How to Write the PERFECT YouTube Video Script! Improve your Content!

1. Introduction: In this Skillshare class, I will show you how to plan and create the perfect script for your YouTube videos, planning and preparing your video before beginning the recording process is pivotal to have videos overall success using the scripting method. My latest videos have been getting over 70 percent water retention. This what percentage is very important for the YouTube algorithm to promote your videos to a wider audience and help grow your channel. So it is essential to do whatever you can to get this number as high as possible. So if you're looking for ways to improve and take your concept to the next level. Join me here for this class. 2. Finding Video Ideas and Researching Your Topic: Before you go ahead and film any kind of YouTube video, you should really take the time to research the topic and see whether there is actually demand for that concept in the very early days of starting my YouTube channel, because I was creating content within a small niche part of the music market. I wasn't doing debt generic guitar abuse. I wasn't doing tutorials on Logic Pro X. I was creating videos about what is called live looping on particular brands because I was a live looper as a solo performer with the guitar, I always had craved particular types of videos that simply didn't exist. So I had to teach myself how to use the products by reading manuals. And then I started crate in this new format and video, you could say on the YouTube platform. So there was no data for me to follow that proved wherever these content types worked within the niche that I was creating videos for. So this constant battle with trial and error and coming up with these new formats and videos for this niche lead to some success, but also led to quite a lot of failure and some failures that you could sort of say, we're quite frankly a waste of time. Now there are many videos on my music channel that have got thousands and thousands of views. But there are some that I've created over a year ago that haven't even got 1000. And if I hit understood the importance of researching and marketplace for a particular product before creating a video on that product, I would not have wasted my time creating that video. Now just to show you my YouTube channel, if we head on over to my music channel where I have a majority of my YouTube videos. I just want to show you an example of a video that was kind of pointless film-making or rather the audience size wasn't large enough for it to get millions and millions of views. And you could argue that my time was a very profitable in creating these videos. Now back in summer, June 2020, I went ahead and created the sort of video series on this heterocyclic a board. So this was a note that brand that I'd never really discussed before in the past. And you can see all of the videos that are contained by this brand have not even got a thousand views. Look it up, 400 views and our views, 600 views. So you're not like my time for making these videos across that entire summer, you could argue was a complete waste of time. Yes, I learned the skills are making a video naught types definitely know it's maybe who I am today, but being brutal about it, you could say it was a waste of time. Whereas when you compare it, when I've talked about this brand compared to a larger brands such as Boston Roland, which is a huge household name for music products. Suddenly the same topic of video. It has a few thousand views because you're comparing it to a more established brand with a much larger following, who's interested in learning about this product? So let's head on to YouTube and begin researching the video that we're going to create. Now I want to create a video on this drone over here, this DJI Navi, many two, I want to do a getting started guide on their animals. So eventually gonna do a full review of it. Now before we go ahead and start filming the video and go, yeah, this is going to fly. We literally, it's a flight because it's a drone. But we need to research the actual topic of the video and see you ever there's demand for it. Sometimes when you go ahead and create a video, you'll think there's a huge demand for that type of video. But when you actually begin to search for that on YouTube, you'll suddenly notice that there isn't. So let's type in Maverick mini. So let's go and DJI maverick mini two. And we'll put Getting Started guide. Now simply by typing this in straight away, you can see there's a huge demand for this tech product, 1.7 million views in seven months. With this Getting Started guide, that signifies straight away that this is a video that is worth creating. And you can see as well on some of the other channels, 400 thousand views and so on. Now you may be questioning what is the point in creating this video when there's already so many channels that have got an established amount of views on there and are also big channels, you could say, because these videos got almost 2 million views and it's seven-month old that the moment has kind of gone for this Getting Started guide got 1.7 million views, each ranking first in search, and it's seven months old. So there's a good chance that the DJI magic mini three is probably just about to release in November and the honeymoon period is kinda gone in this topic. And to an extent that's completely true. However, there is no harm in trying to recreate this video. One from an exitation, a educational standpoint to understand why this video got 1.7 million views and also give a trial run for when the neutron comes out later this year. You can then pick that up and go back. I'm going to make a video on this straight away. Additionally, because all of these videos have got so many views, 1.7 million views now, almost 400 thousand views. You can go ahead and watch all of these videos and figure out what is not very good about the video. Say here for this gentleman's video, it's 45 minutes long, which is way too long. If someone's just got a brand new drone, they did not want to sit there for 45 minutes. They want to go out and start flying a drone straightaway because they're excited to start using it. So we can go ahead and watch this video, read the comments and figured out which sections were a bit inflated in to rambling and make a more concise version like some of the other channels have here You got 25 minutes version of this video and you've even got this guy here that's made a leather minute version of this video. I would much rather watch this video here because I want to start fly my drone. And then maybe after a few weeks and having the drone go and watch this video for a few things that I may have missed. 