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The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
YouTube Goldmine: How Jeff Hampton Turned Videos Into a $2M Law Firm—No Ads, Just Strategy!
Want to turn YouTube into a client-generating machine?
Jeff Hampton did just that—adding $2M in annual revenue to his criminal defense firm without running a single ad. In this episode, he reveals how he built an organic YouTube empire, ranking videos that bring in 189+ client calls per month.
💡 What you’ll learn:
✅ How one video made Jeff $850K in signed cases
✅ The biggest mistake lawyers make with video marketing
✅ A step-by-step guide to getting found, getting calls and scaling your firm
✅ How to use AI + YouTube to stay ahead in 2025
Stop waiting for referrals—your next big case could come from YouTube. Listen now! 🎧
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
Yeah, I've never run a single YouTube ad out there with this channel at all, and I wanted to keep it purely organic. And so when I started, like I mentioned, youtube is a marathon, it's not a sprint. You have to put in the work on it, but if you lay the foundation, I'm going to give you one example. First of all, my firm now makes an additional $2 million a year in revenue for my criminal defense practice just off YouTube.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, this is Ben. Welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast where, if you've been listening for a while, you know that every episode I say I get to speak to people inside or outside of legal who are making a ding in the world. And this is going to be a fun conversation because, as we were going live and preparing, I said to my guest, jeff Hampton I just love interviewing people and I get to ask them the questions that I really want to know to help grow my practice. So Jeff Hampton is an attorney. He is famous really for the way he's leveraged YouTube second largest search engine out there to build two different kinds of practices. So Jeff has a national practice in a really narrow niche asset protection for Airbnb owners.
Speaker 2:I want to talk to Jeff about how he got that idea and developed it. That's kind of cool. And then a local criminal defense practice in, I think, houston. So and plus, without buying advertising on YouTube. So this is organic growth of YouTube channels leading to revenue and organic growth of two different, vastly different types of law firms. So, jeff, thanks for carving out some time to be on the show with us today.
Speaker 1:Well, ben, it's all my pleasure. I've long looked to you as kind of one of the pillars in the legal community for marketing and understanding how things work in this realm, so I appreciate you taking the time and giving me the opportunity.
Speaker 2:So I appreciate you taking the time and giving me the opportunity Very, yeah, very good, and, you know, happy to do it. As I say, I learn a ton doing the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, so let's give folks a little bit of your background, like even pre-YouTube. How did you get to where you are in terms of your, in particular, your lawyer path, in particular, your lawyer path?
Speaker 1:So it started. You know, I graduated from law school, went into the district attorney's office, worked as a prosecutor for about five and a half years and wanted to get some trial experience and that was mission accomplished. I've tried about a hundred cases during that period of time jury trials and so that experience gave me the confidence that I always had known I wanted to try or to start my own law practice. So I jumped out there, started the Hampton Law Firm and eventually, very quickly, I ended up bringing on a partner, brandon Fulgham, which now is Fulgham Hampton Criminal Defense Attorneys. Him and I merged up together and initially, initially we were growing our practice kind of just like everybody else that that throws themselves into it. We, you know, back in the good old days you could scale organically. There were ways that you could scale your practice just organic with just ranking really well on search and maps and all of that. And then then we jumped into the ads side of stuff and that really helped us grow.
Speaker 1:But during the pandemic you know, really right, even before the pandemic I was looking and noticing a shift in the way Google was doing things. You know, back in the old days there might be an ad at the top of a search and then I started noticing they were adding more and more, and pretty soon it would. You might have two or two, maybe local service ads. Then pretty soon you've got a pay-per-click ad and then you've got a map ad and I was beginning to realize the organic side of this. You're going to have to pay to play and before you know it you could hardly even get below the fold. You have to get almost below the fold of the first page before you scroll down, before you even get to the organic results.
Speaker 1:And so I started looking to see what other platforms are there and learned very quickly YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and then I wanted to see who all is playing in the in the YouTube platform and what kind of competition there was. I was shocked. I was shocked there was almost no lawyers doing it and, to be quite frank with you, the ones that were doing it weren't doing it very well and they were doing what I would call vanity videos, which is essentially like maybe one minute, like 30 second videos where they just brag on themselves. And I was just like man I bet, if I started figuring some of this out, that I bet I could start growing my firm through video, and so that's when I looked outside the legal industry to find out what was working in the educational fields of other areas on YouTube, because, you know, legal has a tendency to lag behind in adoption with things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I mean, like you know, by decades or more sometimes, depending on what's going on. So I just threw myself into it. A lot of people during the pandemic either sat around and just waited for things to get better. Well, that gave me time to double down on YouTube and during that period of time, it allowed me to lay the foundation that ultimately grew two different law firms. It was really pretty exciting. I was a little lucky because I was an early adopter, but I still believe attorneys now can do the same thing.
