Going Viral: Make YouTube Shorts That Viewers Watch & Share

1. Introduction: These days everyone is jumping on the short form of video bandwagon. They're easy to make, only require your your phone to produce. Take no time to edit and pump out in big numbers. However, for most people, it still doesn't work out. I've been posting YouTube shorts for five months now. And in this course, I'll share with you how I plan, script, shoot, edit, and optimize my YouTube shorts for SEL, here's an example of one of my YouTube shorts. Timothy at Apple says that this MAC is very powerful, but I don t trust him. I've put all my Mac apps here in the dog and they'll open all of them at once to see if this laptop can keep up. I'd give it a ten out of ten in this class, I'll show you my strategy and mindset behind creating YouTube shorts. You'll learn how to efficiently generate video ideas without having to be the most creative person. How to script a YouTube shorts to make it engaging for viewers. How to record short-form videos with no gear other than your phone. How to enhance the voice-over audio so viewers can clearly make out what you're saying. How to edit YouTube shorts completely for free, and how to optimize them for SEO, this class is for aspiring creators looking to take their short-form video content to the next level. In order to take this class, you don't need to have any prior knowledge about filmmaking, but you should have a phone and a computer beside you because you're going to be making your very own YouTube short based on the things you learn in this class. So if you're still open-minded about creating more engaging YouTube shorts, I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Class Project: Great, welcome to this class. In this class, I'll tell you about the class project and it's going to be very simple. Essentially, you're going to be creating your very own YouTube short and then posting it in the project gallery. By the end of this class, I want you to script, record, edit, and upload your very own YouTube short, applying the techniques and tools that I show in this course, then come to the project gallery and post the link to your YouTube short so others can take inspiration and see the progress you've made. But the main thing that I want to emphasize here is that it's very important to try out the new things that you learn yourself. You see our brains are not designed for keeping information when we don't put it to use. And that's why I encourage you to pause or rewind the course along the way and make your own YouTube short when watching it. That way you're going to improve your chances of actually remembering the information that I show and the techniques I use. With that said, I'll see you in the first lesson. 3. Things to Keep In Mind Before Creating Shorts: In this lesson, I'm going to go over six core concepts that everyone should keep in mind when making YouTube shorts. The first one is that schwartz should not complement your long-form videos. Most people think of shorts as a way to promote their other long-form videos. But I think that this is the wrong approach. You should think of shorts as separate videos that stand on their own. Their primary purpose is not to direct viewers to your other videos, but to provide as much value as possible, whether through entertainment or education. Sure, some shorts can be a little snippets from your long-form videos. If they're interesting to the viewers on their own shorts that get the most views on my channel are the ones that I plan, script, shoot, and edit as completely separate videos. You should give shorts to time and attention that they deserve. The second thing is to focus on average view duration. If we go into the analytics of one of my shorts and scroll down, you can see the Retention graph. This graph shows where viewers are watching most of your video and where they're leaving. As you can see, this Retention graph is very flat and it reaches 100% retention at 9 s, which is more than halfway through the short, which is very good. If we go to see more and then click on relative audience retention. You can see that throughout this YouTube short, the retention is high and only in the beginning it's above average. So the main goal with your YouTube Schwartz is to keep retention as high as possible. But why you see since Schwartz get the majority of their views through YouTube shorts feed, it means that the viewer doesn't choose which short to watch. Shorts are being served by the platform YouTube. So then how does YouTube know which short to show to those people? They look at analytics like, like to dislike ratio, the number of comments, and most importantly, the average view duration. Because those are the only metrics YouTube can take away from the viewer since shorts don't have a click-through rate and the thumbnail when making YouTube shorts, I like to focus all my effort on maximizing the average view duration, making shorts as loop label as possible, revealing the most important piece of information at the very end of the short, cutting out everything that isn't necessary or doesn't add to the story. Keeping the pacing of the short consistent and not starting off fast and then slowing down in the end, going to the point quickly and with no rumbling. If I show a picture with my short, I use the Ken Burns effect, which means that I slowly zoom into that picture to add movement to the video and keep it more engaging. And finally, I make sure that the viewer has something to look at all times and doesn't get bored, which means that I change my scenes very frequently. The next thing is to make shorts feel amateur. One of the best pieces of advice that I heard about creating YouTube Swartz was from Chris Ramsay, who has multiple shorts that are over 40 million views. Even