200: How to Turn Your YouTube Channel into an Email List Growth Machine
Ever wondered how some creators seem to effortlessly grow their email list through YouTube?
In this week's episode, I chat with Lisa Lisson, founder of Are You My Cousin, who shares exactly how she strategically uses YouTube to build her email list and create a thriving digital business.
Lisa started as a blogger (just like many of us!) and was initially hesitant about YouTube. Now, she's successfully using the platform to grow her email list consistently, even as blog traffic has declined due to recent algorithm changes.
What I love about Lisa's approach is that it's super simple - no fancy equipment or complex strategies required.
In this episode, you'll discover:
The mindset shift that transformed Lisa's YouTube strategy
Her specific approach to converting YouTube viewers into email subscribers
How she balances educational content with promotional opportunities
A simple trick for overcoming camera anxiety (that actually works!)
Her strategy for landing sponsorships while staying true to her audience
If you've been thinking about using YouTube to grow your email list but feel unsure about where to start, this episode is for you.
Lisa shares practical tips you can implement right away, whether you're just starting out or looking to make your existing YouTube channel work harder for your business.
Key moments from the episode:
[00:03:00] Lisa's origin story: How a simple family blog evolved into a full-fledged genealogy education business
[00:06:00] The strategic shift: Viewing YouTube as a marketing tool and working with the platform's algorithm
[00:09:00] Balancing educational content with promotional opportunities while maintaining value for viewers
[00:11:00] Overcoming camera anxiety and building confidence in video content creation
[00:14:00] Landing sponsorship opportunities and creating strategic partnerships through YouTube
Mentioned in this episode:
How to Build a Successful YouTube Channel: Insights from Genealogy Expert Lisa Lisson
In a recent episode of the Creators MBA podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lisa Lisson, founder of Are You My Cousin and a leading expert in genealogy research. What started as a simple family blog has evolved into a thriving digital business with a successful YouTube channel at its core. Lisa's journey offers valuable insights for anyone looking to leverage YouTube as a strategic marketing tool while building an authentic connection with their audience.
From Family Blog to YouTube Success: A Natural Evolution
Lisa's story begins like many entrepreneurs - with a simple solution to a common problem. She started blogging to share genealogy discoveries with her family, eliminating the need for countless individual emails. As her blog attracted readers beyond her family circle, she noticed a pattern: people wanted to learn her research techniques. This organic growth led her to transform her family blog into an educational platform.
The transition to YouTube, however, wasn't immediate. Like many content creators, Lisa initially used YouTube merely as a storage platform for videos she wanted to embed on her website. It wasn't until she noticed people actually discovering and watching these videos that she began to consider YouTube's potential as a marketing channel.
The Strategic Shift: YouTube as a Marketing Tool
One of the most significant insights from Lisa's journey was her mindset shift about YouTube's role in her business. Rather than viewing it as just another content platform, she began to understand and work with YouTube's core business model. "YouTube wants to keep people on YouTube," Lisa explained. This understanding led her to develop a strategy that worked with the algorithm rather than against it.
Her approach involves creating series of related videos that naturally lead viewers from one topic to the next. Instead of immediately directing viewers off-platform to her website, she focuses on keeping them engaged within YouTube, only occasionally including calls-to-action to join her email list. This strategy has proven particularly valuable as recent Google algorithm changes have affected blog traffic across many niches.
Balancing Value and Monetization
A key element of Lisa's success has been her ability to balance educational content with promotional opportunities. She maintains a strict focus on delivering value in every video, ensuring viewers walk away with practical knowledge regardless of whether they purchase recommended products or services. This approach has made her particularly attractive to sponsors, as she naturally incorporates their products into her teaching methodology.
She develops quarterly content calendars to maintain this balance, carefully planning how to weave promotional content into her educational videos without compromising their value. This structured approach has helped her secure sponsorships and build strong affiliate partnerships while maintaining audience trust.
Overcoming Video Creation Challenges
Perhaps one of the most relatable aspects of Lisa's story is her journey to overcome camera anxiety. As a self-taught video creator with no previous experience, she faced the common hurdles of feeling uncomfortable on camera and learning video editing from scratch. Her solution was refreshingly practical: she would schedule videos ahead of time, knowing she could always unschedule them if she lost her nerve - though she never did.
This approach, combined with positive audience feedback about her authentic, casual style, helped build her confidence. Lisa's experience shows that perfection isn't necessary for success; viewers often connect more with genuine, relatable content than with polished production.
