just go and subscribe. You don't need to even watch the videos. Just go and subscribe. And that's kinda where it started.
Susan Friedmann [00:05:33]:
Wow. Yeah. This is like when you sell books for the first time. It's like, you know, family and friends. They buy the book, so it's the same. You get them to subscribe. And I want to come back to how to get subscribers. But before that, let's talk about what advice you would give listeners about using YouTube as a book and author marketing tool.
Louise Brogan [00:05:58]:
The reason my LinkedIn channel, my YouTube channel about LinkedIn grew was because I focused purely on sharing value for people about LinkedIn, and that's why people started to subscribe. It's really interesting how I was talking to somebody else about this earlier today, and I was doing a content marketing workshop. And I said, when you create content, whether you're writing it or making videos about it, You have to really focus in on the thing that you're writing about or making videos on, and that is actually how you become an expert on something. I am a on the coolbie that looks at your different personality types. I am a fact finder. I'm a quick start on a fact finder, and I love to research things. So researching how YouTube worked, but also researching how LinkedIn work was how I started to write about LinkedIn. So if anyone looks at my YouTube channel, you won't see other content on there.
Louise Brogan [00:06:58]:
You'll only see stuff about LinkedIn. So people start to recognize you as an expert in the space that you're in. And I think one of the biggest misconceptions, I think, about YouTube for people who are starting out is they'll go on and they'll create a video and they'll start to say, hi. My name is Louise, and I'm I'm a LinkedIn consultant, and I wanna talk to you today about blah blah blah. If you do that on YouTube, people switch off straight away. These are all the things I learned about YouTube. Somebody would be asking a question on the Internet, and my video would turn up as the answer to that question. Because as soon as you click on that video, I start answering your question.
Louise Brogan [00:07:39]:
And there's loads of little nuances to YouTube, but the first thing is to build an audience who see you as someone who's their go to on the thing that they need help with. And then it's taking it from there and onto the next step. So for me, it's a natural thing that people then go to find me on LinkedIn. On both YouTube and LinkedIn, there's places that you can link through to your website or to buy your book. When you upload a video, you can add a link that takes people to buy your book. But, like, a lot of these platforms, they don't really like you sending people elsewhere. If you want to use it as a marketing tool, as an author, it's really about getting known for the subject matter that you are an expert in. And all of the people that find you on YouTube, a percentage will want to go to the next step with you.
Louise Brogan [00:08:36]:
It's not about getting on there and constantly talking about your book because that's not what people use YouTube for. If you forget about book marketing for a minute and think about when I go to Google, what questions am I asking? So for me, a lot of the questions would be, how do you make a you know, I've got butternut squash. What am I gonna do with this tonight for dinner? For my husband, it might be something was wrong with the tumble dryer, and he wanted to figure out how to fix the tumble dryer. Typing those questions into Google will pull up an answer on YouTube. A more specific one that people might resonate more with is gardening tips. We've decided that, well, I would like to build out a garden, not just have a plain old lawn in the back gardens. We want to become gardeners. So I have found through searching on YouTube for tips for gardeners who've got clay soil, and I have found a couple of people who I really like how they come across.
Louise Brogan [00:09:35]:
So I am now subscribed to them. And when I want a question answered about my garden, I go to them first. Now if those people then said, we've got a book about this, then it would be natural for me to want to go and find out more about their book because they have now become my resource to the questions that I want answered. That's another reason I created the channel. So apart from Tom suggesting that I should do it because it was kinda like a fun lockdown project, the channel has a 10,000 subscribers now. We're almost at 3,000,000 views. I could not work with 3,000,000 people if I wanted to. The way our my company works, we do LinkedIn content for companies and training and workshops.
Louise Brogan [00:10:19]:
If I have 10 clients on the go at one time, that's a lovely number for me to work with. All of the people who will want help with LinkedIn but don't have the money to hire us or don't want to outsource it, they needed somewhere else to go. So I thought, well, if I make videos that answer these people's questions and put them on YouTube, then the next time someone comes to me and says, Louise, I don't have any money. I'm just starting out. I'm like, oh, no problem. Everything I teach is on YouTube for free, and you can go just go and watch it there. So it became a resource for people who didn't want to hire me directly to work with them as well. So it's kinda like a extra resource for building a wider audience, if that makes sense.
Susan Friedmann [00:11:06]:
It does, and sort of a great repository of your brilliance. How do you decide on the topics that you cover? What I heard you saying was you're answering people's questions. So then where my mind went was, how do you find out what those questions are?