3. Creating a Video Outline: So when it comes to actually writing your YouTube script for your video, there's a few different approaches that you can take. Now more recently I have been going down the approach of actually scripting out word for word what I want to say within the video. Now, I run two different YouTube channels. I have a music channel where I do music product demos and tutorials. And then I have a tech channel where I review things like the latest iPads and the Imax. Now what my tech channel, every single video has a word-for-word script built before I even record the video because it's a tech video. This is about a specification that I need to talk about, such as RAM speeds or CPU speeds. All of them different kinds of things. And it's quite difficult to try and recall those without making a slight error. And then some picks up on that in the comment section and thinks you're an idiot. However, for my music channel, because I'm doing more tutorials like the one you're watching right now here on Skillshare, they're a little bit more free flowing. So I know the topic inside out because I'm teaching it. And I can just sort of create an outline and a structure for what the video will contain. And then I can just sort of took off the top my head while I worked through that bullet point list to show someone how to achieve something on a particular device. So this is the approach that I like to take when I'm creating my YouTube video outlines and scripts, I like to use Google Docs as this is a Cloud service. So any file that I create on my Google Drive, it is available on any device that basically has an Internet connection. I can access my scripts on my iPhone, my iPad, my Mac Mini, which is one I'm filming on right now. All my main editing computer, which is my iMac on my desk over there. I don't need to export out a PDF and I drop it to myself, email it to myself, just there with me simply logging into my Google accounts. So let's explore this script that I recently wrote for a video on my tech channel that is becomes take-off within the YouTube algorithm. So this is all about the new M1 iPad Pro and how does it perform the playing video games. Now I like to break down my YouTube videos into particular chapters. So you can see we've got our introduction. We got what gains are available on the iPad. We've then got controller support. So can you use a PlayStation 5 controller and Xbox controller with your iPad to play your video games. We then have a section about the overall performance, particularly focusing on the new display, this inside of the new iPad, which is a huge talking point. Finally, we progress down onto some other things you can do on your iPad, such as Cloud gaming with Google stadium and, and different services like that. And then I finally conclude the video with what is the future of the iPad where so to give a roundup of what the overall thoughts have been throughout this video. And is it going to get better as more games get released with this particular script format, I have been seeing an average watch attention of 50 percent on my videos. And in particular cases, I've been getting up to 60 to 65 percent, depending how compelling the topic of the video actually is. And considering the average across YouTube is about 30 percent. Watch retention. And you should try and target 40% to signify you're doing a good job. Shows something pretty special about the importance of planning and scripting your video before you even start shooting. So what do you do to decide what is actually going to be included in your final YouTube video script. Now what I'd like to do is before I even head into Google Docs, I like to create a premise, what my video actually is going to be about, and what is going to contain on a piece of paper. Now you can do this on a piece of paper inside of a notebook or whatever you wanna do. I used to just literally do this on any piece of paper, scrap piece of paper that was on my desk because once this part was done, I would never look back at it anyways. But more recently I've begun to do them on my iPad using an app called GoodNotes five. Now this lets me obviously rights there my iPad as if it's a piece of paper. But I can also create little notebooks to contain different topics. So I can have all of my YouTube video plans in one place, my Skillshare script plans in another place, and anything else that I need to do such as to-do lists for B-roll and actually filming the video. So what we're going to do is we are going to create a YouTube script from the ground up for a drone review. So I have a tech video coming up then I need to do I need to do a review of this drone. It's a DJI maverick mini two. So I need to do with getting started guide and also a review. So we are going to plan out the getting started guide video. And this is going to show you how in depth you can go with a YouTube script. So because I'm going to have to head out in my studio to film this video about this drone. I want to make sure that I planned this video thoroughly and do not miss anything because it's going to be nothing worse than if I do a half decent video plan. And then I get to the top of the mountain, get all these awesome shots with the Joan, then