Speaker 2:I do too, and so now I'm curious, because what you're really talking about is the principle of being a forever learner, taking what was you know for many lawyers kind of dead time, although it wasn't for everybody. We have many lawyers in the great legal marketing community were very active and grew their firms during the COVID times, but you were very smart to look outside the legal industry. But you can you remember back like your, your sort of process, your internal thinking, brain process, for I want to learn this new subject matter. Did you go like watch YouTube videos? Did you buy courses? Did you follow any gurus?
Speaker 1:So great, great question. So I probably could have done it more efficiently. I was a little shocked at how very few resources there were about how to grow on YouTube. I mean almost no courses that are out there. Very little people would talk about it there in terms of something I could just go sign up for. And I looked I mean, I was looking pretty, you know, really strongly looking there are, look, there were some courses out there about just going viral and but I, from the very beginning, I never had the intention. I don't want to just get views talking about, you know, some new trend that comes out. I wanted to get views that were somewhat evergreen, specific to someone who would want to work with me at my firm. The whole purpose is to grow the firm.
Speaker 1:So my thought process was this First of all, what are some other creators? I found a CPA that had been doing which is educational. I saw some of the content he was putting out there and I thought, okay, wait a minute. This guy is getting tons of calls. He's his businesses. He even admits it on there on his videos talking about how he's five X his business in the last 18 months, and a lot of it is because of the responses he's been receiving on YouTube, and so I started looking at that, saying, well, let's start simple, and this is as simple as it can get for someone to get started on YouTube. I wanted to have good audio, decent audio. You don't have to have a fancy camera and now the smartphones that you have if it's an Apple phone, it's perfect, it's good enough to get started. And I wanted to have decent lighting, which doesn't take much. And then I wanted to treat the conversation like a consultation, where I'm speaking kind of generally but I'm covering information that I know that a potential client would call me, would be interested in.
Speaker 1:Now I did take the step of doing what you talked about, ben is. I took some time to understand a little bit about how I was found on the Internet. I understood keyword searches. I knew a little bit about marketing. I wanted to make sure I knew enough about how people found me on Google, right, so I played around with the Google keyword planner. I started looking to see wait a minute if Google owns YouTube and if I go into the description section and the title and I optimize my videos for search, I wonder if I'll show up on the YouTube search if I do searches for high volume keywords. And so those were the first 10 or 15 videos. That's all I focused on. I did maybe four or five minute long, and then I was experimenting to see. I wanted to make sure I showed up for search terms.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then as I started to find that I was showing up like aggravated assault deadly weapon lawyer or how to beat a aggravated assault case in Texas, that I started to show up at the number one spot, I realized there were only two other lawyers trying to compete with me. So I mean I had more space. It's like getting started on Google back when everybody was on yellow pages and realizing there's nobody on Google yet, and then I thought, wow, this is amazing. And I doubled down. I then created a hundred videos of almost every practice area that I had. I optimized them for search like I would if I was doing it for Google. And here's the amazing thing Google started then pulling in my videos and ranking me on organic search for Google on the video sections, and I was getting calls from both. I got to double dip from both platforms and I fully exhausted that strategy for the first year of doing YouTube videos and even just that simple strategy, I was able to add another 50 to 75 calls a month to my practice.
Speaker 2:This is, and I should have asked you this first so that the folks who are listening to this episode of the podcast would say, oh, I want to stick around, but let's, let's just go and let not bury the lead. Give us the information about, sort of the size and scope of what this journey of learning has meant to your two practices and revenue and whatever numbers you want to use, because it's huge and I think people it will shock people really, especially when they remember without ads. Without ads, that's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've never run. I've never run a single YouTube ad out there on on uh with this channel at all, and I've wanted to keep it purely organic. And so when I started, like I mentioned it, you know it, youtube is a marathon. It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. You have to put in the work on it, but if you lay the foundation, I'm going to give you one example. First of all, my firm now makes an additional $2 million a year in revenue for my criminal defense practice just off YouTube.
Speaker 1:Now many of you listening may be going well, wait a minute, jeff, hold on. How do you know that? How do we establish attribution? Well, first thing I do is I put a call rail tracking number at the top left-hand portion of every one of my videos and I'll know who calls in from those. But secondly, as many of you may know, the marketing journey can be multiple touch points. So someone might watch a video, then they'll go to my Google business page to see what kind of reviews I have. Right, they may want to make sure I've got good 4.9, five-star reviews. Then they may call from there. So our intake team. One of the first questions they ask how did you find out about us and well over 60% of all the calls will mention hey, I saw that YouTube video about such and such, so we know that's part of the attribution process. So we now get just this.