Louise Brogan [00:11:24]:
Honestly, sometimes, it's someone has sent me a message on LinkedIn and said, Louise, I don't know how to do this thing. And I'm like, oh, that's god. That would make a great video for YouTube. And once you have a YouTube channel, Susan, this is how your mind starts to work because you hear questions more than you might necessarily hear, and if that makes sense. There's different ways. There's people who ask me questions. I think, oh, they want to know the answer to that. I bet you other people do too, so I'll make a video on that.
Louise Brogan [00:11:50]:
There is a whole thing about numbers on YouTube, and it is I think for me, I will hold my hands up and admit it was a vanity metric to get to hundred thousand subscribers. It was like a goal I set myself. I was driving towards that. Actually, that meant that the content I created for YouTube was slightly different to the content that would bring in my ideal target audience. So we could talk about that a little bit.
Susan Friedmann [00:12:18]:
Absolutely. I want you to go there because I'm sure our listeners want to know that. Because as they think about if they've got a channel, how they can make the best of it? Or if they don't have a channel, how do we even get started with that and what they should even think about? Tell us.
Louise Brogan [00:12:37]:
I know that more people use LinkedIn in their career than entrepreneurs. There are more people on LinkedIn who are there to get their next job and for recruiters to hire and to find their next work. Okay? There's a billion people have LinkedIn accounts. They are not all on there to talk about coaching and consulting and, you know, their small business. The majority of people on LinkedIn are people in the corporate. I knew if I wanted to get a larger audience, I had what I would call small and mighty audience. And it's 2025 now. In May of twenty twenty four, I had 10,000 subscribers.
Louise Brogan [00:13:17]:
So I got to a hundred thousand subscribers by November of twenty twenty four. What I did was I switched up what I was creating content on. So I knew if I made videos for job seekers and people advancing their career, I would get more subscribers. So that's what I did to build that audience up. They are not my target audience. Like, interestingly, my book works for both people who want to raise their profile to get their next job and for small business owners. So it's actually turned out to be good for both. But my top video on YouTube is how to upload your resume to LinkedIn.
Louise Brogan [00:14:00]:
My business, my agency, which creates content for people who wanna be seen as a thought leader on LinkedIn, Those people aren't uploading their resumes to LinkedIn. They have no interest in doing that. So the content that grew my audience the fastest was for the job seeker, who is not my business's target audience. But I could see that that was a bigger part of the YouTube network and the potential on YouTube for me, if that makes sense.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:29]:
It does. So I'm thinking of our listeners and whatever subject matter they have, they've written about, and the value that they can bring. How do they find out what would be the right approach? Where should they be listening in? If LinkedIn is more for job seekers, that may not be their market. It might be if they're interested in focusing on HR or burnout. I've got some authors who are very much into burnout. Yeah. I'm thinking, okay. Maybe it's not LinkedIn, but it might be either Facebook or, I don't know, it might be e x, it might be Instagram.
Susan Friedmann [00:15:14]:
Yeah. It's finding out what people want, where they're asking those
Louise Brogan [00:15:19]:
questions. LinkedIn is definitely the place for those people.
Susan Friedmann [00:15:23]:
Okay. It's
Louise Brogan [00:15:23]:
absolutely the place for those people. But in a a billion accounts, more people are on there looking for their next job than anything else. But that does not mean that you don't have 300,000,000 people on there who want help with professional mindset or whatever it is that they're dealing with. They are on there as well. I recognize that more people were looking for help with their career prospects on LinkedIn, so that's why I created the video content for YouTube on that. Does that make sense? If you're thinking about, okay, Luis, this sounds great, but, you know, maybe I have a book and it is about burnout in 2025 and how to deal with that. What I recommend you do is social listening. Have a what are people asking about this? One of the easiest ways to do this is literally go to Google, who own YouTube, so not a lot of people realize, I think.
Louise Brogan [00:16:19]:
Go to Google and start typing in a question about burnout and see what Google auto suggests, and that will be the key questions that people are actually asking about this. And then if you can make a video that answers that one thing this is another thing. People will do a video and say, here are three tips for dealing with burnout. People are not typing in three questions about this. They're typing in one. So you take those three things, and you make a video about each one of them. The other thing about YouTube is some of my most successful videos, and we are talking over a hundred thousand views on one video, might be ninety seconds long because it's literally answering that question, and people love that. If you've got a question and someone can answer it in a clear, simple way that helps you, they love that.
Louise Brogan [00:17:16]:
YouTube loves that because the person then stays to see what else you're talking about, and you've got a happy customer, it pushes it out to more people. Whereas if I did you say you you asked a question about because let's talk about LinkedIn profiles. If somebody asked a question about what should I write in my LinkedIn headline, and I started talking about lots of different things before I even got to the headline, they're just gonna click away. Whereas if I start the video by saying, to write a really good LinkedIn headline, here are a couple of formulas that you can use. One, two, three formulas. Try these. End video. End of video.