come back to edit the video. Go, oh, I forgot to get a shot about that and have to pack all of my stuff and go out again. I want to make sure that when I'm out filming, I get everything I need and I refer to this script along the way. So let's get a grasp for the flow this YouTube video is going to take, just like in the script that I showed you earlier is the example. That script had different chapters with the little sort of title in underlined and then that would contain all of it's information. Now the way that I decided what those chapters we're going to be was by doing this particular process. So obviously the first part of our video is going to be the introduction. So we want that to be an intro. That's where this video is going to start. So we'll have our introduction. And we may create a few bullet points in a moment that what we might want to include here to capture the actual audience. And then we want to go into the bulk of the video. Now I'm obsessed with my YouTube videos getting straight to the point. When you watch a YouTube video, There's nothing worse than when the person's rambling for ages and ages. So we're just going to do a very quick introduction and then get straight to talking about the drone. Now the first thing we need to do in this Getting Started guide before we start flying the drone and shown them all these crazy advanced things you can do. We need to give the user and watcher a basic overview of the jump. So the next chapter will be the drone overview. And inside of this section, we will give them basic features. What's in the box, how to set it up. But when boxing and how to set the drone up, you know, I get the propellers and everything in the first flight. So setup for first flight. The next part of flying the drone will be the controller and understanding the controls. So we will now do a control overview. So let's just say this section will be called the controller. And here we will show them that the settings, because you can customize them and the directions or the actual joysticks are doing, etc, in all of them different types of things and the buttons. The next part of this video will be the app. Now for this drone, there is an app on your iPhone and this allows you to tweak the camera settings on the drone, have an actual view of whether Joan is and how it's being flown and loads of different things here. So with the next section is going to be the DJI app, which is called fly more awesome. So go to DJI app. We can refine this later on. And then in here, obviously we're going to talk about features and your camera settings and so much more, etc.. And then for the final part of this video, it's all going to conclude all of this. We'll just conclude to the first flight. This will be the conclusion of the video first flight. And this is where after learning how to use the Joan, they were finally take off and understand how to bring it back home for a lot of people creating an outline just like this is all you need to do if you've got a lot of confidence when you're talking to your camera. You can just elaborate beyond the bullet points within each section. And it's perfectly fine, especially if you are super enthusiastic and like the hardcore nerd on the topic you're talking about, it's going to be really easy on my music channel for all 260 odd videos that I've done on there. All of them have been planned just like this, not a single script word for word at all. All of it has been bullet point list and me just talking around those points, obviously because this is such a complicated video that we're trying to create, we're going to be leaving the studio. We need to capture lots of footage on the drone. We need to teach people how to correctly use the drone because of CDN's, It's quite a dangerous piece of equipment to be flying around. We need to make sure that the information is as accurate as possible. So we need to take this to the next level and do a more detailed plan. 4. Writing Your Script: We can now begin with scripting out this YouTube video. I have created my Google Docs document, and we're going to go ahead and now start formulating what this video is going to be about. For now, I'm going to skip over the introduction section. I'd like to go back to the introduction at the end of the video. Once I've actually created the script for the video and I know what's going to be included within it. It's like when you write an essay, if you've ever written like an essay or a dissertation, you always write the introduction at the end once the essays finish, because you can introduce is actually contained within the essay, instead of predetermining what you're going to talk about and then being restricted within the introduction, you can have a bit more freedom and let it naturally conclude whether video needs to go. And then surmise that in the actual introduction, I have taken the time to expand upon the work we did earlier on my iPad. We've got our different chapters. And now within each chapter, I've gone a little bit of information about what I want that part of the video to contain. This is now giving me a very detailed outline to head out with my Joan and start capturing all of the B-roll footage that's required to achieve this video. The next stage of the script writing process is to take these notes and turn it into a word for word script. If we scroll down to the second half of this document, you can see I have begun to write my script for this video. What I've opted to do is turn the script completely into a voice-over. So there's going to be no talking head segments like you are seeing right now. I'm just going to record it with my microphone directly into my computer. The reason why I've done this is because there's so much stunning footage that I've captured outside. I want to use all of it of me setting up the drone and also the drone flying in the air, capturing the beautiful scenery. I think just a stagnant shot of me talking like this is going to be a