though Chris Ramsay is an amazing filmmaker, he chooses to use a less polished strategy for his YouTube shorts. He makes them look amateur on purpose. He said, when it comes to shorts, It's such a different way of consuming content. You're just flipping through things. You see most people are used to scrolling through short-form videos on Instagram, which has many ads in-between. So if you create a professionally looking you too short, that doesn't feel how mature the viewer might think that it's an ad and skip over it. Another reason is that people don't really care and they want to connect and see the true side of you. So if you record your video in five K PhD, 1,020 million p, no one's going to relate to that and probably skip to the next chart. The next thing is to make shorts as short as possible. A YouTube short can have a maximum length of 60 s. However, that's not to say that you should make them that long or short, or any YouTube video should be as long as it needs to be, meaning that any extra fluff should be thrown out. I cut away all shots that don't contribute to the story. Sentences that if removed from the middle, don't change the narrative. Graphics, intros and outros. While I create my YouTube shorts, I leave nothing else, just the bare minimum that's needed for the viewer to understand the concept of my short. Also, viewers tend to be more likely to loop shorts when they're shorter, resulting in a better average view duration. The next thing is to capitalize on trends craters on other social media platforms like TikTok go viral overnight following a trend. You can use this to your advantage for growing your YouTube channel. Talk about recent events, news in your niche, or anything that's hot right now, you can share your opinion. Create a meme, something's that's shareable and relatable or trending. And the final thing is to make videos for international audiences. One of the best examples of this is capitalism. He makes videos where he doesn't speak only shows. That's why these videos can be appealing to someone who doesn't even speak English, and that's most of the world. So if you don't want to speak in your YouTube shorts, you can turn this into an advantage. You can make shorts that don't require a voice-over and capture a wider audience. With that said, I'll see you in the next lesson where I'll talk about the most important aspect of YouTube shorts. The idea, I'll see you there. 4. Generating Content Ideas: Mr. Beast one said, for most people, they could spend 100 days making one video a day. That averages 10,000 views of video. Or they could just sit down, come up with a good video and just get 1 million views in a week. A great idea is what makes or breaks a video grid. Video ideas are things that make a known channels on YouTube blow up. The best hack I found for shorts ideas is to use ideas that I already have four long for videos that I know, I will probably never make into a full length ten minute video, but I can easily take that idea and condense it down into a YouTube short. Also, it's a good idea to keep a list of running ideas. You can use Apple Notes or Google Docs to quickly jot down ideas when they come into your head. As David Allen said, that your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. Most of my video ideas come to me randomly, at random times of the day. That's why I immediately pull out my phone and the jot down the idea in Apple nodes so I can come back to it later. Because if I don't write it down, I know I will 100% forget it. Now coming back to shorts, you can think of them as little pieces of information or short stories that you can tell your viewer in 60 s or less. In my YouTube shorts, I tried to share what I've learned or overcome, but in an interesting and subtle way, most of my shorts are edutainment, which means that I'm trying to entertain the viewer whilst also educating them about something. Whether it'd be a tip for using your MacBook, some piece of information that they didn't know or just an interesting experiment. I found that the best way to tell a story with your short is to teach the viewers something along the way, show them something cool or from a different angle that they've never seen before. If you're struggling with ideas, there are two tools that you can use, and I use them all the time. The first one is called vid IQ. I will leave the link in the course resources. So if you go in and then come to keywords here, you can type in any keyword that you can think of. And vid IQ will spit out a competition and search volumes course for that keyword. What's great about this is that this is for long-form videos and shorts also appear on YouTube search, but they have their own separate shelf, usually at the very top. This means that if you make a YouTube short about a frequently searched keyword, you can expect to see consistent views throughout the year. Let's look up a keyboard like Chrome extensions. You can see this keyword is searched over 100,000 times per month and the competition is fairly low. So this is a very good keyword to target with your YouTube short. What's great about this tool is that if you've entered a keyword that has a bad search volume or very high competition, it recommends related keywords. So best Chrome extensions, cool Chrome extensions, or useful Chrome extension, I can make a short targeting each one of those. Of course, I'm using the free version which only shows me three related keywords. But as you can see, there are a lot more and there's another way to find them by using YouTube. If I go to YouTube and type in best Chrome, you can see that YouTube tries to auto complete my search query. What this tells me is that a lot of people put all of these search phrases in YouTube search. And that's why YouTube is suggesting them