Louise Brogan [00:17:54]:
No. Please subscribe. Please like. Because people click off before that ends, and your videos are measured on the percentage of the video that a person watches. And if you have a three minute video, but the last thirty seconds are of you trying to get people to subscribe or go and buy my book, everyone clicks off. So that video has less of the full percentage watched than one where you answer the exact same question, but you try and sell at the end. People watch a larger
Susan Friedmann [00:18:34]:
fascinating. First time I've heard that, so I love that perspective. So then it also begs the question, well, then how do you get them to subscribe? Or how do you get them to click to a lead magnet or buy your book?
Louise Brogan [00:18:52]:
I put links to everything in the show notes on my video. This is where it is a game of volume on YouTube. We want to get the volume. Even if you look at the numbers, for me to have 3,000,000 views, that's three and six zeros and a 10,000 subscribers. So I don't know what the percentage of that is out of 3,000,000, but, you know, it's not even half a million. So you need to get a lot of people watching to get one subscriber. So I'm
Susan Friedmann [00:19:26]:
So it's a volume thing. Was that what you're saying that it sort of yeah. Yes. The more people who watch, the more likely they are to subscribe.
Louise Brogan [00:19:35]:
Yes. So it is a volume. So this is why I suggest that you make a weekly video at least. You're just answering the key questions that your viewers have. What I find kind of fascinating about the whole thing is as well is that a lot of my viewers are not return viewers. I'm kind of fascinated as to how a YouTuber behaves as a person who consumes YouTube content. And that was a tip I was given early on. So I told you I was a fact finder.
Louise Brogan [00:20:08]:
When I started this, Tom has a book about YouTube, which I bought. I have bought another book about YouTube. Like, I read almost cover to cover. And one of the biggest tips you can get about YouTube is if you want to understand how YouTube works, you need to watch YouTube. Sounds really simple. But how do you learn how to write a good LinkedIn post? By reading LinkedIn posts and seeing what works and what doesn't. And it's the same with YouTube. Now the caveat there is don't be thinking, oh, the the gigantic YouTubers, you know, the the Mr.
Louise Brogan [00:20:43]:
Beasts and the the Minecraft gaming people. I'm not talking about them. You're better to look at somebody who like an audience size of my size, which is pretty substantial, but it's not making any news in the papers. If I had 3,000,000 subscribers, that would be different a different ballgame. So I've got a really good successful YouTube channel, but it's not, like, groundbreaking. You know? It's a a lot of people want would love to have the size of a channel that I have. Not saying it's a tiny channel either, but look at people who are coming in second, third, fourth place and aim for them as opposed to the people who are coming in first place because they've got to a stage where whatever they do, people are watching them. If you think, like, there's a guy in The UK, Stephen Bartlett, Daria's CEO, and anything he puts out now is going to have hundreds of thousands of viewers because he's reached that level that's just gonna be automatic.
Louise Brogan [00:21:39]:
With some videos I put, I still will only get a couple of hundred views. An easy way to do this, Susan, actually is if you see somebody in your space and they are that kinda you know them because you you work in this space, but people outside of your world probably wouldn't know who they were. If you look at that person and you're thinking, why are they so they have so many people on YouTube, what you can do is go to their channel, click on videos, and filter their videos by most viewed, and then watch those top three or four videos and see what are they talking about in these videos and what way are they creating these videos. Some of the feedback I've had from people is that my audience, not the thought leader type people, what they like about my videos is they say, Louise, you don't wave your hands around lots. You just get straight to the point. I know what my audience likes, so I try and do more of that.
Susan Friedmann [00:22:36]:
Absolutely brilliant. Oh, there's so much wisdom here. I'm, like, blown away already. I'm, like, itching to get started, and let's look at all those frequently asked questions. By the way, you said go and check for Google, but also potentially type into chat or perplexity or one of the LLMs to find out what are the most frequently asked questions in your particular field. Because what you think people want to know isn't necessarily what people really want to know.
Louise Brogan [00:23:11]:
So That is still true. That's
Susan Friedmann [00:23:13]:
still true. Sorry. I think this is a great segue for our listeners to find out more about you, how they can get hold of you. Take it away.
Louise Brogan [00:23:22]:
Well, I'm on LinkedIn and
Susan Friedmann [00:23:24]:
YouTube. LinkedIn and YouTube. Duh. Yes.
Louise Brogan [00:23:29]:
My website is called unimaginatively called louisebrogan.com, and you can connect with me over on LinkedIn as well or come and subscribe and follow some of the YouTube channel stuff. Honestly, Susan, everything I teach, you can see on my YouTube channel, which is kind of the way I set it up. I also do a regular newsletters and little mini workshops. So if people are interested in kinda finding out more about me, I have a, like, a free guide on how to use LinkedIn and not how to use YouTube, how to use LinkedIn. And that's on louisebrogan.com/download to be nice and easy. That Belfast accent might need closed captions for that.