little bit disjointed in the overall video. The key to a good script is to tell a story from start to finish. You want to take the viewer on the experience that you went through in a very concise manner. So we're going to skip over the introduction at this current time. And I want to show you the bulk of the video. Let's take the time to dissect the script that I have written. Now, I've taken my notes from earlier within this video and I have used all of these information and elaborated upon it to create this script. And you would do it within your own words. It's quite a natural process. What you'll see from reading through this script is it flows between the chapters without you even realizing. So we begin with the drone overview here, which is listed here with the bullet points. These bullet points also correspond with the actual footage that I captured while I was out in the fields using the drone. We then seamlessly transition from the overview into the controller, just using a bit of a segue where I talk about taking the drone into the air. You're obviously going to need the controller. And then this takes us straight into that chapter of the video without the viewer even realizing. Then once again, while I'm describing how the controller works, I mentioned about the flight modes that you can change with the button at the center of the controller. This then segways into demonstrating those different flight modes. We've got the cinema, the normal mode, and the sports mode, always corresponding footage. Again, the viewer doesn't even realize that we have progressed into the next section of the video. Next up, I've got this simple sentence that I have put in bold text, so I do not forget to record this part of the video. If I just left it in regular texts, it's very easy while you're recording just to scroll past that and then you forgot to tell them something really important. That's just a little workflow tip and then progress to talk about some of the safe operation features found on the controller, which is a pretty much the exact same paragraph from my notes section. I just simply sort of copied and pasted that in there and tweak them a little bit, and then move on to talking about the actual app controls this entire drone. Once again, the viewer doesn't even realize that we've changed topic. This is something that you should get into the habit of doing. You don't need to describe and tell the viewer what you're doing. You don't need to go up. Next, we're talking about the controller. We're now going to move on and talk about the unboxing. We're now going to move on and talk about the app, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because if you take the time to capture the correct B-roll and you put a lot of effort into that. The picture on the screen is going to tell most of the story they need to know so that visually going to know what we're talking about the controller now, because it's a picture of the control on the screen. Oh, we're talking about the app now because it's a picture of the app on the screen and now talk through a few different features on the actual app. You can read through this if you want to. And then finally, once again, I have a sentence in bold. This is a safety thing, just making sure it's clear and safe. This is once again something I do not want to forget to mention within the video. And that's the bulk of the video. It continues from there and then just simply conclude, there's one important thing that I want to raise about creating the introduction for your YouTube video. You want to use your introduction as an opportunity to hook the audience into what the video is going to entail. Now wherever the beginning YouTube is go wrong. And I did this myself, is they take about a minute or so to introduce the video? They like, Hey, what's up, hope you're having a fantastic day. Welcome back to another video. In this video I'm going to show you how to fly that EGI. And I think we need to draw and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you enjoy the video like subscribe, join the channel, leave a comment and then also they then have a whole intro sequence that plays it's about 15 seconds long. You take about one minute and minute and a half for the video to actually begin. And that's why you may see a drop-off curve at the beginning of your video that's similar to this, but instead you want to introduce the video as quickly as possible without it being rushed and feeling too fast. So we're going to roughly allocate between eight to ten seconds to introduce what this video is going to be about. So we're going to keep this introduction very simple. We're going to say in this video, I will show you how to set up the DJI maverick Mini 2. So we've clearly stated what the product is. We're going to show them so they know that they're in the right place without any rumbling. We then go to say, for your very first flight to signify, this is perfect for beginner because this is your first flight. And then to hook the audience, we want to say something like if this is your first time flying a drone. This is a video you don't want to miss, something very simple like that. So we've engaged them by stating what we're going to show them and then a reason for them to stay. You know, if this is your first time flying, you don't want to miss this video, cuz you know, you might crash and destroy your drone. That's basically what we're implying that without telling them that's what we're implying. In this video, I will show you how to set up the DJI magic many two and get prepared for your very first flight if you are brand new to using a drone, this is a video you don't want to miss. This way ensures that they watch more of the video. So they miss something. 