to me. Now I know these keywords will probably have a high search volume because YouTube is recommending them, which means that a lot of people search for them. I don't know how competitive they are, but I can find out if I go back to vid IQ. So let's take the keyword best Chrome themes and go back here and save best themes. Now, as you can see, the competition is very low for this keyword. So if I made a short about best Chrome themes, I think I'm going to get quite a few views, but coming back to ideas, this place here where vid IQ shows related keywords, and this plays here where YouTube shows suggested keywords is a great way to grab ideas, e.g. here, I could make a short about best games for Chrome, best Chrome VPN extensions, best chromosome marker extensions, best chrome features or anything else. And I can just change up the main keyword at the top and get new suggestions. What's also cool is that you can look up suggestions in the middle. Let's look at an example. So if I type in a keyword like how to on YouTube and then go back in the middle. What an underscore here, you'll see that YouTube will start suggesting keywords in the middle, like how to earn money on YouTube, how to create channel on YouTube, how to upload a short videos on YouTube, how to upload videos on YouTube using this method, you can basically placed the YouTube suggestion in any place of your keyword and come up with ideas that way. However, having a good idea is only 50 per cent of the equation. The other half is execution. So I'll see you in the next lesson where I'll talk about how to script your YouTube short for maximum retention. 5. Writing a YouTube Shorts Script: In this lesson, I'm going to walk you through my step-by-step process of scripting a YouTube Schwartz from start to finish, I'll show you a real-life example of one of the YouTube shorts that I made and how I wrote the script for that video. We're going to take a look at this YouTube short, which is still getting quite a fair share views every single day. If we scroll down and look at the retention graph, you can see that it's pretty flat. And if we click See More and then go into relative audience retention, you can see that it's above average all the way through and even high at the very end, which is really good. The most important part of the short is here in the beginning. It's called a hook. It's used to grab and hold onto the viewer's attention and keep them watching all the way through. Always remember that every single viewer is actively looking for the reason to click away from your video. So you need to convince them to keep watching. Take a look at the short. Timothy at Apple says that this MAC is very powerful, but I don't trust him. I've put all my Mac apps here in the dark and they'll open all of them at once to see if this laptop can keep up. I'd give it a ten out of ten. Now here are a few things that you can do to hook your viewer in. You can ask an interesting question, present a strong statement that the viewer wasn't expecting. Quote, someone which will give authority to your short to tell an interesting statistic, come up with a metaphor, tell a quick story, or describe what's happening in your short. But of course there are many other ways. So if we scroll down, you'll see the full script that I wrote for this particular short. However, you'll notice that some of these lines were not in the short itself. I removed. Okay, here we go. Opening the first ones. It seems to have no problem at all and now it's starting to struggle. Oh wait, no, it's not. I removed this whole part from the YouTube short and instead added silence to hopefully introduce some sort of intrigue in suspense for the viewer. I'll talk about that a little more in the next lessons. I've also removed It's perfectly fine because it doesn't add anything. And saying, I'd give it a ten out of ten in the end is the same as saying, it's perfectly fine. I'd give it a ten out of ten if I remove, it's perfectly fine. The narrative of the short, it doesn't change, so therefore, I should remove it. Now, in the very beginning of the script, I have my hook which says Timothy at Apple says that this MAC is very powerful, but I don't trust him. There are two very subtle things here. The person's name that I show in the short is Craig and IC Timothy in the script to catch the viewer off guard. And I also say, I don't trust him, which introduces intrigue and mixed the viewer. Think, what am I going to do next? Then with this part of the script, I explain what's happening, that I'm putting all my apps in the dark and then I'm going to open all of them. Then here in the empty space, I'm actually opening them and at the end I give a very short conclusion. So this is an example of how I script one of my YouTube shorts. 6. Recording YouTube Shorts: The next part in the short creation process is actually going out there and recording your video. And this is by far the most fun part for me since I always write a script for my shorts. I record the voice-over and video separately. That gives me a lot of wiggle room when I'm recording the video, since I can have multiple takes and multiple angles of the same part of the script. So when editing, I can choose which clip I want to use for that part of the script, I use an iPhone eight to record all of my shots, so gear really doesn't matter. This phone has a really outdated cameras system, but it still works for YouTube shorts, since most people who are watching shorts don't really care about video quality when recording, I always hold the phone in my hand and try to show what I'm doing. Sometimes I included camera shake on purpose or zooming with my hand rather than in post-production. This makes the short feel a lot more authentic to the viewer. Some footage you can see in my shorts are actually screen shares or screenshots of my computer screen as well. When recording my short, I always open up my script and go sentence by sentence to make sure I record all the footage I need. I use free stock footage in very rare cases and try to fill out the whole timeline with the footage that I recorded myself. But video is only 50% of the recording. The other 50% is audio. And the thing is, most people will sit through bad video quality, but not through bad audio quality. So in the next lesson, I'll show you how to enhance your voice-over audio for your YouTube short. 7. Enhancing Audio: In this lesson, I'll show you how I record and enhance the voice-over audio for my YouTube shorts, I record the visuals and the voiceover separately because that gives me a lot more control in the post-production later on, of course, some shorts don't require a voice-over and they can have just sound effects or music playing over them. And in that case, you can go ahead and skip to the next lesson, even if you make the visuals of your shorts, how mature on purpose, don't do the same with audio quality. Your audio doesn't have to come from an expensive studio microphone, which your viewers have to easily understand what you're trying to say. If you've already recorded bad audio quality and don't feel like going back and redoing it. You can use captions to help make your video more appealing to viewers. I usually record the voice-over with my built-in MacBook microphone because the Mac book has a very good quality microphone. If you're recording the voice-over with a MacBook, make sure you go into the sound settings, then click on input and set the microphone input level somewhere in the middle. If you set it too low, it's not going to pick up that much audio. And if you set it too high, the audio will start clipping and sound very distorted. Now this is the voice-over recording for one of my popular shorts. I use an app called Audacity to enhance all of my voice-overs. It's a free audio editing software that you can download from the Internet. What I do is first import the audio, double-click to highlight it, go to Effect and normalize. Normalization sets the audios, loudness levels to an appropriate amount. Then I go over all the recording and cut out everything that's unnecessary. All the silences, breaths, and everything else that I know will not go into the final video. Once I have the rough cut of the audio, I double-click, go to effect and apply a compressor than again, I go to Effect and normalize the audio again, these are just basic audio enhancements that are usually enough for YouTube shorts and we'll get your audio's sounding good enough. Of course, there are a lot more tricks and the facts to make your audio sound more professional. And they made an entirely separate course about it here on Skillshare, about how to make your voice-over sound professional with not professional gear, like an iPhones or MacBooks microphone. I leave a link to it in the class resources. Now I can double-click on the audio and hit Command Shift E to export. So now that I have my enhanced audio clip and the visuals that I recorded with my phone. I'm ready to move on to editing. I'll show you my process along with some tips and tricks in the next lesson. 8. Editing Tips to Maximize YouTube Shorts Retention: When it comes to editing the YouTube short, I use Premier Pro to do all the editing. But of course, there are other free alternatives out there that do just as good of a job. My recommendations for free video editing software or Canva or Da Vinci Resolve. While both of these tools offer a paid features, the free versions are just enough to edit a YouTube short for free without running into any significant problems. Da Vinci Resolve is best if you already have some video editing skills and a decently powerful laptop, because it's a full non-linear editing software and it requires newer hardware to run and some more advanced knowledge. Video editing Canva is best if you don't know a lot about video editing or have a less powerful computer with Canva, all of the editing takes place online in your browser, which doesn't rely on how powerful your computer is. Alternatively, you could use premier rush to edit videos on your phone. But coming back to Premiere, this is how a finished short looks like on the timeline. Let's take a look. Timothy at Apple says that this MAC is very powerful, but I don't trust him. I've put all my Mac apps here in the dog and they'll open all of them at once to see if this laptop can keep up. I'd give it a ten out of ten. The thing that I want to emphasize here is that this is the amount of footage that I recorded for a particular segment. And this is how much I used. I used less than half, and usually I use even less. So to make your short engaging, it's very important to cut out the silences and everything that's unnecessary in-between. The second thing is music. It's very, very important for the edit, but it's important to balance it out. This is how the short sounds like without any voiceover. As you can see, I have the music in the very beginning, but then I immediately cut it out when the scene changes, this adds a little bit of suspense and mystery into the short and really emphasizes this point where there's no music, then the music comes back again when I'm explaining what I'm doing, and it immediately cuts off, right when the action begins. This part here has only sound effects, mouse clicks that I added later in post. And once the whole action of the short completes, I bring back to music to show the results and the conclusion. And this is how I put together most of my shorts. I have some music in the beginning, then I immediately cut it off to emphasize something, then I bring it back when I'm explaining what I'm gonna do