Speaker 1:Last month I got 189 calls, local calls for my criminal defense practice from YouTube. And that's local, not just nationwide local calls from the YouTube. So you're talking about an additional 2 million a year. And of course we've now grown to 369,000 subscribers. But some people go well, that's for Jeff. He's at almost 400,000 subscribers. I bet he does get those calls. I was getting 50 to 75 extra calls a month when I was less than 5,000 subscribers. I mean, it doesn't take that, it doesn't you? If you put the right uh you know strategy in place for that search to be found in searchable content, then you can start getting those calls. And then the last one I'll say is I doubled down. When you find something that works, sometimes it's good to double down, and I applied it to my asset protection practice. And now that practice, even with only 5,100 subscribers, that practice gets an additional probably anywhere between $40,000 to $50,000 a month in revenue, with a fraction of the amount of use I'm curious.
Speaker 2:just tell folks what the asset protection for Airbnb owners is all about. Yeah, because I've never even heard of that practice area.
Speaker 1:I mean I'm yeah well and it is, and so and it's an interesting story how it came about kind of organically, in fact so it's called STR Law Guys, which stands for short-term rental right. So short-term rental law guys is what we were known as, and so we're still a practice now. We're growing now leaps and bounds, we're in that particular niche, but essentially, what happened was is I'm always, first of all, I had an investment of my own. I had my first Airbnb. My wife and I wanted to buy an Airbnb and we thought about getting invested.
Speaker 1:And so I went down this journey for about two years of just going all in on asset protection, studying it. I worked with a couple of attorneys on different things related to asset protection content, and then what happened was I was at a group with other investors and they were like oh Jeff, you're a lawyer and you've got a few Airbnbs, what do you do for your short-term rentals? And I just you know what they call the old napkin test. You know you pull out the napkin and like, literally, I did some diagrams, I showed them the base layer, llcs, my holding company, a trust strategy for my other assets, a trust strategy for my other assets. I laid all of that out in a room of about 50 investors that each of them had four or five rental properties.
Speaker 1:Each all looked at me and said how much would you, how much can I pay you in order to set that up right? That's the first thing they told me. I didn't even have a business yet. I didn't even the business wasn't even. I said no, no, no, no, that's not what I do. No, no, I'm just telling you what I've done. And they said no, no, no, that's what you need to do. Like, we're going to, we're willing to pay you. That was the. That was kind of the birth of what led to STR Law Guys and I have a good friend of protection lawyer. For about 15, 20 years we partnered together. He helps on the operation side and then I took the marketing engine and just went forward with it on the content side and it really helped us get exposure. It just doubled down.
Speaker 2:I'm curious at what stage of your life did you go to law school? Was it like directly out of college, or did you do other things first?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no. So I was in and I tell my son this because he's about to graduate from high school. The first thing and the best thing I ever did is my first job was a sales job. I worked in sales and a lot of times people see that as a bad thing, but I actually believe sales translates into anything that you do Makes the world go round, first of all.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right. And so what I did is I actually went. This tells you how. To date me a little bit. Before I went to law school I was in corporate sales. I worked for a company called Pagenet. I sold pagers at the end of the industry right as they were dropping like flies. I was still selling those to doctors. And then I went to VoiceStream. That got bought out by T-Mobile and I did big corporate accounts where I was selling large corporate account deals for cell phone and different paging and that gave me an opportunity to understand the process of sales and then the integration part of marketing. And then I went to law school and then came out and kind of always had a mind for knowing I wanted to start my own practice.
Speaker 2:What made you want to go to law school?
Speaker 1:Well, that's a great question. I'm going to tell you, I was a bit of I felt like a little bit like on the island of misfit toys, you know, like for me I felt like I showed up and I was like I don't know, I'm not the smartest guy in the room here, I don't think I'm the and I mean I was. You know, I did well. I was in the but I wasn't law review top 5% or something. I was in the top 20% or something, but I was.
Speaker 1:I went into it thinking my big interest was trial law because I really enjoyed speaking, I enjoyed persuading, I did pretty well. I was a part of the mock trial team at University of Houston and did different things like that, and I knew I was either one of two things I was either going to be a trial lawyer or I wasn't going to probably do law at all. That was it. I was never going to be an attorney that just sat in an office and did briefs and stuff like that. That's what led me to the district attorney's office, but really I've kind of my identity now is I'm an entrepreneur that happens to be a lawyer.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say. You're an entrepreneur that went to law school. You've got this DNA in your blood and in your soul, not just a little bit, but a lot, and then, prior to the pandemic, you're running your local criminal defense firm. Yes, doing with you know what sort of marketing and was it kind of like? You know you can look at a lot of criminal defense practice and go that's just a regular practice, it's good, it's a great little job, right? Right, or were you already like? No, I'm doing some interesting stuff in marketing over here and my practice is actually more robust than most small criminal defense firms. What was the state of it before this YouTube journey?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I had thrown myself in very heavily into wanting to understand and learn marketing. I wanted to be honest with myself what are my strong suits and my passions and what are the areas that I'm not that strong in? I knew right away I was never going to be an ops guy. I was not the strongest in operations, probably needed to have somebody a little bit stronger in that field than me, which we did.
