This post is an interview transcript. Click here to watch James Wedmore's video interview featuring Antonio Centeno.
James: Hello, everyone, James Wedmore here doing a very special video for you. I'm really, really excited. I am over here on a YouTube channel called Real Men Real Style, and I have with me on the line the creator and founder of this channel, Real Men Real Style, Antonio Centeno. So, Antonio, are you there?
Antonio: I'm here, James. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
James: I really appreciate you being here as well. Now, check this out, guys. Antonio has over 4.3 million views on his channel and 56,000 YouTube subscribers. I don't even know how many videos you have, but it looks like a lot. You've been posting for a while. These are incredible videos. Your most viewed video has almost 400,000 views. And, obviously, you're doing a lot with this. So what I would love, really quick from you, Antonio, is tell me a little bit about how you got started with YouTube and this business and a 30-second to 60-second intro and story of yourself.
Antonio: Sure. I'm a business owner. I own a custom clothier and I saw a friend of mine actually doing very well on YouTube. I listened to some interviews over at Mixergy, which is actually how I found you, James. I listened to you review over Rise to the Top and you guys gave some great tips that didn't seem — I mean, it was scary at first. One of my friends, he had over 4 million views. But I knew that if I put out some quality content, that if I stood out from the pack, that I could get this done.
And the hardest thing was really just getting it done. So I followed a number of your tips, which I'd love to share a few. And I think that anybody can follow these and start to get views.
James: I definitely want to hear those tips and strategies. I think that they're far more effective when they come from a student or someone who's actually doing this in a completely — I don't want to use the word random. But it's a very unique niche. It's a very unique niche. Before you share that, share with me something that will get us excited about some of the results. How does this translate into marketing, business and results for you? How do you take–
Antonio: It tripled my sales.
James: That's amazing.
This post is an interview transcript. Click here to watch James Wedmore's video interview featuring Antonio Centeno.
Antonio: It tripled the sales of my company. It has helped me take a blog and turn it into a six-figure business on the path, hopefully, within a year and a half, into a seven-figure business. I get to hire an assistant simply to answer all the thank you emails that I get because I felt so bad that people contacting me. I mean, we get a lot. It is beautiful. I love it.
James: That's amazing. So first and foremost, I just want to congratulate you. I'm so happy for you because — Actually, guys, just so you know, we met in person at an event locally. Antonio bumped into me and I'm just so happy to connect and to see these types of results. So, congrats. It's exciting. So take us through some stuff. Share either some of your biggest ahas, or even just little tweaks that you've done to really see some great results on here.
Antonio: Sure. Well, I'm going to actually share some things which you've given — I think you talked about it in Mixergy. I think you maybe talked about it in David Siteman show. And I know that you give away in your Video Traffic Academy and your membership site. But one of them is to create videos in batches. Videos should not stand alone. So we went through a period. I filmed almost all of these videos in my 110-year old Victorian house in a dirt basement.
You can't tell that because we made the lights all nice in the background. I filmed at 5 o'clock in the morning when it was dead quiet and my kids weren't awake. And we filmed in batches. I would get up at 5:00 because I think you talked about how — It takes actually a lot of time to prep for a video. But when you get filming, boom, they go by quick.
And so I would shoot sometimes 14 videos at a time. And all of a sudden, I could release a video a day for two weeks. And I put up a challenge. I'm like I'm going to do 100 videos in 100 days. That stretched out to 200 videos in 200 days. But when I did that, when I jumpstarted, it wasn't me getting up every morning and doing a video. If you divide it by, let's say, ten, I only shot video on 20 days. That's very doable over more than half of the year. People, if you're dedicated and you want your business to grow, you can do that.
James: Yeah. Let's just address that for a second because you said the time thing. And the time issue is so big for most people. They say that I don't have the time. We're both busy people. You and I don't have the time to do this. But you still did it. What is your response to someone who would sit there?
Antonio: You make the time.
James: Yeah.
Antonio: It is a business imperative. And like I said, I had to get up. I was getting up at 4:00 because I would be filming at 5:00. Because I have three young children. And any time I do something, I'm asking myself, “Is this project worth the time I could be spending with my family?” And I found myself answering tons of the same questions again and again. Every single day now, 10,000 to 15,000 people watch my videos and I answer their questions exactly.
I mean, I just love it. It scales things that you're doing right now which is inefficient. So identify what is wasting your time and kill it and make time to once a week, once a month set two hours, three hours aside in the morning, an hour or two in the evening before to prep and film those videos.
James: That's great. That's great. So what else do you got for us? Because I see so many things you're doing but I want you to share some of the things, little things that have made the biggest difference and impact for you?
Antonio: Well, another thing that I took me, James, is that you said ask people to subscribe. And I kept doing it. Even though I felt that many people are going to think, “God, he's repetitive. He asks us again.” But the way I look at it is people now find me all over the web and no matter what video they watch, most likely, I'm going to ask them at the beginning to subscribe. And when I don't ask them to do this, I get maybe 30% to 20% of the subscribes I get when I simply ask people to subscribe.
So by doing that, if you look at the proportion of our subscribers to our views, it's pretty good, as you pointed out. Because I haven't had any viral videos. You mentioned my biggest video, How To Roll Your Sleeves. It's a very simple video. I show people how to roll their shirt sleeves. But most of my videos sit at about the 10,000, 5,000 range. They don't get really huge. But all of those were sitting out there and all of those are slowly growing. So I ask people to subscribe.