Building Successful Sponsorship Relationships
Lisa's approach to sponsorships demonstrates the importance of strategic thinking in content creation. Rather than simply accepting sponsorship offers, she develops comprehensive proposals that outline how she'll incorporate sponsors' products into her educational content. This includes specific learning objectives and strategic placement within her content calendar, showing potential partners the value of working with a creator who understands both their product and her audience's needs.
The key to her success with sponsorships lies in maintaining alignment between the sponsored content and her channel's core value proposition. By ensuring that sponsored videos maintain the same educational focus as her regular content, she's able to create win-win situations for both her sponsors and her audience.
For content creators looking to build their presence on YouTube in 2025 and beyond, Lisa's final piece of advice is simple but powerful: focus on consistency over perfection. Whether you can post weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, maintaining a regular schedule and promoting your content across other platforms is crucial for building a sustainable YouTube presence.
Through Lisa's journey, we see that success on YouTube isn't about overnight viral hits or perfect production values. It's about understanding the platform's mechanics, delivering consistent value, and maintaining authentic connections with your audience while strategically growing your business.
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Creators MBA podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destini Copp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching.
Or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today.
My special guest today is Lisa Lisson. Lisa is a leading genealogy expert and the founder of Are You My Cousin, which is a comprehensive online resource dedicated to empowering family history enthusiasts. through her website, engaging YouTube channel and sought after speaking engagement.[00:01:00]
Lisa equips researchers with practical strategies and clear tutorials to navigate the exciting world of genealogy. Lisa, I am super excited to chat with you today. Now you are one of our newsletter profit club members. And as you and I were working through some things with your newsletter, I started learning a little bit more about you and your business, which is fascinating to me because I love kind of digging into all of that genealogy, family history, and that sort of thing.
But what I also found very interesting was the traffic that you were getting organically from YouTube. And I know that you've been using YouTube for several years now. And, I think you're, you know, obviously you're doing a great job with it. You've grown your YouTube channel. You're getting people who are interested in sponsoring you through your YouTube channel.
So want [00:02:00] to dig into all of that for our listeners here today. But before we get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the good audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people? Oh, sure. Thank you so much for having me, Destiny, because I love talking genealogy and family history, and, well, I love talking YouTube as well, so, absolutely.
So, what I do, though, is I help people who are interested in their family history, I help them find their ancestors and, discover their family history. And I do that through, my blog, which is called Are You My Cousin? Through the YouTube channel with the same name and webinar trainings.
Thanks. So I love to help people get beyond just the family tree that says the names, the birth, date, the mayor's date, the death dates, and really dig into some of the stories so walk us back through whenever you started your business and you can take us back to that point in time.
And you were thinking, you know, I really want to teach people how to do, genealogy research and, build kind of [00:03:00] build their family tree. When you were first starting out your business and you were thinking about, you know, how am I going to communicate what's going to be my content platform.
What did you start with and how, you know, when did you add YouTube into that strategy? Oh, that's a great question. So I started out as a blogger, a genealogy blogger and did that for many, many years. That's all I ever thought I would do with it. The blog actually started out as a way to share with my family, the things that I was finding, because so many people were interested in asking and I I was getting lost in all the emails, so I just started the blog.
And I will tell you, when your kids are in middle school and their mom starts a blog, that got me some pretty cool mom points there as well. But, and so come forward, it sort of just was a gradual thing as people started reading it, that were not actually related to me, that they started asking questions about, well, how did you figure that out?
How did you do that? And that was sort of the gradual progression of how I went [00:04:00] from really just a family blog to an actual teaching type blog. And that's what it was for many years. I did that and even started speaking based on it. But YouTube really came about only just two or three years ago where I got very intentional about using YouTube.
I had had YouTube for a while, mainly as a parking place for videos. to put on my website. But I never really had intention of doing anything. And again, one day looked at it a couple years ago and realized people were actually watching some of those videos. So I thought, Oh, well, maybe I need to pay attention to this.
And I just dabbled in it for a while. And then I was in a business mentor type group and the idea of being able to use YouTube as a marketing tool. Not so much a content creation tool, but a marketing tool for my business kind of clicked and I was like, now I get it. Now I get what YouTube can actually do with, for my business.
It fortunately for me [00:05:00] was right before a lot of the Google traffic changes were happening for bloggers where we were losing a lot of traffic. So it was a good timing on my part because then I was able to leverage that YouTube, to build, continue to build my email list and build the business when the blog was taking a bit of a hit with some of these Google updates that have happened.
And I think you're bringing up a good point. I'm seeing it, you know, with several of my clients where with all the AI changes and everything, their blog traffic has gone down, but where I am seeing them have success is with YouTube, just like you.