Susan Friedmann [00:24:12]:
It gets transcribed. It's okay. Excellent. It's mind-blowing. I mean, just the numbers alone and the fact that May of last year to now, you've 10 x'd, if my math is correct, the number of subscribers, which just blows my mind how you did that. And I'm assuming that you've got subscribed to my channel in multiple different areas. Is that correct?
Louise Brogan [00:24:40]:
Yes. But this is the funny thing about YouTube is that the people who subscribe to your channel, it's hard to get people from your own email list to subscribe to your channel. I find this it's kinda fascinating. It's and I know it's not me because I've heard podcasters say, here's a funny thing. We know our download numbers, but we also know our subscriber numbers, and they don't really connect. People will subscribe to your channel because they know it's gonna be a resource for them. So asking people to subscribe yeah. Of course, ask them, but they're not gonna do it because you're asking them.
Louise Brogan [00:25:16]:
They're gonna do it because they know if they need help with a question about what it is you're an expert in, they know how to go to that channel. So for me, following those gardeners like, I don't have to try and remember that lady in America who talks about clay soil. I don't have to try and remember her name. So I subscribe to her channel, so it's literally just sitting there when I want to go and see what she's doing. And I think it's the same for my subscribers because who has time to remember everybody's names? You know? There's so much stuff out there. They're subscribing because it's helping them, not because they are helping me. Of course, my friends and family on Facebook, they are subscribed to my channel because they were helping me at the start.
Susan Friedmann [00:25:56]:
It's just when you ran out of friends and family, it's like, then what? It's the same with book sales.
Louise Brogan [00:26:02]:
I don't have a 10,000, friends and family.
Susan Friedmann [00:26:07]:
Although I know that there are some Irish families that are pretty large.
Louise Brogan [00:26:11]:
Yeah. Well, that's true. Yes. We do. Apparently, there's 45,000,000 Americans who have Irish ancestry.
Susan Friedmann [00:26:18]:
Yes. I mean, yeah. We just had some It's kinda hilarious. And it was like, it's a big thing here. So probably even bigger than possibly it is in Ireland. I don't know. In any event, we were sidetracking. Louise, always have our guests leave our listeners with a golden nugget. What's yours?
Louise Brogan [00:26:39]:
Okay. So if you are going to use YouTube as a marketing tool for your book, and I highly recommend that you do, think of it as an add on to your readers or a resource that they can use that supplements what you have in your book. And the top tip that no one will tell you is that thumbnails for your videos. If you do not have the right thumbnail for your video, no one is ever going to click on the video to hear the wisdom that you have in the video. Pay attention. When you do that research on the top people in your field, look at their videos on YouTube. Look at their thumbnails, which is the image before you watch the video because that is so critical. And if you don't get that right, it doesn't matter how amazing your video is, no one's gonna click on it to watch
Susan Friedmann [00:27:31]:
it. Wow. Yes. I mean and they're starting to look a little the same, but obviously, that's what sells, so to speak. Just quickly, I mean, is it the subject matter you're covering, or is it like a tagline or something?
Louise Brogan [00:27:47]:
Have a look at my thumbnails and my top videos, and you'll see what I'm talking about. You want to have your face on the thumbnail, Not close-up like we can see your pores, but we want from your neck up. K? So we don't wanna see your torso. That's not how we connect. We connect with head and shoulders. So that should take up at least a third of your thumbnail to one side. And then, Susan, I refuse to do the shock face on my I just refuse. I know a lot of people do it.
Louise Brogan [00:28:16]:
I don't do it. That's where you go, oh, you look really shocked. I just won't do that. And if you ever see me doing that, you know something's gone terribly wrong. And then have one or two keywords. I don't mean keywords by search engine optimization, but a couple of words that someone's gonna, oh, what is that about? That makes them curious and wants to click on the video. Perfect.
Susan Friedmann [00:28:40]:
Listeners, go and look at Louise's channel, Louise Brogan. You can really look at her brilliance and copy some of that and use it for yourself with your expertise. I think this has been amazing. This definitely deserves a part two, Louise. So you and I are gonna discuss that because I'm like, okay. We didn't discuss this, and we need to discuss that. Oh, there's so much.
Susan Friedmann [00:29:06]:
And probably by the time that we do this again, there'll be so much more out there that we need to know about. So thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. It's been amazing.
And by the way, listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expected to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for. So go to bookmarketingbrainstorm.com to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparked some ideas you can use to sell more books. Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
Here's how to connect with Louise:
