Transcripts
1. Welcome to the Lazy YouTuber: Hey, guys, welcome to our
course, the Lazy YouTuber. My name is Spencer, and
this is my friend, Ben. Hey, everyone. We are super
excited to have you here. Spencer and I have
been making content on YouTube since about 2009, and we have a combined
total of over 15,000 subscribers spread
across numerous channels and millions of views. We just love creating
content on the platform. It's our favorite social media. And for anyone out
there who's ever been interested in
talking about anything, YouTube is a great
place to talk about that and to start a
community around. Created this course for you. Specifically, those of you that want to create a
YouTube channel, but are a little overwhelmed by all the advice and
strategy channels out there on how to be
successful on YouTube. Let me look at it like this.
Yes, this can be a hobby, but compared to something
like Binge watching Netflix. You're actually
creating something. You're going from
where there was nothing to now you've
created something, and you're sharing
that with the world. Not only can that help you meet new people and start a community around
something that you love. But you can potentially make
money off of it, as well. So it beats sitting on the couch watching Netflix
at your free time. That's for sure. We
want to encourage you to be a doer creator. In this short course, we'll cover everything
from basic lighting to equipment to discovering
your topics and your niche, filming, editing, posting, but we'll keep it
light and loose. There are no hard
or fast rules here. What we're trying to do is get you started on the platform. Exactly. We're not here to
give you a 60 page workbook or tell you you have
to spend 20 hours a week on your YouTube
channel content. We're here to make things as relaxing and as stress
free as possible. Throughout the
course, we'll share our own experiences and
tips that we've found, little hats and
tidbits along the way. To help you get from ideation to publication in under 2 hours, if that's something
you're wanting to believe in striking
a balance between thoughtful and engaging content versus professionalism
and perfectionism. Again, this isn't about becoming the next YouTube sensation. This is about creating a
channel for your passions and being able to create content around that in the
simplest way possible. So let's jump in
and have some fun. We're very excited to
see what you can create. Welcome to the Lazy
YouTube. Let's get started.
2. Our Class Project: Every one, welcome
to the Lazy Tube. Today's class project is all about how to start
your channel and create your very first video
with this class project. So get excited or just continue sitting on the
couch. It's your choice. This is the Lazy
YouTuber after all. You might be wondering
why we chose this as our class project. Starting a YouTube
channel seems a little bit daunting, but it
doesn't have to be. It's going to be easy pz. You're not even go
to break a sweat. Plus, it's designed to
be fun and stress free. Alright, so let's talk about what you'll need for this class. You'll need a smartphone or whatever you
have laying around, could be a camera or
something like that. You'll need some basic editing
software like Descript. And then finally, you'll
need an Internet connection because D, you have
to upload a video. It. No fancy equipment required. Use some of the steps
that we've already talked about in the course,
and you'll be good to go. So before we dive in,
let's cover some tips. Firstly, don't overthink it. If you start overthinking
your whole YouTube channel and what your first video is going to be, you're
never going to do it. So just pick something
and go for it. Keep it simple. Your first video doesn't need to be perfect. Like I always say, practice
makes better, not perfect. And lastly, engage
with the community. Share your progress,
share videos. Do what you need to do and
provide feedback to others, because the only way you grow is to learn with others
and through others. Remember, the goal is to set up your first video
and your channel with as little
effort as possible so relax and enjoy the process. That's it for the intro.
I hope you're excited. I'm excited to see what
you create and remember. If anyone can do it, you can
3. Setting and Sticking to A Niche: Back to the Lazy YouTube
in your next lesson. Now we're going to
talk about finding your niche and sticking to it. So I'm sure if
you're on YouTube, watching YouTube creators
and watching content there, you've heard of the importance
of sticking to a niche or why sticking to a
niche doesn't matter. I think that Ven and I have found in our long time here on YouTube that
sticking to niche is important for a few reasons,
especially starting out. One, when you are first
starting on YouTube, there are millions and
millions and millions of viewers watching
YouTube videos. What YouTube is going
to try and do with your content is try and put it in front of the
right kinds of people. So let me explain it this way. If you decide today, you're going to talk about photography. And then in your third
video on YouTube, you talk about your
Pokemon cards. YouTube is confused, right? It'll put the video out for your audience of photographers
because it's like, Oh, that's a
photography channel. Why are we talking
about Pokemon? Now, if you have a very
sustinct and direct niche where you want to talk to
photographers who love Pokemon, and there is an
actual audience out there that you have
found that enjoys that, or maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe you just enjoy
those things to get photography and Pokemon
and how those crossover, that's a very, very
specific niche, but it's possible that an audience can be
built around that. The problem now is
once you've set that, you need to stick to that. Right? Because again,
after a while, after making multiple pieces
of content on YouTube, YouTube will start
to learn, Okay, this is a photography
and Pokemon channel, whatever that means,
people are enjoying it. We're going to push it out to
more people who like that. If then you decide to make a
video on pancake creation, then again, you
confuse the algorithm. The biggest thing that
YouTube is a home for is creating a community
around a certain topic. So I want you to think
about what you love, what you could spend
all day talking about. What if someone said, I will pay you $100,000 a year
to talk about this topic. What would that be?
Whatever you want it to be? What would that topic be? What do you absolutely love? What are you passionate about? Now, I will say, be
careful with what you pick because I think it would
be easy to say, Hey, there's lots of money
in financial advice, or there's lots of money
in talking about medicine, or there's lots of
money in slime. And you're going after the Niche based on the money you
think it could bring in. And again, the point
of this course is not to make you
a millionaire. It's not It's to help
you start a journey of creation on YouTube and find joy in that process
in and of itself. So you need to
think about a niche where you are happy
researching it, where you watch other
YouTubers talk about it. Where you're following multiple newsletters that talk
about this topic. Something that you're interested
in learning more about, that you're interested in diving into more and more every day, and maybe That topic needs
to be something that you have been interested in
for quite a few years now, because for all of us, it's easy to have that shiny
object syndrome. Today, I'm excited
about photography, and so I'll start a
YouTube channel tomorrow. Well, I wasn't actually that
excited about photography. It was just flashy and new. I've never actually liked
photography before, but I think I would. That's not a good
enough reason to pick the photography Niche
in our opinion. Think about this for a while. Long and hard about
what's something you truly truly enjoy, and you can make lots
of content about. What's something
you always talk to family and friends about,
to co workers about? What gets you excited?
Is it sports? Is it gaming? Is it Pokemon?
Is it Harry Potter? Is it being a stay home dad? Is it journaling, right? Think about that
specific topic that you absolutely love and enjoy. And then we're going
to stick to it. Now, I'll follow
this up with this. If after you've created 100 videos and you've built up a huge audience
on your channel, you decide, Hey, I've been talking about photography
for the last year. What if I talk about
videography a little bit? Right? There are places in your content creation and
ideation where you can say, let's try something
that's a little step away from what the
main channel is doing. I've heard people say to try that maybe one
every four videos, try something a
little bit new and just see if your audience
follows you there. If the views go down, then let's revisit it later, or maybe that's just not an
option with this audience. But there will be time
in the future to test and play around with
expanding that niche. But for the purpose
of getting started, being consistent and growing
a community on YouTube, pick a niche that you
love and stick to it. And guess what? It
won't be hard to stick to it because
you love it so much. All right. Onto the next lesson.
4. How To Come Up With Video Ideas: Back to the La YouTuber. Previously, we talked
about finding your niche, something you absolutely love. Now we're going to talk
about how to come up with tons and tons of
content in that niche. So it's actually really simple, and I wouldn't overthink it. My sort of lesson
plan for you in my homework for you
is to take 5 minutes. Literally, set a timer on
your phone, 5 minutes. Have a pen paper or have a
notes open on your computer, and I want you to write
down your goal is 50-100 video titles that you could make content
on in that niche. Let's say it's photography, ok? Ready. Said, Go. My favorite camera, my
least favorite camera. The difference between
Nikon and Cannon. Why people don't like
street photography. Why people love
street photography, my favorite type of photography, wildlife photography,
landscape photography. So the idea here is,
don't ever think it. Just think about all the
different keywords for video titles you could use in your channel.
Don't ever think it. Just write as quickly as you can 50-100 titles. Get
all of that out. And if you truly
love it that Niche, this is going to be really easy and probably really fun too, and you'll be surprised at how many video ideas
you can come up with. Now, something I'll say
is don't be afraid to be like the Fuji film X 100 V
is a really popular camera. So don't be afraid in your quick typing out
video ideas to say, the best things about
the Fuji film, X 100 V, the worst things about
the Fuji film X 100 V, how I use the X 100 V. My
favorite part of the X 100 V. The sample images of
the X 100 V. Don't be afraid to make content that
might even be redundant. How about this? My favorite
things about the X 100 V, what I love about the X 100. Why I pay double for
the X 100 V. All of those videos could technically
be the same thing. You're just talking
about your love for the camera and why you use it. By the way, I keep
looking over here because it's literally
sitting right here. And I do love this
camera. Of people. But don't be afraid
of redundancy because little sneak peek into the future of
content creation. There are going to be times when you're creating
content and thinking up content where you're
going to look back at content that has worked
well on your channel, and you're just going
to recreate it because your audience has shown a huge
interest in that content, you want to serve
that audience well. So let's talk about it again, or let's talk about it from
slightly different angle, Why I pay double price
for the X 100 V could be a slightly different
but same video as why I love the
X 100 V. Right? So don't be afraid to
make redundant titles. I mean, I wouldn't say,
why I love the X 100 V, why I love the X 100 V.
Obviously, don't do that. But in this time, don't overthink it
just right, right, right, right, right
for 5 minutes. And you might come up
with 200 titles, right? Depending on how fast the typer you are and
how quickly you can process and how much you love
that niche, particularly. Don't ever think it, sit down and do the exercise.
Have fun with it. And one thing I'll say
is stick to your niche. Don't let your mind run to tangent and start talking about, you know, why I love car
rides with my family. Like, You could say, why I love taking a camera
on every family trip, right? But, like, don't let
yourself go on a tangent, stick to that niche
and try to be as specific within that
niche as you can be. Again, there will be time
in the future to flesh out your niche to
flesh out more ideas. You can try with your audience. Try in this exercise to be as strict to that niche as you
can be in that 5 minutes. I personally actually
do this quite often. When I feel my sort of list of video ideas has
sort of run dry. I'll take another 5 minutes on a Thursday morning or a Friday lunch break and
just do this exercise again. And again, it doesn't
matter if I'm writing the titles of videos
I've already done, right? The point here is coming up with ideas and doing it quickly, thinking about things
differently from different angles in your niche. And honestly, if you
were to come up with ten video ideas outside of
that 50, that'd be fantastic. Some of these might be terrible. Some of them might be great. Some of them they may be things you've never
even thought about, but you're in that zone, and it really helps you get
creative with video ideas. So there's your
homework assignment. Take 5 minutes, come up with
50-100 video topic ideas. Let's do it. I'll see
you the next lesson.
5. Batching Content: Welcome back to the Lazy Tube. In today's lesson,
we're going to talk about batching content. Now, I don't know where
this video is going to fall in this series quite yet. I know we're going to be talking
about lighting and video and composition and editing
and all that kind of stuff. But today, I just want to
talk about the theory of batching and kind of put in perspective on how
it can make you very consistent and make YouTube
an easy thing to do. If you've ever looked
into content creation or social media management or even creating a
YouTube channel, you've probably
heard of batching. If you don't know what
it is, it's basically like coming up with a
ton of video ideas, filming them all on like
a Saturday morning and then editing them out and
scheduling that content. So that something instead of going video to
video each week, you've done five
videos in one setting, scheduled them out
for five weeks, and now you don't have
to worry about it again. They're they're done. So that's the idea of batching, and it sounds fantastic, and it is fantastic. Easier said than done, but today I want to give some perspective on why it's
something to strive for. So in a previous lesson, we talked about that five
minute exercise of writing down 50 to 100 video titles. What I want you to do now with that list is look through it and find 12 of your
favorites, okay? So things that you just love, you definitely can
make a video on it. It's pretty succinct.
You wouldn't go on too many tangents. It's very within your niche, and you think that an
audience similar to yourself would enjoy
that video topic. Now, I want you to
number that list, right? So if you had the next three
days to film all of them, don't worry about anything else. Just think, if I had
to film 12 videos, what order would I put them in? What would make me
the most excited and satisfied to do first
and to do second? And ooh, that'd be
a good follow up. I'll do that one third. So
now you have that list. Now I want you to
think about something. If in 5 minutes, you could come up with
50 to 100 video ideas. Who's to say, you can't then film 12 of those
ideas in 2 hours. Let's show the power of this. It's probably not reasonable
because there's set up, you need some time to get your thoughts together
and breathe in between. But let's just say you could literally sit down in
front of your camera, turn it on and record for
two straight hours, right? And let's say each video
is 10 minutes long. So for each video, you're talking to the camera
for 10 minutes. If you could sit down in
front of the camera for 2 hours and record
ten minute videos, that would be six videos
per hour times 212 videos. You have in a two hour span recorded one video per month for an entire
year. In 2 hours. You have made enough content
if you're posting on a monthly schedule to supply for an entire year
of content. You're done. You don't have to film
anymore the rest of the year. That's the power of batching. That's something to
be excited about, and it's something
to strive for. Because what this is going to do is it's going to make it so that I don't have to worry about what I'm going to
film next week. I don't have to worry about Oh, no, a video is going
to go out tomorrow, and I haven't even started You will have banked
all these videos. They are scheduled
and ready to go out. You sit back and you just
go into engagement mode. When the video comes
out, you share it, you reply to comments, we'll get to all of the
engagement stuff later. But that is the
power of batching. Now, batching doesn't just
have to be for filming, right? I mean, we already basically batched our idea
creation in 5 minutes, we came up with 50
to 100 video ideas. You can also batch editing. You can take 2
hours and edit for that two hour period and do as many videos as possible
in that two hour period. You can batch your script
writing or your bullet points. I usually don't really write scripts. We'll probably
get to that later. But you might write
scripts. You might be very scripted with
how you do things. And so you can batch that
type of content as well. You can batch your
packaging, right? So let me come up with
the five thumbnails for the next five videos that I just filmed or even your
description writing. All of this can be done in a batched setting in
a single sit down, do multiple videos
so that again, It's done, and you've done
all the work upfront. Now you can enjoy the
community you're creating. Now you can enjoy the extra
income you might be making, everything that comes
with this YouTube idea, you are doing all the work
upfront so that you can reap the benefits of
what you sew early on. Let me wrap up with this, right? So maybe you want
to post weekly, which I would recommend, and we'll probably hit on that a little bit later in
terms of consistency. But let's just it
doesn't matter honestly. We're here to have
fun, build community, and explore and create, right? But say you want to do
a video every week. Keep in mind that's 52
videos you need to create. But if you're able to
create 12 and 2 hours, say you take 2 hours out of every month and do
some batch recordings, in a matter of months,
what's the map there? 2 hours out of your month
for four to five months, you can record 52 videos
for the entire year. And say you wanted
to do it weekly. If you just did four
or five weeks, right? You could have your
entire 52 video schedule for the entire year filmed
in four to five weeks. So January to first
week of February, the rest of the year,
you have nothing to do. You don't have to film anymore
unless you want to, right? Batching is powerful. I
will always push for it. Again, easier said than
done. It takes a mindset. It takes a certain amount of focus to get in those
kind of sessions. But when I can do
it, I love to do it. And when I don't do it, I can
sometimes feel very behind. So batching is important
onto the next lesson.
6. Basic Equipment and How To Use It: Come back to the Lazy YouTube. In this lesson, we're going to talk about basic equipment. Use what you got is the
main theme for today. So what do I mean when
I say Ue what you got? When you have nothing else
but your iPhone and you want to start a YouTube
channel, use your iPhone. You don't have to go out
and buy an expensive DSLR, MLs, whatever. You
don't need it. You can start your
entire journey on YouTube with just your phone. And I'm going to show you
a little bit about how that works and what settings
you need to be aware of. For those of you that already
have your Mus or DSLR, all these settings are
applying to you as well. So let's cover the
basics of what you need to know before you start
your YouTube channel. So before you hit record, here are some things that
you need to know and some things you actually
need to make a decision on. If you have an iPhone with
cinematic mode, use it. It's actually pretty decent. So use that if you
want to get that depth of field in
the background. It's going to look pretty good. So let's talk about settings. These settings that
I'm about to talk about are universal
across any camera system. So whatever you got,
this will work for you. We have one decision
to make before we get any further
in this lesson. What frame rate are
you shooting in? Frame rate is
extremely important. Frame rate is the amount of frames per second that
are being captured. A typical motion effect is achieved at 24
frames per second. That's typically smooth motion. Anything less than
that, you'll start to see a little
bit of jittering. And then you could
go all the way up to 240 frames per second and 100 frames per second for those high quality
slow motion cameras. But let's focus on the
three frame rate options. We're going to focus
on the three options that I think are the
best for YouTube videos, and that's 243060
frames per second. Personally, I come from
a filmmaking background. So my personal opinion
is always shooting 24 frames per second or whatever your camera
gets close enough to, so like 2398 or 976, all of those options are great. They're still 24 at
the end of the day. If I wave my hands, you can see there's
motion blur there, and it looks authentic.
It looks real. 30 frames per second, while it's great, it's mostly
related to home movies. Now, don't take that
in a negative way. What I'm saying is that's
what it's going to look like. And if that's what your
videos are going to go for, so if you're doing family
logging or self logging or something that needs to
look home movie ish, use that. Use 30 frames per second.
It's going to be great. And it's going to make your audience feel like
they're there with you. 60 frames per second
looks really smooth. There's not a lot of
motion blur at all. And That can look a
little strange to people. Video games, anything like that, you want that high
frames per second, so you can have the edge in the game and then the refresh
rate, all that stuff. In filmmaking or
in YouTube world, I only use 60 frames per
second to slow footage down to 24 and get nice
slow motion footage. But if your content calls for something like 60
frames per second, if you want to make
something that looks unique and it draws the
viewer in, it could do that. All of these are dictated
by what your content is, whether that's a log, a review channel, tech, whatever it is, you have to choose your frames
per second first. These are only guidelines
to help you get the footage looking
as good as possible. But if you want to
go out and just use your iPhone and capture
whatever, just do it. The whole point of Lazy
YouTube, as you've heard, is to just fuel your passion and create videos that you love without worrying
about anything else. Some settings to avoid. Avoid using your
ISO in a dark room. Now, with iPhone cameras, when the video
gets in low light, it looks pretty awful. You start to see
speckles, and it looks like a found
footage video. That's ISO. It's digital noise. It's the camera actually adding in pixels of light
that aren't there. So you start seeing
like, little colors and everything that fly around. You want to lower ISO, and that'll get you the
cleanest looking footage. There's still going to be a little fragment
here and there, but you won't notice it as much, especially once you
upload it to YouTube. Try to avoid cranking your ISO in favor of getting
some low light footage. If you don't have
the light to support it, don't shoot it. So to wrap this lesson
up, use what you got. And if you don't know
a whole lot about what you have, YouTube it. You can learn
everything you want to learn for free on YouTube, so you might as well learn
something new today. So get out there and
make your video, and in the next lesson, we're going to talk about
basic composition.
7. Basic Lighting and Composition Tips: Back to the Lazy Tube. In this lesson,
we're going to talk about basic composition
and lighting. Let's jump right in.
Let's not waste any time. We're going to talk
about lighting first. Let's start off with my setup, and I'll show you what the
lights are doing in this room. So I have this one big light that's right here
in front of me. If I turn that off,
now you can really see what it's doing
to the image. It separates me from
the background, and then it provides enough light that
you can see my face. Now, if you don't have
something like this, there is a good cheat
that you can use. If you go to Google and just
search white background, doing this in real time here. Go to images, find
your white background, make it as big as possible, or either get like
a really white page like Apple's website or something like that,
and you turn it on. You can see I'm getting
light from that, and let's turn it down. I'm looking at my
monitor up there. So you can see what it's not doing, and then we turn it up. I've got light on my face now. That's a good hack
that you can use. You can keep your laptop or whatever screen you have
lower and out of the frame, so nobody else sees it, and then you have a
nice source of light. Another great recommendation
is using natural light. So again, if I turn this off, you can see I have a lot of
natural light coming in. I have one, two, three windows in this room
that are providing light. That would be my recommendation. If you don't have any lights, you don't have anything else. You're using what you got, just like we talked about
in the last lesson. Use a window, get as close to that window as possible
and get all of that light, that natural light on your face. When you're using a window as
your main source of light, make sure that you are
facing the window, and the window is
not behind you. If the window is behind you and you try to light your scene, you're going to be
exposing for yourself, and that window is going
to be really bright, and you're going to
look silhouetted, or you're just going
to blow your image out and over expose it. So put yourself in
front of the window. Put your camera in between
you and the window, and all of that natural light will be falling on your face. That's the bare essentials. If you have no lights
whatsoever, that's what you use. So if you want to go a bit
more advanced with it and you have some more lights or more
equipment that you can use, then we'll talk about the three point
lighting system here. So the three point lighting
system is very basic. You have a key light, which is the light closest
to your talent. You have your fill
light, which is providing extra light that comes into your image and fills in some of the gaps
and the shadows. And then you have what's called a hair light or also
called a rim light, which is providing separation
from the background. In this particular setup, what I have is I
have one key light, and then I have the
natural light that's providing that hair
light in the background. I don't have a hair
light because this light really does do everything
I needed to do. But in a professional scenario, I would have another
fill light that's over here a little
bit further back, not as intense, just filling in the rest
of these shadows. So that's your basic three
point lighting system. Another thing to remember
when it comes to using artificial light
and natural light, you want to make sure
that the lights match. And what do I mean by that? So if I turned on the overhead lights in this
room, they're very yellow, and daylight is a lot more
white light or bluish light. So you want to have those match because if you have
a mixture of color, it's going to be really
hard for your camera to figure out what white
balance it should be using, especially if you
leave it on auto, and you're just
going to confuse it, and it just depends on what kind of colors of
light you have around you. So if you make
everything the same, or at least as
close as possible, Then you can set your camera or your iPhone to auto
white balance or a particular white
balance that works for the scenario you're
in, and call it a day. All of that to say, just make your lighting look consistent, and if you're filming outside, you shouldn't need to worry
about it because you have the sunlight that is going to provide light for
the rest of the day. Let's talk about composition. Composition refers