Speaker 1:I read a book by Gina Wickman called Traction, and when I read it, one of the things I did is I realized, hey, I need to work more on the business rather than in the business. And so my first goal was to turn up the marketing engine to the point where I could bring in the revenues to hire other lawyers to go to court. So my number one goal is I'm not going to court anymore, I'm done, I'm just going to be all in the business. And we accomplished that. I was able to accomplish that part. Then the next part was is that my partner is better at operations than I am? So we ended up doing he does operations, I do all marketing. So I went. I went like, pretty quickly, my identity was everything and anything about marketing I was all into. I mean, I was learning everything about search.
Speaker 1:I joined a non-lawyer marketing mastermind and as part of that, I was engrossed around other non-lawyers guys like Perry Belcher and other guys like big name guys in the marketing field, where I'm seeing things from a different perspective, that has nothing to do with legal and we're not talking about limitations that sometimes people think about from the legal side of it and it opened my mind to realize. That's when I first realized the power of video too, because video converts at 25 to 30% higher than other marketing. If I just send you a cold email or if I just send you an ad, you're going to convert. If you watch three or four of my videos, you're much 10 times more likely to sign up with me. And that's where it opened my eyes, when I began to realize YouTube was the direction I needed to head. Do you come?
Speaker 2:out of the Dan Kennedy world as well, or did you kind of find the? You mentioned Belcher and maybe some others like you find that world and, you know, become a true believer and a follower of one of the internet geek guys or gals so great.
Speaker 1:I wish I had been around to be able to be at the time and knew about Dan Kennedy's mastermind. I knew he had a mastermind that if I had known about it at the time I would have. I would have joined it, I would have been in it. I'm a huge fan of Dan Kennedy. I've got a number of his books, his, his copywriting skills and just the ability to to really lay things out. I I I absolutely followed him. I listened to him. He still has a podcast out there that's run by, I think, russell Brunson.
Speaker 1:Now I'll listen to some of the stuff that he puts out and it was mainly just opening my eyes to things like there's another guy named Jason Fladlin who's like a master of webinars, and so to begin understanding webinars, I think COVID opened my eyes to understand the world forever changed forever. Because once COVID made everybody do everything remotely, then now, like right now, right or wrong and I know some people disagree with this our criminal defense practice signs up about 80% of everything we do over the phone credit card, debit card paid right there. Many of the people don't even come in to see us first, they just sign up remotely right then and there, and then they come in and meet us when they get a chance to review their discovery. And what we've learned is is, if you, if you present things in a certain way, you do it the right way and you just lay it all out for people, particularly if they've watched two or three of my videos, they're ready to hire A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
Speaker 2:So we have the same sort of statistics in our personal injury and long-term disability practice. Most sign without ever speaking to an attorney, most express some version of I know you because of our digital presence, because in the lead gen sequences you know, are filled in part with videos, and so yeah, and then the other thing that COVID brought was the vast improvement in the technology right to be, able to do this Like do you remember Skype?
Speaker 2:I mean, skype was around. I don't think Skype's around anymore. But now there's things like you know, this Riverside platform that we're broadcasting on. You know I'll have to put a unless you've read it. I'll send you a copy of Renegade Time Management that Dan and I published late last year. No, so if you want an updated version of that, I'm going to put one in the mail to you. That's awesome. All right, so the local criminal defense practice has 369,000 subscribers. Yes, sir, that's incredible. So let's talk about that journey from idea zero ground zero, patient one right. Ground zero, patient, one right. That's just tremendous. It's almost unbelievable. So talk to us a little bit about, I guess, both your learning and what you did, and then we'll wrap back around with high level tips for lawyers and then we'll give them access to a resource that you have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so a lot of this was through trial and error, which I've learned is pretty much the entrepreneurial way At the end of the day you have. A lot of this was through trial and error, which I've learned is pretty much the entrepreneurial way. At the end of the day, you have to fail, and I learned to. Sometimes it's good to fail fast.
Speaker 2:We like to do it the hard way.
Speaker 1:That's right and that's what I had to do here. So I realized, OK, I tried to borrow from what I knew, what was working on on the on just the Internet for Google search, and I realized we put a lot of time and effort into certain practice area pages because they provided a lot of our revenue. And so I sat down and I call this now my 80, the simple 80-20 principle, which is any attorney that comes to me and talks about this I'll say tell me right now what are the 20% of your practice areas that are making you 80% of your revenues. And then I want you to write those down. Then I want you to go through and create a list of maybe your top 20 FAQs from current clients. You know you have right now Clients that when you come in and you've met with them over time and even if you're not doing the sales, if you've got another attorney that's doing that or your staff, they know what those questions are.