5. Improving Your Script with Data: A very key thing to understand when it comes to creating YouTube videos is using data to improve your videos. This is a huge area that people overlook. They just want to create the video, get it uploaded, and then move on to the next one and hope that that video gets thousands and millions of views. But the harsh reality of creating a YouTube video is every single video needs to continuously improve until you sort of find that golden formula that allows you to create high impactful videos. Now one of the ways that I like to improve my YouTube videos is by using the YouTube Analytics Studio. Inside of each video you upload, you have all of these tools that give you an overview of how the videos performed, the reach, the click-through rate, the engagement rate. It's insane. You get all of these tools for free just by simply having a Google account. Now here we have got a very recent video I did on my music channel. This was a tutorial that I did only a few weeks ago. You can see the average view duration is 70 percent, which is absolutely mind-blowing. Now I want to compare this new video formula that I do to an older tutorial that's surrounding your role. This was a tutorial I did over a year ago. Now as this video still has got a great retention rate of 52%. Not too bad. I definitely have videos with worse retention rate than this. But you can see more importantly, the shape of this blue line. This shows the sort of viewer habits throughout your video. So the average line shows what people are doing at each point within the video. So you can see where people are skipping and dropping off out of the video and where they're just leaving altogether. Now there's a huge difference in the shape of this line that from a video I did over a year ago, and the shape of the line of a more recent video. Now I understand how this script and plan a video correctly. Now one of the worst things that people do when they start a YouTube channel, and I blame the advice of some of the YouTube gurus for this is having a stupidly long outro. Now back when I started my YouTube channel, I used to have the outro would be like subscribe, check out this video over here, common if he adopt blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, subscribed for three videos every single week. It ridiculously long. You can see how long that outro is. It's just silly. And the main reason why this video hasn't got more of a 60 percent audience retention or even higher is because of the drop-off here we're going from 50% water tension down to nothing within seconds because of the stupidly long outro. Now what all of the big YouTube gurus tell you to do. And I was following that formula just like your probably going to follow the formula I'm sharing with you within this class to an extent is delight. Go check out this video here in a little box pops up and you click the subscribe button. But think about this. Have you ever, ever click subscribe because somebody told you to click the bell notification at the end of the video. I think I've only ever done it once in my entire life of watching YouTube since I was like 11 years old, they like 10 years of watching YouTube. I've done it once. So that made me think, well, why am I doing it? How is that going to encourage people to like and subscribe if I don't do it myself and I'm a hardcore user watching YouTube. It's all I watch. You don't watch Netflix, don't want anything else other than YouTube. However, more recently, I decided to just scrap the outro altogether. We now just plow through the tutorial. There's no ridiculous intro going, hey, in today's video we're going to be doing, because no one cares. The title tells them going to be doing that. Should we just go bang? We're going to start doing this in the tutorial. This is how it works. How do you set it up? How do you set it up? You can see here people are rewinding it because there may be just want to check that piece again. This helps increase the water tension because it's keeping people on the video. We keep plowing through it and there's hardly any drop off until the final three seconds of the video, which is what you want. There's always going to be a drop-off anyways, but not like it was a year ago where it was continuous, the drop-off was a continuous curve. So that is made better. The only thing I do now at the end of the video is a call to action. I'll say check out the link in the description and I'll be selling a digital product or something to make these YouTube videos a little bit more profitable? And a fair question to ask is, has there been a drop-off in the amount of subscribers the video has gained due to the lack of call to actions. So to make this fair, I have chosen the last 28 days on each of the videos. So from May 16th to June 12th, 2020, one you can see this video has generated seven subscribers. And the older video with the rubbish format, Watch attention has generated five, albeit it has had to a 100 views less than this video. But this just proves that the call to action serve no purpose whatsoever within a YouTube video. So I hope this shows how you can begin to use your analytics in a practical way to improve your videos because your watch retention graphs will be totally different shapes to mind depending on how you create your videos and how engaging they are. And it gives you an opportunity to figure out what is and isn't working on your channel in particular. 6. More Skillshare Classes Coming Soon!: I do hope that this Skillshare class has helped you understand how to create a powerful and effective script for your future YouTube videos. If you want to learn more about growing your YouTube channel, you may wish to check out some of my other Skillshare classes, such as my YouTube basics class, along with my YouTube shorts course, which shows you how to create high-quality Egypt shorts and leverage that new feature on the YouTube platform. Additionally, make sure you're following me here on Skillshare to catch any future courses, I released the skills that you need to grow your YouTube channel. But as always, I'd been Babylonians. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next bomb.