simply to how you frame up your subject
or in this case, how I'm framing myself up. I use the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds
basically says that your video frame is
divided up into quadrants, and I'll put those up right now. You can see you have your top quadrant, your middle quadrant, and your bottom quadrant, and then you have a left
and a right and a center. So let's talk about this. I am framed up on the center, if I put my hands up like this, and I'm using my monitor
to frame this up. If I use rule of
thirds correctly, I'm sitting right here
on those lines, right? So that middle line
crosses my eye line, and that's generally
about where you want to your eye level is on that third line at the
top. And why is that? Really, it's just fancy way of making your shot look nice. But it does look pleasing. If I were to frame it so
that my head was getting cut off or that I had too much head room, it
would look strange. So that's what the rule
of thirds is doing. What is pleasing to the eye. But it's also really helpful if you frame your
stuff up and you're thinking about doing
short form content, especially vertical content. You want to be in between those two main lines so you
can cut everything off, leave a little bit of head room, and now you have your
vertical content ready to go. Avoid having really distracting
things in the background. You can see I have some screens behind me here, but they're
not playing anything. It's just a static image, and there's nothing going on. That's really nice. But if you had a TV or something playing in the background or
a flickering light or even something
like a keyboard, like if I moved a little bit, you could see that I have some
lights on my keyboard back there that light up,
that's really distracting. So don't have many of those
in the background unless you want your viewers
paying attention to that instead of
what you're saying. If you're doing a
running gun setup or you're logging outside, you can't really control
your environment as much. You have to use what you
have, use your environment. And that's really
I feel my theme for all of these videos
is usually what you got. But that's all you
have to your disposal. If you're out there in public and you're filming yourself, you can't control what
somebody's doing behind you, but sometimes that makes for
really interesting content. Especially if you're walking
around and you're talking, and then there's some dude
behind you going like this or making a face or
doing something weird. Sometimes that's really
engaging and could get you a lot more
uptick in your audience. That's it for this lesson.
And the next lesson, we're going to talk about
how you film your videos.
8. Tips for Filming Your Videos: Back to the Lazy Tube, today, we're going to be talking
about how to film your videos. Now, when it comes to
filming your videos, you want to keep a
few things in mind. Firstly, how do you
want to shoot it? And what I mean by that is are you going to shoot
it chronologically? Are you shooting it
throughout the day, just when you can, it's important to decide on this now versus after the fact, because if you shot
things out of order, and you don't
remember what order they're supposed
to actually go in, that can be really confusing. Us being Lazy Tubers. We just want to get
the video done. So it's better to
film your video from start to finish
from beginning to end instead of starting
with the end and then coming back to the beginning
and filming everything else. If you have trouble, speaking or you have trouble just
getting your words out. I that sound really
fluid and nice. Don't worry about trying 30
times to get something right. Thomas Edison tried and failed so many times to
make the light bulb, but only needed one
time to make it work. Same principle applies
when filming your videos. You could take as many takes as it takes to make it look right. If you saw the actual behind
the scenes to this video, I did 300 takes, because sometimes
I'll start talking, and I'm like, that
doesn't make sense. And then I dial it back and
I restart and I do it again. Like, I'm going to
try and do for this, but now I've gone on a rant, and I feel like it's funny,
so I'll leave it in. I don't really know. Anyway.
You get what I'm saying. Don't worry about the number
of takes that you do. A couple of tips
for those of you that have never been
on camera before. This is nerve wrecking.
For me, I'm an introvert. I don't really like
talking in public. I don't like talking to
a large group of people. But when I'm talking
to my camera, it really feels like I'm
just talking to one person. Treat it like it's
your best friend. If you treat your camera
like your best friend or your iPhone, whatever it is, you're going to
be willing to let your emotions out a
little bit, smile, relax, And you're not worried about the fact that
when you post this video, it could be seen by tens
of millions of people. But don't focus on that. If you're nervous about being
in front of the camera, like I said, pretend
it's your best friend, or if you just have a passion for what
you're talking about, it will naturally come
across on camera. Another tip is to stare
right at the lens, because that is your audience. If you're staring
off at your monitor, it doesn't look like
I'm looking at you. You're not engaged with me because I'm not
engaged with you. So I'm going to look
back down at you. Now I'm engaged. Now we're
having a conversation. And I'm sure Spencer talked about this in
his video as well, but when you engage
your audience, you're more likely to get
those views and to get people to subscribe and come back for more because they
enjoyed talking with you, or they enjoyed listening, or they learned something, or you showed them
how to do something, whatever that case may be. This is how you engage
with your audience. The most important
thing to remember when filming your
videos is to have fun. Throw something in
there that when you're editing your footage, you can go back and
be like, Oh, Yeah, that's when I sneezed or that's
when something happened. Somebody called me on the
phone or whatever it was. That was a funny moment.
That's just something for me to enjoy when I'm
editing my video later. A couple of other
things I want to talk about, do you need B roll? B roll is really nice. And if you don't
know what B roll is, it's stuff that covers up
the footage underneath. So it's covering up
what I'm saying, and you don't see my face, but it's showing a point or it's showing something
in more detail. Now, depending on
what your content is, you don't technically
need B roll. You can get by completely
without B roll. If you have a bunch
of jumbled up words or a couple of mess ups and you need to splice
everything together, you can use B roll
to cover it up. One other tip that I
like to tell people is I have a computer screen
right in front of me with the title of the
video and a couple of bullet points that will give me the highlights of what
I need to talk about. I don't typically like to
script out word for word, what my video is going
to say, because I'm more likely to trip over those words
to try to get it perfect. Whereas, if you
have bullet points, you have your topic, you know
what you're going to say, and you can fill in
the blanks throughout, and you're not worried so much about getting it
perfect every time. That's it for this lesson. In the next lesson,
we're going to be talking about editing
with description
9. Editing Software: Come back to the Lazy YouTube. In this lesson,
we're going to be talking about editing software. Now, there's so much
out there that can be very overwhelming anything from Premiere Pro to Di Vnci Resolve, it Film Express, you name
it. They're all out there. But I want to talk specifically about one of the easiest
ones that you can use, even if you've never had
any editing experience before, and that's descript. Haven't heard a descript before. Descript is an editing platform that allows you to
edit your text, and that will cut your video. So you basically just
have to know how to edit a word document and
strike through things. We're going to go through a whole tutorial and
the next lesson. But it's the quickest
way to get going, and in the free
version of descript, you get plenty of time,
especially if you're not doing hours of
content at one time. You get plenty of
transcription hours to make sure you can go
through and edit your content. Now, if you do want
to pay for Descript, there are a bunch of different
subscription options that come with various levels of AI assistance and a bunch of other things that are
really great features. But I would encourage
you if you're just starting out
and you don't really know if you're
going to full jump into the deep end with
this YouTube thing. Try out the free version
first and get your hands dirty and see what
Dscypt is all about. It is stress free. You don't have to
worry about where are all the tools, where's
anything else? You just have to
edit a document. All your text is right there
on the left hand side, and just go through and start typing it out,
and you're good to go. So in the next lesson,
I'm going to show you exactly how I edit
inside of Descript.