Speaker 1:People are asking them over and over again. Then it comes down to okay, this is stuff that is your customer avatar, and you want to match your customer avatar with your viewer avatar on YouTube, because your first goal is just to be found in search, People that are high intent. If they're searching for this stuff, they need it. They're not going to just watch a criminal defense video for no reason most of the time, and so that's where we start, and then we create what I call content silos, which is now you know, let's say it's DWI is one of them. Let's say, if you're a PI lawyer, it's car accidents, trucking accidents, whatever that might be. Now we're going back into those FAQs and it's all about framing your content. So, once you realize what those FAQs are, how do we frame them in an engaging way and how do we present? Don't hold anything back. This is one thing I think attorneys will do is they'll spend too much time trying to sell people on these videos. Don't sell them. Give them overwhelming value.
Speaker 2:Yes, this is counterintuitive. You're exactly right. People are afraid. Well, if I give away all my secrets and they won't come in for a consult or they'll try to solve the problem or settle the automobile case themselves, and you know, there's probably a percentage of people who will go and do that. But the most successful entrepreneurs, gurus, thought leaders I know just give away high level quality. Yes, I can help you. Content in various media, through various media. And so you're right. I think lawyers are still shy. Most lawyers are still shy about this or they don't understand the value. I think. Well, go ahead, yeah.
Speaker 1:No, no, I was just going to say it's because one of the things that I learned is that I remember I went back in time. My dad taught me about the law of reciprocity, right? So if I give you something and I hand everything I have that are things that you would like to know but you hadn't seen or knew a solution to, if I provide those to you, internally, psychologically, that law of reciprocity, that person will want to do something in exchange and in return for that. And when, when you do that, it builds what I call the no like and trust factor. Because once they know you cause like wow, I've never seen a video a lawyer talking, go that in depth. And like, lay all of it out for me, then that okay, I trust him, the next video is going to come up.
Speaker 1:You're also getting the algorithms attention Like this is good content, they're watching for longer, they're willing to watch the next video. Then they trust you. Then you have to take away all the friction for them to call you and make it as easy as possible for them to engage your services. This is what I had to learn how to do on YouTube and I just borrowed from some of the principles. I knew that had worked through some of the Google strategies that had happened, but I needed to make them visual.
Speaker 2:They had to be visual happened, but I needed to make them visual. They had to be visual so, as you would be, so we're recording this in early 2025. And if you've got a list of new videos you're going to put out, say this quarter, do you have a framework for, like headline story you know, offer or that you work from and teach about?
Speaker 1:Yes. So one of the things that I do is like for my situation once you get to a certain place, I tell like, let's say you only have maybe a couple hundred subscribers or maybe a thousand subscribers. And you were to come to me, the first thing I would say is we need to focus on that searchable content first. I see it as like pouring a foundation of evergreen content. So if you try to go, there's two ways to go. Some people go broad and they do broad content that's not specific to their geo, geography and not specific to practice areas. Then it's hard to go back to narrow once you've gone broad. But if you start narrow and you're doing really strong optimized titles for search, you're adding in content that's specific geographically to your service area If you're a local, if you don't have a nationwide practice and you're mainly in a particular state or area, and then you want to completely fill that out.
Speaker 1:But I'm going to tell you right now I have a video. It's about aggravated assault deadly weapon. It's how to beat an aggravated assault deadly weapon case in Texas Over the last four years. It only has 18,000 views but it's made me, from what I can attribute up to this point, $850,000 from one video, and the reason why I know that is because it's an average case value of $10,000 per signup. I know for a fact from our own intake that we have signed up 85 of these cases minimum and I'm still getting calls. Right, I can still add up. I can still add up calls that we sign up at least one or two people a month that sign up 10,000, you know another 10,000 here, another 10,000 there.
Speaker 1:Well, if you create 50 to 75 of those types of videos, then what you do is you go broad. So I'm going to give you an example, and I just launched a video I guess it was about a week ago, week and a half ago. It's been open, it's been out there for about five days and if you go to that video, I it's, it's all about and, and one of the things I pull up here I'm going to use as an example, I pull up one of my, one of the videos that I have done. Let's see here it is. It is how to stop cops from and that this may sound like a crazy one, but how to stop cops from making you roll your window down. Now think about this for a minute. Some people go. Why wouldn't you roll your window down? Because you can and you are legally, don't have to roll your window down, but many of the people who watch my channel want to know how do I? Either is it legal to do this or is it not legal to do this, and sometimes here's the key the 80% of YouTube, once you go broad, is the rapper. You've got to make sure and I say rapper I mean your title and your thumbnail is what determines whether people are going to ever be introduced into your content.