Pinterest has also still been a good kind of traffic, Organic traffic driver for folks. So you mentioned something just a second ago, and I really thought it was, you know, kind of eye opening. You said, I really kind of changed the way I thought about YouTube and really wanted to start using it strategically in my business.
So can you walk us through [00:06:00] what changes you made and what results you have seen from doing that? Sure. So I started to really view YouTube as really a marketing tool. And so I really knew that to do that, I needed to, one, grow my subscribers, which I, or my, you know, my YouTube subscribers. So that's continued to do, but I needed to be very strategic with that.
And I had to actually understand. YouTube. So I had to take a step back for a moment and study what is YouTube about and how can I use this. And again, I was in a business mentoring group, so I had some support there. But what really I recognize is at the end of the day, YouTube, it's, it's a fantastic video platform, but they want to keep people on YouTube.
YouTube's really not all that excited to send people From my videos back to my website because they want to keep people on YouTube. That's their business model and So once I understood that, what I strategically was able to do was, [00:07:00] okay, if I can keep people watching my videos, you know how you sit down to watch a video and then you watch the next video and you watch the next video?
That's what YouTube wants. And so if I can capture people's attention that way, then YouTube will then serve up Oh, you're interested in watching genealogy videos? Well, let me show you another one that you might be interested in. Let me show another one of Lisa's videos into your home feed that you might be interested in.
And so, that was a way that YouTube is actually using their algorithm to grow my channel. All of that's just organic within the YouTube platform. So I wasn't actually, you know, I wasn't paying, no paid ads. or anything like that. It was simply leveraging their algorithm for that. It's a slow growth.
I'm not going to say that it's a super fast way. It's a slow growth, but I prefer the slow and steady to that kind of overnight sensation that sometimes we see that's not necessarily really sustainable. So I always want to make sure I created really solid [00:08:00] videos as far as content is concerned and giving value.
And I would recommend if you like this video, be sure and watch the next video on your screen because I'm going to show you how to, research the 1850 census record for your ancestors or whatever that next video would have been. After, I would do several in a series, and then at the end, I'm like, if you really like this, head over and sign up for my newsletter so that you can get actionable tips into your inbox every week, that way I'm not sending them off the platform every video but Every four or five, six, I'm going to make that call to action off the YouTube channel.
So I understand your strategy. The strategy is like any social media platform keep up that, you know, they want to keep them on that platform.
So you are leading them from video to video. And then maybe after the fourth video or the fifth video, then you would say, go sign up here to get on my email list. And you can get these weekly tips in my email. I love [00:09:00] that. So let me ask you this. I'm going to switch a little bit of gears on you here.
I know that your channel has a mixed. of educational and promotional content. So can you walk us through how you balance all of that where you're teaching those valuable genealogy techniques while incorporating affiliate promotions and other products that you might have in your business?
Sure. So I think a lot of what I always try to keep in mind when I'm starting to try to create that content calendar, and I do create a content calendar. I create one, I try to do it about per quarter because I find that works better if I get too far out. I kind of lose the flow, but I do create that content calendar What I always want to keep uppermost in mind is that I'm delivering value, that somebody who watches that video will walk away with something that they have learned, regardless of if I'm promoting an affiliate or a sponsorship, I don't [00:10:00] want it to be so heavily based that they can't walk away without some type of information without having to maybe necessarily purchase that product type thing.
So I do try to make sure I always have something in it for everyone, shall we say. And I do balance, so it is an educational type of thing. I try to keep that focus on the viewer and a lot of what I'm showing and teaching. is how I do genealogy research, how I tackle those tough problems. And so I want to share the products that I use that actually help me do that.
The companies are actually really respond well to that because it is kind of a watch me. how I use this particular product or watch how I do this particular technique. The audience really seems to respond to that type thing. I love that. So it's really, you know, here's how you're doing it. Here's how you're using this tool to do this genealogy research.
And I know that you've gotten some sponsorships and definitely, I know you have affiliate partners out there. So I think [00:11:00] that strategy is most definitely working for you. So let me ask you this, and this is, you know, Partly just for my own education here. One of the reasons why I personally haven't tackled YouTube and I use podcasting as my content platform is, you know, I probably have some mindset issues there.
I feel like I'm a little bit older and I feel like I'm, you know, Always want to lose those few pounds. And that's really probably has kept me from jumping on YouTube. Can you walk us through, have you ever experienced that? And if you have, then what helped you kind of get over that?
Oh, sure. I think tackling the mindset piece of actually doing YouTube. Really, that was probably the hardest thing I have done on YouTube. And I came at it with having no background or skills to video and to edit. Those are all self taught that I've done.