10. Descript Overview: Come back to the Lazy UTuber. Today, we're going to be
talking about how to use Descript to quickly
edit your videos. So Descript if you've
never heard of it before, is a new AI way to learn how
to edit. It's really great. So what I'm going to
do today is show you the absolute laziest way
to edit your videos. And not to say that in a
negative way, but, you know, in the style of the Lazy UTuber, this is what we're going to do. So I'm gonna go in and
make a new project. We're gonna go a video project. Then we're going to add a file. And then when you
open your project, it'll analyze the file. And then once it's loaded in, it'll ask you, who
are the speakers, how many speakers,
all that stuff, but we're going to jump right in with the power of editing. I'm going to get all this
set up so we can just jump right in and not
take up everybody's time. Okay, so we've got
the video in here. It's already transcribed
and ready to go. Very, very straightforward. This is how you edit
inside of descript. Have you ever edited a
word document before, can edit inside D script. These are brand new features
as of recording this video, and they make editing
absolutely seamless. So first things that I always do is I remove retakes
and hit submit. And while it's doing
that, power of editing will make it
happen super quick, even though it's
generally super quick. Didn't even need to
pause. Okay. So then you just hit apply
edits the script. And this is taking out
most of the retakes. Sometimes if you reword
things, it won't get them all, but it should get them all, then you will remove
filler words. And if on my plan, I can remove all of these. Now, one quick tip, I'd never delete them. I always ignore them because
sometimes if you look at the filler words,
I suppose, I mean, I guess, kind of like, you know, all of those
particular phrases. Sometimes they are actually
important to your sentence. So it's important
to hit, ignore, and that won't delete them, because if you delete them,
you can't get them back. All right, so all of that is done after you just hit remove all Then I usually go in here
and shorten the word gaps, and I shorten them
to about 1 second. And I shorten those,
and there we go. Then we go back, go
back to the under Lord. Another thing that
is really cool are some of these new things, especially to create clips, highlight real yaa
yada, draft a title, summarize, show notes,
YouTube description, social blows, blog post, all of those things
are super helpful to get your content up and
running as quick as possible. So, we are going to
do some of this, but then I'm going to show
you just how to edit Dscript. So all these little
dots that you see here, you can just get rid
of those really quick. They're just pauses in time. They're not anything that
you need to worry about. Sometimes it's a cough,
but they're not words. So you don't have to
worry about them. So I'm just going
to go ahead and go through it and clean
all of these up. And if you already watch
this course, spoilers. But yeah, we're just going to knock these out really quick. It's a bit of a longer video,
so it may take some time. So with the power of editing, I'm just going to make
this happen super quick. Now, I do a little bit of
clean up for the video. So with this one, I just need to zoom in just this Mg. And
you can change the position, especially if you're
doing vertical content. It's super easy. You
just switched a ortrait. Plick position, fill
Canvas. There you go. Now you see my humongous
face on the screen. What a great place
for it to stop. The landscape, again, go back, change position, fill
Canvas. And you. Next and final thing that I do before I even start
going through and checking the script here
is I'll click Studio sound. And I usually turn
this down to about 60% because sometimes it will remove words that are
really important. But if you don't have
great sounding audio, this is a great way to make it sound just a
little bit better. I would encourage
you to do everything you can to make your
audio sound as good as possible because
this only does so much when you're
actually recording. So it sound good up front, and this will make it
sound even better. And just for clarity,
I know I said I was going to do one
on Divici Resolve, but Hindsight, think about
the nature of this course. It's better if we use the
script because it is faster, and we want you to get working
faster on your dreams, and this is the way to do it. So anyway, now that you've already done
all these other steps, you've got the studio sound,
you've got everything else. Now it's time to actually
go in and edit your video. And there's two ways to do this. You can go through
and edit it just like a word document while
you're listening to it. And then you can also
hit show timeline, and you can see all
the words here, all these gaps to the words. This is also where
you can put things like titles if you really
wanted to put a title in here, and then you can adjust where that title goes, how
long it's going to be. If you want it just
a really crick one like like this, Spio. And then that'll show up
and where you want it to. You can move it all around the screen or you can
lock it into place. We're not going to
use that right now. So I'm just going to delete it. But you can also import media. You can do stock video. These are some of
these things are on the paid plan, but honestly, it's worth every bit of 15 bucks a month or $12 a month
if you pay yearly. It's worth every
penny of that. So The last thing I
want to touch on really quick is captions. And captions is pretty
important in today's world. So I would highly recommend you get used
to having captions on your video or at
least getting it to the point where you are comfortable looking through it, making sure it all makes sense, and then exporting the
captions with your video. I'm not going to have
them turned on right now. You can go in here
in the layers, and you could turn them on
and off if you want to. Don't worry about, you know, not having captions
or having captions, trying to decide beforehand, you can always turn
them on and off. Or when you go up to
export the video, you can just select
the subtitle line, and you can export that as well. Speaking of exporting,
when you're done checking through your
video and editing that, you can go to Export and
click the video tab. Honestly, when you're just
starting out on YouTube, ten ADP is fine. You're shooting in four K and you really want to
do that, you can, but I honestly
wouldn't do anything more than ten aightP when
you're just starting out. Quality set it to high. You really don't have to worry about any of these other ones. Metadata can actually be
really useful for you if you wanted to go in and
include chapter markers. And how that works, which I know I said that
was the last thing, but now I am going on
to something else. But let's say you wanted
to add a chapter marker. All you have to do is
hit M on your keyboard, and then you can rename
that marker all about AI. And you can add chapter markers on your own if you
really want to or You can go to Under
Lord and hit Add chapters, and if you want to
set a number of them, you can, but I just
leave it on auto. Hit Smit, and with the Power
of editing, it'll do it. Actually, I don't even
need to wait for it. It'll do these for you, and
then you can hit Ad descript. And it done. And now you
have chapter markers. And in these chapter markers, you can go when you export it, and then in the metadata, you can include
markers as chapters. And that'll help you out, too. So then you just click Export, find out where you want
to save your project. Like and I talked about in the file management
system lesson. You need to make sure you know where you're
saving your content, so when you're uploading
it to YouTube, you know exactly where it is. So that is de script. That's a very basic overview
of how to work this. And I mean, look how fast we just edited
this entire video. Now, of course, I
didn't go through and triple check
everything, but you know, definitely go back and
look at it yourself and make sure that it is the
video that you want to make. You can obviously take stuff out if you just highlight it, and then you can either
ignore the media, delete it, replace
it with a gap, whatever you want to do. That's a great feature as well. One other thing I
do want to mention, I keep finding things that
I want to talk about in D script because it is
such a great program. But here's what you can do. You can replace and go overdub. Instead of detail,
let's just say SRO. I I can spell it right? There we go. I'll hit overdub. Now, what this is doing, I've already read the
script for this. What you do when you first
set up your AI voice is you read this entire
script that D script offers, and it'll basically make
a clone of your voice, and we'll see in just
a second how well that works once this is
done processing. But basically it'll just for certain words or if you
mess up a statistic, it's a great way
to fix that really quick and then
watch what happens. Times it's good,
sometimes it's not, but that's there for you
if you really wanted to try that out and make your
life a little bit easier. Now, of course, you can do an entire dub over a video if
you had nothing but B roll, and you just wanted
to dub a script. You can obviously type stuff in and have it say it for you. But generally
speaking, I would only use it for one or two
words at the most. I have done full sentences
before on B roll, and it depends on
how the inflection goes because if it
doesn't do it right, it definitely sounds
like it's AI produced, and it doesn't match, but then there's times that
it actually works. Anyway, that's the basic of
editing inside of Descript. You edit it just like you
would a word document. You can strike things
out, you can delete them, you can highlight stuff, and then take
everything that you highlighted and create a
highlight reel from it. You could find the highlights. I mean, it's just
everything's in here. I would invite you to
explore it even more. But if you want to use
descript a little bit more, make sure you use the link
that we provide down below, and that is a referral
link for us that we get a little bounce
back from that if you decide to
use the D script. Hope you enjoyed this one, and we'll see you
in the next one.