Speaker 1:Another example of one that has about 925,000 views, is how to stop police from checking your gun during a traffic stop. Now, why does that matter? Because sometimes, if you're a concealed carry license holder, you're a law abiding citizen. You have a gun in your car. You're worried about what if police know and they check with the DMV that I have a gun? Am I going to have a tent standoff here? And so I present information that's broad, available to all states, mainly Supreme Court case law, but yet I introduce them to concepts about the Fourth Amendment, I introduced them to state-specific concepts. Sometimes, as it applies, that's where you build your brand.
Speaker 1:Now, I didn't do this, though, until I had laid a foundation of about 100 videos and then what happens is I established social proof by being able to establish content that applies to multiple states and now my subscriber count just 10x. It just began to go up and up and up. So there is a process to follow here. The process is you must start narrow, start getting that evergreen content where you're going to start getting those calls, and then you can go broader and broader, but make sure it always has to do with your practice area. So you notice, some of this content has to do with how to stop cops when they ignore your right to a lawyer. That's one of them. That's just a basic. Fifth amendment or sixth amendment, right to counsel right Well, that's a broad application. But I'm establishing my expertise for both people locally and nationwide. And you know the concept of social proof.
Speaker 2:They see the number of subscribers and the number of views that help that brings more people in the door's a big deal um, what is your, what is your current sort of technology set up, because you mentioned, hey, we can do this on a iphone. Um, is that what you're doing or do you have? You have studio how? What is or not yours? What is your recommended? Somebody who's starting out like what in terms of equipment, lighting, microphone, whatever are you recommending these days?
Speaker 1:So, now and actually one of the things that if anyone at the end of this, obviously, if you reach out to our main site, youtube Rainmakers, I actually have a free resource that lays out the recommended items, the equipment guide that I recommend. But I am going to tell you when you first start, the biggest thing people like to do is spend too much time planning, to plan Like I'll have people that I'll meet Exactly, and it drives me crazy.
Speaker 1:They're like, okay, man, I'm so excited about this process and then they want to spend three weeks researching what they need to do to get ready to get started. Because it keeps that excitement going, because before you have to take action on it. And so what I tell people is look, get a good microphone. Like I have a basic sure, what's called a sure microphone or a road microphone it's. It's a hundred bucks, right, it's not very expensive. You can get a very decent microphone. And then, even if you start with your, your, just your you know a newer iPhone or something like that, that's a good start.
Speaker 1:But I have like a Canon EOS, like it's an M six, uh, m 60. It's like a three-year-old camera that works still great for me. I don't need something really fancy four or $500 camera that takes care of business and then a very basic light package, a soft light package that I spend like 150 bucks on, and if you really want to do that, that's fine, but I don't want someone to be allowing the equipment to be the thing that holds them back. The thing that needs to happen is is to get started. Record your first video. I'm going to tell you, if you go to Hampton law and look at my old videos, they're embarrassing. Okay, so everyone starts off. It's not going to be the greatest, but I can tell you.
Speaker 2:You suck at it until you don't, but you got to go through. Whenever you do something new, you got to go through the suck first. Right, I teach young teenage soccer referees. Like you're just going to suck at it for a couple of years, but that's just part of the process and we'll protect you from the crazy parents while that's going on. But I think again, I think you're exactly right. Like you know, this quest for perfection. And what will my mom, my spouse, my kids think of me?
Speaker 1:like blocks a lot of entrepreneurial ventures, but the funny thing is, I was just going to say one more time. The funny thing is, though, some of my really what I think are terrible videos that aggravated assault, deadly weapon video was made during COVID. I couldn't get a haircut, I was just like some of this stuff was bad. I'm still getting calls from those videos because people aren't watching to see if you look like Brad Pitt. They're watching for the content and if you're giving away the good stuff, you're going to have people calling and they want to work with you. That's what people care about.
Speaker 2:You're going to have people calling and they want to work with you. That's what people care about. Do you think that there's a certain vibe that lawyers should give off in these YouTube videos? Or is it Ben Like, be yourself Like Ben, be Ben right, or do you, jeff? Do you think we have to elevate that to you know, maybe add in I mean, I don't have a hard time adding energy. Many lawyers, if you watch their YouTube videos, it's just awful. I mean, they're standing in front of law books and they're they're they look like they're energy less. So is it like hey, you do you, or like we do need a bit of energy in these videos?
Speaker 1:So I want people to be authentic. I mean, look, you know the viewer can tell if you're trying to if you're not authentic. But I think you can be an optimized version of you, and what I mean by that is what.