James: It's simple. Now, tell me a little bit more about it. You ask for the subscribe at the end of the video?
Antonio: At the beginning because I assume that they're not going to stick around to the end. My videos are also longer. This is one thing I've kind of ignored. I know a lot of people say, “Keep the video short.” I go a little bit longer. That was one of the ways that I separated myself. I knew this content really well. I had written hundreds of articles. I was already an established writer over at The Art of Manliness and some other place, my own blog, when I was writing content.
But when I was getting out there would separate me from the crowd. No one else out there was doing it. And it's something that, yeah, my first videos, they weren't that great. In fact, they're still out there. People can go look at them. I talk very slow. But you get better with time. As you do it more and more, you get better. Another thing with asking them subscribe, ask them to like the video at the same time.
Again, when you ask them to like, it seems at least basically, my basic text is math. I see three times more likes when I ask them to do it. And then have a call to action. So I'm always recommending people go grab my free 47-page ebook. Because one thing you can't see, but because of this YouTube channel, yeah, I have over 50,000 YouTube subscribers, but I've got over 50,000 email subscribers because of this as well.
James: Wow. And that's where it really does translate into a real ROI when you can sit here and save 50,000 email addresses that you can send an email to right now and make an offer and promote a new product or service. This is incredible.
Antonio: Exactly.
James: So, I could go on so many directions here. I really want to talk to–
Antonio: Let me–
James: Yeah, go ahead, Antonio, please.
Antonio: Another thing that you talked about is have good sound. Sound is more important than actually — I think, the actual video itself. And so we used — My getaway of doing this, I had a yeti. You can get the Blue Yeti. Actually, you can see my review of the Blue Yeti. That was one of the first test videos I put out there. So if you go to Amazon, you'll see the Blue Yeti for under $100. I had this microphone hanging upside in front of me recording on a computer and then my video editor, who is my wife, would then go in and she would mend the two together.
Because a lot of my earlier, I just wasn't getting this good a sound as I wanted. You could spend a couple hundred bucks. We spent money on our camera and on getting that good sound. And people really noticed.
James: I love it. It's so smart because you work with the simple principle of, “Okay, I got to have a great audio.” And you just figure out a way to get it done.
And we've done little Jimmy rig situations and stuff like that. It works. It totally works. And you've great audio right now in this. So I really appreciate that. So, how often are you posting right now? That's what I want to know. Are you still posting? Are yous till posting daily?
Antonio: Now, I've slow down. Now, not daily anymore. I pulled back. Now, I'm focused on product creation and a lot of the videos we make are private. So, I was just telling you earlier in our conversation as we were talking, I launched a new membership site called Black Man Style. Now, they go to my channel, they can see, I just announced this to all my subscribers on YouTube and I sent out the email to the email list that I built up because of YouTube. So all of this placing together and I'm already looking at money coming right into my account as we're talking because of these videos.
James: Okay. This is my last question for you, Antonio. You have hundreds of videos on here as far as I can surmise. And you said you did the 200 video challenge. It's so amazing. How do you get inspired for your content? How are you coming up with it? Because these are very specific stuff we're looking at here. It's like belt reviews to how to wear a men's suit to how to roll up your sleeves, leather shoes. I mean, how do you come up with this content?
Antonio: Most of my content is simply answering the questions that people ask me. And if you ask people — So on my email list, if you check it out — I stole this from Derek Halpern — is ask people what is their burning style question. At least, that's what I ask them. And they vent all the time. And I take those and put them into a database and I simply create the content. And I will oftentimes create content that I know 99% of people don't really need.
I mean, I've got one video that is geared towards a finance student in Mumbai who has dark skin, dark hair and he's trying to figure out what to wear. Now, I realized most of us are not finance students in Mumbai and of Indian descent. But for the million men who will fit that demographic over the next ten years, that is evergreen content that will always be number one and will answer their question so beautifully that you can't compete with me on that.
And my goal is to put out so much content that hits that long tail so perfectly that I will simply overwhelm the Esquires and the GQs and all those other guys that have millions of dollars in their budget. I'm simply going to eat them up on the long tail.
James: And you're a real person that people can relate with, get to know. Do you do that? Do you share about your family and your personal life? Does that make its way into your videos?
Antonio: It didn't at first. I was scared to open up and I wanted to appear professional. But I found that as I get more personal, all of a sudden — Yeah, I started opening up and people responded beautifully to it. When they see you're a real person, I think not only it translates into more views, more people liking you, more people commenting and more sales.
James: I couldn't agree more. Well, Antonio, you have no idea. Thank you so much because this is not only inspiring me to continue teaching this and sharing this. I get so excited when I see someone who has just created a business off of YouTube. But all the people are going to watch us are going to be inspired to. You guys make sure to go — We'll have the link below, YouTube.com/realmenrealstyle, and become the 56,567th subscriber of Antonio. Make sure to watch his videos, like and comment on them. And thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you, Antonio, for joining us. Take care.
Antonio: You're welcome, James. Thank you.
This post is an interview transcript. Click here to watch James Wedmore's video interview featuring Antonio Centeno.