11. Learning To Use AI Effectively: Welcome back to the Lazy UTube. In this lesson,
we're going to talk about using AI to
your advantage. AI is quickly becoming something that we use
on a daily basis. I personally use it on a
daily basis to get tasks done or to think of ideas and use it as
a research system, which is exactly
what I'm going to teach you to do in this lesson. If you're just getting
started out and you don't really understand all the SEO, the analytics, and how
things work on YouTube, using AI is going to
really help you get ahead. So how do you use AI? There's a lot of AIs out there But the two
I would recommend are perplexity and
OpenAI's Chat GPT. I personally recommend chat GPT because it is four
and it's free, and it's really fast and can be super helpful,
and it can be creative. I pay $20 a month to get
unlimited chats, and it's great. I love Chat GPT. It helps me every single day. So one thing I want to
talk about really quick before we dive into
this is the 80 20 rule. Is something that I run by, and it's something that I teach when I talk to people about AI is 80% of your work is
going to be done by an AI. But it's your job to do
your 20% of your work, so making sure that
it's accurate. It sounds human, and
it sounds like you, and it doesn't say words
or things like in regards, because that's
something I don't say, but AI loves to say
regards or in regards. And it has a couple
of other words that it likes to say and
put into things. So just be watching
how for that. So when you're training an AI, in the case of Chat GPT, when you have a chat
going, you can feed all the information
you want to feed to this AI, and it
will remember it. So if you feed it, everything that you want to
do with your YouTube channel, whether that's your ideas, your mission statement or
whatever it needs to be, feed all that information
to the AI, and say, Hey, remember all of this
about my YouTube channel. And then when you go in and
you start working with the AI and saying something like I
have this idea for a video X, and I don't really know
how to execute it. Can you help me?
And based off of what you've already
inputted into your AI, it will give you a response. Now let's talk a little bit about prompting because that is the most important skill that you need to teach
yourself today. If you want to get
ahead with AI. So prompting is what
you are saying to the AI to get the result
that you need to get. Now, you can say something like let's think of a very
bare bones example, talking about a
certain cereal box. If you can't remember what that cereal was when
you were a kid, and you'd go to Chachi
PT and you say, Hey, what are some
cereals from the 90s? If you ask that,
it'll give you a list of names and products,
all that stuff. But you're looking for
something specific. Let's say you remember
a little bit about it. Let's say you remember that
it had different colors. So When you're prompting AI, you would say
something like, Hey, I'm trying to remember a serial that I used to
when I was little. And I remember it
was multiclored, and they had little circles. And I feel like the
box design was red, and the character that was on the front was it
was white in color, and I feel like it was a
bunny, but I don't remember. Using your natural language just like that is super
helpful for the AI. It will immediately realize, Oh, he's talking about
trick serial, hopefully. But that's what I
was talking about, and that's the answer I wanted. So the more detailed you
can be in your prompting, even if it sounds
redundant or even if it sounds like
you're doing too much, put all that
information in there. It's only going to help you in the long run versus give me a list of cereals that I
may have eaten in the 90s, and it'll spit out
a bunch of them, and then you're like, I don't really know
which one it is. The more you can feed the AI, the better your result
is going to be. And that goes again, for
your YouTube content, instead of saying, write me a
script for a video about X. Let's say, for example, let's write a video
about how to use AI. Okay. It's go to spit out a
very generic script about AI. But let's go a step
further and say, write me a script
about AI that includes three bullet points on how to use AI effectively
for YouTube creators, how to use the 80 20 rule
where 80% is done by the AI, and 20% is done by yourself, double checking your
work and all that. And then the third
and final point is going to be whatever
we want to talk about. See how much more
detailed that is, and that's going to give the AI much more room to be a
little bit creative, but also to stick to those ground rules that you
made and not going off into L L Land and coming
up with something like you can use AI to create
a picture of a beaver. Which you can totally do, but, you know, we get my point. So the better you are
with your prompting, the better your responses
they're going to be. So a couple of things that
I recommend not using AI for is writing
your entire script. If you use AI to write your whole script, it's not
going to sound like you, and you're just going to
be repeating something and regurgitating what the AI said. And like I talked about
in a previous lesson, we want to have
those bullet points, so you're not feeling
like you have to say exactly what is
written in front of you. Another thing I wouldn't use AI for is thumbnail generation. One, because it's a
pain when you save it, it saves it as a dot web M file, I think, or something
along those lines. It's not a JPEg.
Then you have to go and convert it to a JPEG and you can't just change the
extension on the back end and then upload it to YouTube. It just doesn't work like that. You have to go to a
website or somewhere to convert it to a JPEG
and then upload it. It's just a big hassle. Another reason I
wouldn't recommend it for thumbnail design is because it really doesn't do
well with letters and words. Sometimes it nails and then sometimes it just
gets it completely wrong, and the text is wrong or
it's spelled incorrectly, and you can't change it. So it's better to just
create a thumbnail, just a photo, no words, and then take it
into something like Canva and put the words on there or photoshop
or whatever your photo designing
software is. And the third reason is most of the time it's
not going to look real. And even though it's
getting better every day, It's still a lot better
to use something that you know you can
get for free and without copyright
and just use that in your design of your thumbnail versus trying to get AI to
design something for you. Now, if you're doing
a tech channel and you're doing a video on AI, it would be cool to use AI
to generate your thumbnail. But again, it doesn't
do well with text at this point in time in
2024, so I don't know. That's really up to
you, but I wouldn't recommend generating
a thumbnail with AI. One last thing I
wouldn't use AI for is, don't let it just generate
your entire plan. You need to put
in your thoughts. You need to put in
your effort to make your channel what you want it to be and something
that you're proud of. And if you just
spit into AI, Hey, I want to make a channel
on YouTube about AI. It's just going to
give you something. But if you really want
to dial into it, hey, I'm really interested in AI, and I want to teach
people how to use it. I want to make a YouTube channel on how to use AI effectively. Then you can bounce your
research assistant, your AI, and you can bounce ideas off
of them and really create a channel that is all your own just by putting
in that extra effort. Now, I mentioned perplexity. Perplexity is a really
interesting AI to use. It's a competitor to GPT. But perplexity is a
similar AI that you can use that does the same
thing that GPT 40 does. Personally, I use GPT
40 and I pay for it. I pay $20 a month. That's something you're going to have to decide for yourself if you find yourself
running into those limits. Maybe think about putting
in that investment so you can continue
without those limits, but that's something
again, for you to decide. Right? So that's
it for this one. And the next one, I
want to talk about what do you do with your footage after you're done
with your video.