and then cut it off on the action. Now sometimes I'll end the short here without explaining or giving any sort of conclusion because that usually results in the best viewer retention. Let's look at another example. Pay attention of how I use sound effects and music in this short to really emphasize on what I want the viewer to focus on. Helpful is worth over $2 trillion. But I don't understand this number. Here is a list of how much entire country's worth. And it turns out if Apple wanted, they could buy some countries US is safe, but Norway, New Zealand, Portugal, Poland, UAE, Colombia, they're all gone. And so are all of these. That's pretty insane. So again, in this example, I have music playing in the very beginning, and then I cut it off immediately when the scene changes, then the music starts again when I'm explaining something and cuts off immediately when the action begins, then when I'm explaining, again, I have the music and in the conclusion, There's also no music. This really helps emphasize some aspects of the short and direct the viewers focus. So balancing out the music with the silent parts of the short is very important. Again, you'll notice that I've added many sound effects here, and most of them are just zoom ins. So when the camera zooms in, you can hear a whoosh effect. Let's look at the short only with sound effects. As you can see, I add a sound effect whenever there's some sort of movement or action happening on the screen, whether it's a mouse click or camera movement. This short is a really good example of a short where I didn't really record anything. These are all screenshots or screen shares. So it goes to show that you can make shorts without even having to record them with your phone. A cool trick that I also do when editing my shorts is overlap one sentence with another. This makes it so the viewer doesn't have to wait for the next sentence to start and there's no breath or a pause in the middle between two sentences. That way his attention doesn't drift off to something else and he doesn't swipe to another short. However, in some shorts, I purposefully add silences to introduce suspense. It's really just a balancing act. Of course, this is only my style of how I edit and I encourage you to try things out and find your own way and own style of editing, shorts. 9. Optimizing SEO: One way to get more views on your YouTube shorts is to make them around subjects that people can search for on YouTube. So e.g. if I search for Apple Notes and scroll a little bit down, you can see five YouTube shorts in the search results. If I search for another phrase like MacBook, e.g. and scroll a little bit down, you can see the torts now show up in YouTube search. And if people don't find the long form video that they'd like to watch. They can choose to watch shorts. That's why in order to maximize the potential that your shorts have, it's also important to optimize them for SEO, the best way to do this include your targets search phrase in the description of your short. So in this short, I have Mac apps, dark and MacBook freezes. And sure enough, if we go into analytics, you can see that this short it gets some traction from YouTube search, although most traffic is coming from the shorts feet. If we go into the Reach tab and scroll down, you can see that this short is appearing on such search terms like MacBook Air M2. Mac, Mac apps, which is one of the keywords, are included in the description MacBook, Air, and iPad. So if people search something related to Apple products, This short has a chance to show up in the search results. Now here's another example. This short is about a feature inside of Apple Notes. And if we go to the Reach tab and scroll down, you can see that the top search term for this short is Apple notes. Now if we go into the details and look at the description, you can see that I use Apple notes in the title, Apple notes in the first line of the description, and one last time over here. So by including your target keyword in the description or even the title of your short, you have a higher chance to reach a wider audience from YouTube search. Now, as I've mentioned before, there are many different ways that you can find these keywords. But the way I do it is with a vid IQ, you can go in, come up to keywords and type in something like Apple Notes. And it lets you know how many people search for Apple notes per month and what's the competition for this keyword? The lower, the better. I also want to emphasize that when writing your description, you shouldn't just throw in all the keywords, but rather use them in a natural language. Another very important thing is to not overthink SEO and the description because shorts get most of their views through the shorts feed. And that means that average view duration is a much more important metric than SEO. 10. Conclusion: So you've reached the end of this class, but congratulations from me and I hope there's at least one thing that you took away from it that will help you improve your YouTube videos. Of course, the best thing when trying to learn new skills is to put them to use. Because if you know that something exists, there's a very high chance you'll forget it if you don't use it over time. That's why I encourage you to post a link to your YouTube short that you made while watching this course in the project gallery. And just one more thing, could you do me a favor and helped me improve by leaving a review for discourse. If you'll watch any other courses from me, make sure to leave an honest review as well. Please let me know what was unclear and what I could do to improve. Just out of curiosity, I want to know what you thought about it. I hope you enjoyed it and gain some knowledge from it. Thank you once again, good luck and I'll see you in a future course.