And at the end of the [00:12:00] day, I just had to kind of build myself up and go, I'm just going for it and let's just see what happens and it took a while for me to feel comfortable in the front of the camera When you edit your own videos, that is a very humbling experience. That was really tough on me, but I finally just realized that people did like my videos.
They don't mind that I don't have the prettiest aesthetic background that's so popular out there with the YouTube crowd. They don't seem to mind that I have this southern accent and that I stumble over my words at times and I lose my train of thought. In fact, people have reached out to me saying, Oh, you know, I can really relate.
I like the fact that you're just very casual and I feel like I know you. So I think just having that positive feedback was very helpful. I would also, when I would create the videos and I would just be so nervous about putting them out there early on, I would schedule the videos out because I do create ahead of time and then I schedule the videos much like you would a podcast and [00:13:00] I always knew in the back of my mind If I chicken out, I can unschedule it.
And you know, I have never ever unscheduled a video. It was always just that kind of scheduling thing and then giving myself a little space and it was okay. But I was always knowing in the background, I guess, that I had that option, but I've never actually used it with that. So, oh, that's kind of funny. I, well, I love that little tip.
Just go ahead and schedule it and, you know, in your back of your mind if you, you know, wanna unschedule it, you have that opportunity. But I love the fact that you've never taken that and never went down that path. I, I've even had, I have dabbled in, for a while there I was doing YouTube lives to help kind of build that connection to audience.
I even had an asthma attack. live on a YouTube video. So I figure if I can go through that, then I'm good. In fact, it was one of the highest viewed YouTube lives that I've found.
I know that sponsorships are something that you are [00:14:00] interested in, both for your YouTube channel and for your email newsletter. And I believe you've had people approach you based on your YouTube channel and wanting to do sponsorships. Can you walk us through what happened there and the collaborations that you found through your YouTube channel?
Oh, sure, sure. That was actually, I think, I was a little surprised, but people started reaching out to me to, as far as sponsorship partnerships with, on the YouTube channel. And part of that had to do with just, I think, one, that I'm very consistent. There's a fairly small niche when it comes to genealogy research.
I think I was able to gain traction that way. But what I found is that when we would get either conversed through email or virtual Zoom meetings, that when I would approach them with the ideas. In other words, they might say, we're interested. What do you think?
And it's important that I put [00:15:00] in the, my due diligence to make sure one, that that company is in alignment with what I do and what I value. And then I would brainstorm. ideas and say, okay, this would be the idea for the video. These are the learning objectives that I have for that video. And this is how I see your product fitting into that video.
And this is why I schedule it the way I schedule it. So really kind of giving them that background to recognize that, it's more than just a markup. You know, okay, we'll just put a little ad out there and we're good that I had some actual background and strategy behind my videos.
I think that was the difference because I did have such a strategy behind them. And I love that. You know, YouTube video is sponsored by XYZ company. You're actually giving them a full proposal on how you would incorporate their tool or whatever they were offering into your video and using it as a teaching opportunity for your audience.
So I think those are the [00:16:00] most powerful sponsorships, quite frankly, that we can do. So Lisa, first of all, thank you so much for being here today. Do you have any last minute tips for the audience? If they're like thinking, Oh, maybe I should try YouTube in 2025. Maybe that's going to help me get some organic traffic that I may have lost, like from my blog.
What would you say to those people? First off, I would say, do it and just do it. And don't, you don't have to be perfect. You know, let go of that. But I think one of the most important things to really. So when you're starting out to try it is to be consistent. So I currently post new videos every week, but not everybody is able to do that.
If you can only post one every other week or one a month, if you can be consistent and consistently, promote them on your other platforms, through your emails, through your social, other social media platforms, then that will get you, get that foothold in and get you [00:17:00] started to grow in that YouTube channel.
You But I love that. It's the consistency that's so important. As it is with everything, right? The consistency is, is there, whether it's your newsletter that you're sending out on your weekly basis, a podcast episode that you're doing on a regular basis.
Can you let them know where they can find you? Oh, absolutely. So I'm at, Are You My Cousin, pretty much on all the platforms. And, or also you can, my name at, which is, lisalisson.com is my website and is kind of the gateway to everything that I do. And so definitely can find me on all of those platforms.
And I'm going to make sure that those links are in the show notes and your free gift for them is called the Big Genie List, which is a curated collection of essential genealogy resources to find your ancestors. So Lisa, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing everything that you've learned about YouTube with us.
Oh, you're welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:18:00]
Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you loved the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.