Speaker 1:I do with. Yeah, cause here's what I tell my here's a lot of the clients. I'll tell them listen, the first 60 seconds of your video really needs to be scripted. And you need to, even if you have to just kind of go through it a few times and really feel just and you, if you've ever recorded videos, you know that the camera like sucks about 40% of the energy out of you when you're doing it anyway, because it doesn't look like you're conveying as much energy as you feel like you are when you go back and watch that video. So it is important to convey.
Speaker 1:I like people to use their hands, be expressive, but only if it's natural. If it's not natural, don't do it. But I can tell you right now, the first 60 seconds are very important to the YouTube algorithm Because, if I here's the biggest cardinal sin that I see attorneys make, they take too much time winding up and too much time winding down, and what I mean by that is they'll start off by saying hey, welcome to the Hampton Law Firm. I'm Jeff Hampton. If you like what you hear today, subscribe to my channel and like that. No, no People are. You'll get 50 percent of people going. Oh, no, I'm out.
Speaker 2:And they'll get away from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right. Instead, you do what Dan Kennedy teaches us all to do, which is you've got to have a hook, You've got to have something. People, at the very beginning then you need to set the stakes for the viewer right. You need to say why does this particular content apply to this viewer? And then on the back end of it, you can establish your authority and what you're going to deliver to them. If they watch to the end. If you put those together at the first 60 seconds, then you want to script your call to action at the end because you need to let them know what they need to do at the end of the video, Then you can just create kind of a I tell my clients, you be you in the middle of the video, you be the expert. You get out there and subject matter expert. All of this information you could just go off an outline if you need to. But the very beginning and the very end needs to have a specific purpose behind it so you can be optimized.
Speaker 2:What do you think most lawyers today need? Who are going to do this, and particularly after they go and download your free stuff? We'll talk about that again in a minute. Post-production wise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so post-production wise, I mean, look, youtube Studio is really great in terms of well, I'm just going to say this right now I just met with an attorney yesterday that I just couldn't believe he edits his own videos. Now, I don't know how he has time to do that, but one of the things I tell my clients is it's important, even if you just use, you can go to Upwork, you can go to Fiverr there are people who can do video editing for you at a very reasonable cost. You want to leverage this. If you have to spend all your time doing this, you'll quit.
Speaker 1:The number one reason people fail on YouTube is they just give up. They just give up. So you want to be you, but ultimately you need to have someone who helps you do thumbnails, which is the art that you see when you click on. That makes you want to click on a video. And then you need to have somebody to help you do the editing. And once you've done that and those are those are people that can be found and that I have resources that I can help people get started on that. Yeah, once you do that, then it's all about uploading the video and having this is what I do. I have two different thumbnails that I can choose from. If one's not doing well, you can have two different titles as options to choose from. And then really, it's all about quantity over quality at first, because the algorithm has to know what your channel's about. You've got to put out some content and know this is the type of content you are. Then my rule is is to improve your videos 1% each video.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's brilliant, that's, that's actually brilliant and I love that in the beginning, quantity over quality, like, like, let's just go go do it. You will learn so much from falling down and and kind of figuring out why you fell and scraped your knees uh, much more than than you will learn from taking a really long time to make everything perfect and to not release it until you know your va has done it. You've reviewed it 18 times. Uh, yeah, we like i5. We've got, I think, five virtual assistants in the Philippines, two executive assistants, so we've leveraged and they're great. They're just great for us. All right, so now just talk to me a little bit. So you have resources and I don't know, newsletter download, whatever. Let's talk a little bit about YouTube. Is it Rainmakers? The plural, yeah.
Speaker 1:YouTube Rainmakers that's kind of the name of our business that we have, and essentially, that's three different levels of things that we do. One is just a course for people that are trying to understand how all this works, and they want to kind of reverse engineer it and have a place to start, which is I only did. That, quite frankly, is because I was looking for that when I was starting my journey, and if I had had something like that, I wouldn't have had to. Maybe, you know, maybe I could have stood on someone else's shoulders instead of making all the mistakes a million times before I figured it out.
Speaker 1:But we also have some consulting options for people, and the most important thing that we do, though, is just give away information for people so that they can get started on their journey, and most of the time, people reach out to me on LinkedIn or YouTubeBrainMakerscom, and there we provide, essentially. There's, several different downloads that get you started, like how do I actually record my first video? How do I actually get started? What are the best practices for me to start that first video, and then, after that, the equipment guide. There's a couple of different things that are out there that I just wished I had had when I first started and they. I use those as an excuse for me to slow down.
Speaker 2:And then last little subject area and again I appreciate your time is you've got this sort of hyper-local criminal defense, youtube channel and business, real business, and then you have the asset protection which is a national for Airbnb. Is there a difference in any of the strategies, just in terms of dealing with YouTube algorithm, search engines, because one one is hyperlocal and because one is 50 states?