12. File Management: Back to the Lazy YouTube. In this lesson, we're going to talk about file
management and what to do with your footage after you've completed your video. All right, so you've
done everything. You've shot your video,
you've edited it. You've exported, you've
got your thumbnail. You've got everything
ready to go. You've uploaded it to
YouTube. Now what? What do you do with your files? We're going to break this down. We're going to talk
about folder structure, and we're going to
talk about how to manage your files and what to do with them
when you're done. So let's jump right
at. Folder structure. I preach this more
than anything ever, because having a good
folder structure and file management system
will save you time, and it'll save you a
lot of headaches when you're going through and
trying to look for something. Now, if you have a great
system of storage, like if you have a bunch of these little SSD drives hanging around or you have a lot of hard drives that you
dump your footage on, this is even more important for your file management system. So my folder
structure looks like a big folder that is labeled
the year that we're in. So currently, as I'm filming
this video, it's 2024, and then inside that folder is the month and
the video title. So for example,
if it is January, I'll put 01, and then
the name of the project. So let's say, for example, I'm filming these videos. So I would do 2024 is my main
folder, one folder down. It would be 05, the lazy Tuber. And then within that folder, I would put my specific folder. So I have the assets, which is where I put
music or photos or anything like that
that are going to be used in the video. I have my footage folder, which contains all of
the A roll and B roll. And then I have
an export folder, which contains all
of the exports, and we'll talk about
that in just a second. Then last but not least, I have a folder that I put
miscellaneous stuff in. So if I export a timeline
from D script or if I need anything else that
just doesn't fit in a place of its own,
it'll go there. Now, if you're using a
separate audio system, it's also wise to create
a separate audio folder. You could put your
audio recordings in there that you need
to sync up later. That's all up in the air, but those are my folder
structures right now. One other thing that
I like to teach when I talk about exports is making sure that you mark your videos with
version numbers. So, for example, if I'm
editing something and I want to show a first pass
to a friend, it's V one. And then when I make adjustments
to that, it's V two. And until I get to
the final version, I have all these
different versions. So that way, if, I'm on V two, and I sent V one
to somebody else, and they have different edits. Now I'm not working
off of V two. This is going to
be V three because I've now got different changes. Keeping it in order and making sure you know what
is your final video. And when you get done
with everything, you can delete all
those other versions and just keep your final export. That way, when you go
back through your files, that, I have V one in this Google Drive
folder, but where's the final? So if you just search final,
the title of your video, Underscore final, you can find that in your file management
system really quickly. When it comes to
keeping footage, I tend to keep my footage
for about a month, and then I delete
all the raw footage, and then I keep just
the exported files. Now, there's certain
projects that I do on the side, like
freelance, whatever, that I'll keep the
footage a bit longer, but I'll move it over to
our external hard drive so there's not taken
up space on my laptop. I usually keep everything on my laptop when I'm working on
it, and then I move it off I'm done with it. I have
a lot of hard drives. It's not the best system, but it's the one
that works for me. And you need to find
something that works for you because my system
may not work for you, but you can take it, add, take away, whatever you need to do to make
it work for you. So, really, it's up to you how you keep your footage if
you want to keep it forever, because you think it's something that you want to look back on. Invest in some hard drives because it takes up
space really quick, especially if you're filming at a higher quality like four K, then you're going to need
something that will get your footage off
of your computer or whatever you're editing on, because those will take
up space very quickly. Now, in the project
assets down below, you'll find my folder structure. You can use that to get started. Feel free to change it
and make it work for you. Thank you so much for
watching this lesson, and I hope you enjoy
making your own content, and you have so much fun
making your YouTube channel. I can't wait to see
what you create.
13. The Importance of Packaging (Thumbnail & Title): Back to the Las YouTube. In this lesson, we're
talking about packaging. This is a big one for YouTube, and you will probably hear
a lot of people talk about how important packaging
is. What's packaging? I'm not filling coffee
orders on my channel. What am I going to be packaging? Packaging is the term used for how you package your video, meaning what label
you put on it, which means title and
thumbnail, specifically, how we attack the title and
thumbnail to be appealing, to make people want to
click on that video, the packaging of your video. YouTubers who have but tons of subscribers spend
so much time on packaging because the
slightest change in a thumbnail can affect how many people
click on your video. If you've ever watched
a video on like Mr. Best and their
thumbnail process, the amount of AB testing
and like edits and, like, should I have my thumb up here or should I
photoshop it to be here? Like the amount of time
and effort that goes into the title and
thumbnail is insane. Now, This is the lazy YouTuber. Not all of us have to be Mr. Beast then click Baty with
our thumbnails, right? There are a lot of
YouTubers who have tons of views or have built a nice little community of even a small amount
of subscribers, but it's a great community by just grabbing screen
grabs from their video. That said, most people who are into the YouTube game
do things intentionally. They pick a certain screen
grab for a reason. Some don't. And their content just
stands on their own, which I would hope for any of us could be the way it goes. But I would think
even thumbnails you see and you're like, Wow, they didn't spend a
lot of time on that, they might have
spent a lot of time on that and done
things intentionally. It can look different
for all of us, whether you're
photography channel or a tech review channel or
like a lifestyle channel. If it's a tech review channel, I found like thumbnails
where my face is not in it, and I'm just holding the device
or the devices floating, usually perform
better than if I'm holding the device
showing my face, right? So there's different things. You're obviously going
to want to test and try out new things, but
I'm digressing. Two things we need
to think about when looking at
title and thumbnail. The first one is to
create intrigue. Why is someone
clicking on a video? Usually, it's for this. They read the title,
they see the thumbnail, and they say, I want to know
what that's about, right? It's intriguing.
Sometimes your title and thumbnail can
pose a question. Why? Why is the iPhone
13 the best iPhone? Right? That's a question where they're like,
Well, I don't know. Is it? Let me watch this
video and find out. So creating that intrigue, asking a question, posing some sort of like,
I think with Mr. Beast, a lot of times,
as the example, we'll continue with, it's like, Oh, no, what's going to happen? That thumbnail looks scary. He's hanging over a cliff, or he's about to run a huge mega yacht into
the side of a building. Like, does that actually happen? Let me click and find out
what happens based on what that thumbnail title is leading me to want
to learn more about. If you're an education channel, and you're saying how to
do a certain math problem, Your video title and
thumbnail should say, This is how you do
this math problem or this math problem made easy. You want someone to see, you want it to be eye catching and create that intrigue to want to follow that up by
actually watching your content. You have a split second while people are scrolling to
catch their attention. So be thinking about what
colors you could use, what sort of messaging you
could use in your title, what sort of imagery would
stop them in their tracks. I've seen a lot of people,
and even, I think, some like VDIQ or Tube buddy, they will actually show your thumbnail and
title next to, like, currently published
videos to see, like, how does it sit in your
niche, in your industry? Does it stick out
from the competition? So just be thinking about
that kind of thing. And that's number one,
create that intrigue. Number two is to promise something that
you will deliver, right? If Mr. Best showed a picture of a yacht about to crash
into a building and said, Oh, no, and you watch the entire video and a yacht never crashes into a building, then you have misled
the audience. That leaves a bad
impression or say, you click on a Mr. B thumb now and it turns out to
be one of my videos. You're gone immediately, right? Like, we're not delivering upon what we've promised in
the title and thumbnail. Another thing
you're trying to do here is there's intrigue. You want to give them
that pleasure of finding out the answer or
seeing what happens, right? Or discovering how to
do something better or realizing a life hack, right? So if you promise something, you need to deliver
it in the video. A lot of times you'll
hear creators actually create thumbnail
and title first so that they can deliver and do
everything in that video as a way of telling
the story to give the answer to what that
thumbnail is promising. A lot of us will do it
the opposite way, right? It's not recommended,
but I do it this way. I'm sure Ben does it this way as well where we'll
create the video. Then we need to think about
a creative thumbnail title that asks the question that
the video answers, right? So I talk about X 100 V
being my favorite camera. My title and thumbnail
might need to be like, why the X 100 V is
my favorite camera, or what is it about this
camera everyone loves? And then I'm talking
about why I love it, and maybe that's why
others love it, right? So again, you're promising something
in the title and thumbnail, then you're delivering
upon that in your video. Just as a side note, click bait on YouTube used to be huge because YouTube used to count
views as clicks, right? So a lot of people would put scantily clad women on
a thumbnail or like, like a yacht about to crash into a building, and
you would click. It would count as a view.