Speaker 1:Yeah, a little bit. Obviously, if you have a nationwide practice, your reach is just astronomical right. Everybody is a potential client or customer that could come in through your door. But I would say this is more based on practice area than it is geographical area. And here's why I ask people this what is the length of your sales cycle, Like, unfortunately, with criminal? It's pretty short, it's like 48 hours, 72 hours.
Speaker 2:I'm in jail. I need a lawyer, that's right. My spouse is in jail. He needs a lawyer.
Speaker 1:Yes, Now, if it's estate planning, if it is business like B2B, like business litigation, or if it's some type of, let's say, it's a 30 to 60 day sales window, it's a higher ticket item.
Speaker 1:Now you're talking about unleashing lead magnets, email nurturing, and essentially now what I do is my call to action at the end of those asset protection videos is I'm saying listen, folks, we just covered and I'll name whatever it was. I want to give you a free gift down in the description below. I'm going to give you the five tips you need to start protecting your assets today, free, totally free. And, by the way, if you'd like to learn more about this, check out this next video where I cover how trusts can protect your, and I'll cover whatever it is. So I'm giving them a free resource as a call to action and it's down in the description and, if it's optimized properly, you can get on some of my videos. I'm getting a 20% click-through rate on those lead magnets and they're giving me their email address that I'm taking off platform and I'm multiplying the ability for me to nurture those leads 100%.
Speaker 2:You're bringing the potential customer into your ecosystem, so you don't have to rely on whatever rules, algorithm changes that either Google or YouTube will do, like next week. That's brilliant, very smart. So, look, this has been awesome. So again, it's youtubereinmakerscom. It's Jeff Hampton. I would highly recommend, if you're listening to this and you heard Jeff's numbers, like, go over to the site YouTubeRainmakerscom, get some of the free information. Give him your email address, read his marketing, because it's going to be brilliant. You're going to ask yourself how can I see what Jeff is doing and translate that into my practice anyway? So that's one way we do marketing hacks is listening is getting on the list of really smart people. And then, I guess, very last, do you have any predictions for 2025 in terms of Google, youtube, like, what do you think about? Maybe working on that nobody else is, or, or you know Ben hasn't thought to ask about today?
Speaker 1:Well, I can tell you right now, like and I didn't mention this resource, but I actually just started a new YouTube channel called YouTube Brain Makers, where I go through a lot of this visibly visually for people and you can, instead of reading it, you can watch it, and one of the things I talked about on one of those recent videos that I'm launching is I I want it's pretty clear.
Speaker 1:You know, experts like Neil Patel and some of these other guys out there are saying, when it comes to web traffic, website clicks are going down.
Speaker 1:Google has made it very clear they're going to continue to prop up more ads, and now you have search generative experience with AI that's coming up on so many of these searches.
Speaker 1:I believe it's even more important to look for opportunities to diversify visibility and not just rely specifically on Google as the primary source for that, and so there are some things that I'm working on right now that I'm finding AI can help really cut down the time it takes to not just do videos but scripting your titles, and I mean it's coming around very nicely. Some of these tools are going to get to a point where it allows you to not just put out more quantity, but you can put out more quantity with quality and I think as we get through the rest of 2025, it happens so fast as it develops I think mid to end of year of this year we're going to start seeing some tools that can help you save. I mean 90% of your time being cut off with brainstorming video ideas, titles, thumbnail, concepts. Those are things that are really going to help move the needle for people that are in YouTube.
Speaker 2:So many normal lawyers are running away from AI because the bar says, oh my gosh, like AI is dangerous and the only thing they are ever discussing is bad citations and legal briefs. But the guys and gals that I hang out with are asking the questions that you just pointed to how can I use this to go faster, go broader, think of more ideas? How can I really use AI to leverage my time right or my virtual assistant's time? So I think you're exactly right. So, jeff, it's been wonderful to talk to you. Hang on, because I want to have a short conversation with you. But folks, youtuberainmakerscom and there's a YouTube channel, youtube Rainmakers Go and start exploring some of Jeff's work and just get on this bandwagon. Look, you're going to feel uncomfortable. If you've never done this before, you're probably going to be suck at it and be awful. That's just the part of the journey. That's part of it. It and be awful, that's just the part of the journey. Like that is, that's part of it.
Speaker 2:But meanwhile, you know 369,000 subscribers in a local criminal defense practice. That's something to pay attention to. Thanks, my friend. Thank you, ben. That's a wrap for today's episode of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. Big thanks to Jeff Hampton for showing us how YouTube can transform your law firm. No ads needed, luntmure. Grab Jeff's free resources at youtubereinmakerscom. If you found this valuable, subscribe, leave a review and share it. For more powerful strategies on marketing practice, growth and taking control of your legal career, head over to greatlegalmarketingcom.