The algorithm would be like, Wow, people are
watching this a lot. And so that actually worked. But YouTube rearranged
their algorithm. This was years ago when
they did this to say, Okay, a view isn't just
someone clicking on the video. It's actually them watching
for an extended period of time and the duration matters
and all that kind of stuff. So Click bait no
longer really works unless it is very intriguing
in the title and thumbnail, and you're actually following
up on that in the content. That's why Mr. Beet
works because he has these insane ideas that he's actually going to
play out in his video. They probably cost millions
of dollars to pull off. But what you're
seeing in thumbnail is what you're going
to get in the video, which is wild, and
it's entertaining, and it's why it works for him. We're not Mr. Beast.
At least I'm not. So my videos aren't
going to be like, Oh, Fire and Brimstone, and
whatever, watch the video. Like mine's going to be why you need to pick
up this phone case. And I need to tell you
why you need to pick up the phone case and
make a good argument for that in my video. All this said, packaging
is so very important on YouTube because it's your first
introduction to a viewer, right? It's the first
thing they see. They don't see your video first, then they see your
thumbnails, right? That picture and text is going to be the first
impression you make on them. It's important to leave
a good first impression. It's important to deliver
on what you're promising. It's important to be eye
catching and intriguing. So don't just
overlook thumbnails, put some intentional
thought into them. It's very important, and I'm not going to give you
exact recipes for perfection because I
personally don't think they exist as a blanket
general rule of thumb. I think it's something
you need to figure out, something you need to realize
your audience connects with this type of thumbnail
title better than this. And if you find
certain thumbnails work better than others, M more thumbnails like that. It's just like in
your video creation. If certain videos
perform better, make more videos like that. But we'll get into that at
another time in this course. So in terms of how to
create thumbnails, right? That's always a big question,
I think people ask. Obviously, YouTube will give you three options as screen grabs within your video
you can choose from. And then there are tools
even like two Buddy VD IQ, where you can actually create really simple thumbnails off of those screen grabs
suggested by YouTube. So that's a good starting point. Honestly, canva.com is one
of my favorite sites ever. I actually pay you
for the pro plan. You don't need it, but it's a great place to
create thumbnails. They already have all these templates and
stuff you can use, literally type in, create
YouTube thumbnail, and there's plenty of templated options for you to
choose from and get started, Maybe add your colors, add your fonts that
you enjoy best. It's a great tool. I use it for every one of my
video thumbnails, and I don't ever need, in my opinion to go to photoshop
or something like that. Unless my channel just blows up, and I can hire a thumbnail creator and all
that kind of stuff, which could happen to you too, but canva.com is my favorite. It's a great place to
create thumbnails. Oh, and it's free to use. So there's that. All that said. Titles and thumbnails. Super important.
Don't overlook them. Hopefully this has
given you some insight into why they matter and
why they're important. But that does it
for this lesson. We'll see you in the next one.
14. Metadata (Description, Tags, Etc.): Back to the Lazy YouTube. In this lesson, we're
going to talk about metadata on YouTube.
What's metadata? It's title description, pinned comments,
naming your files, even metadata is in
terms of YouTube, any sort of text that can be used for the algorithm to search through and
find keywords, right? I've heard many YouTube
actual employees, people who are creating and working on YouTube
talk about how metadata isn't as important as it used to be with YouTube. Tags used to be the biggest
thing on YouTube, honestly, because I think YouTube would look at your
tags and be like, I keep using this example. Fuji film X 100 V. Let's put this in front
of people who are searching for Fuji film X 100 V. I still think that
happens to some extent. But I think more than
anything, again, teaching the algorithm, your niche is what's most
important about metadata. Right? So along with creating videos that
are in your knee and stay in your knee
and make it very obvious the types of people you're trying
to get in front of. Same thing goes
with your titles, with your descriptions,
with your comments, with even the way you name your video file and
your thumbnail file. I'm sure all of this
is taken into account when you're teaching
YouTube the platform, what your content is about, and you want it
to be consistent. You don't want your
video to be titled Acorns when you're
talking about cameras, we'll say the food you
film X 100 V again, and you don't want
your title to be like taking pictures of acorns, and you don't want
your description to be like, I love acorns. Acorns are great, and I love
taking pictures of them. When the purpose
of your channel is to talk about photography or photography equipment
like the X 100 V. If you're trying to
show off the X 100 V, and you just happen to be out taking pictures of
acorns while you do it, Don't make all your
metadata about the acorns. You're talking about the camera, the X 100 V. So be intentional in your
thoughts about metadata, but don't spend too
much time on them. Now, I have heard from other YouTube officials,
whatever you want to call them, that metadata is
a good place for the algorithm to learn about your channel when you're
just getting started. So if you post your first video, it could be about anything, and the algorithm
doesn't really know. So picking your content type, whether it's like
blogging or education, that can matter right
at the beginning. I think tags matter. But again, what
we're trying to do here is one, teach
the algorithm, the content you're making and
the content it can expect, and also teach your current small and
future large audience the content they can expect. So the more keywords you use, if your channel is only
about the Fuji film, X 100 V camera, right? Then every video
should have that name. In the description or in the
title or in the tags, right? If your channel is
all about minimalism, then in every video, you should have the
tag minimalism. In the description, you should
mention minimalism, right? Be again, we're
training the audience, we're training the algorithm. So I would say don't spend
too much time thinking about metadata or thinking you have
to have the perfect tags. I will say Tube buddy and
VID IQ are great tools. They have free versions
and paid versions, which can help you out
with some metadata. Maybe it can suggest some tags. But again, it's not as important as creating good videos,
making good packaging. It's just about being
consistent with your text, with what you say on the
camera, with your titles, with your thumbnails,
it all needs to be consistent in your niche. And if you yourself are a
big part of your brand, make yourself part of
that metadata as well. I put my first middle and
last name in every video in a tag section because my channel is called
Spencer Scott Pu. And I want that metadata to be consistent
across every video. If anything, I want to be the consistent thing
in every video, right? So just be thoughtful and intentional
about your metadata. It's not huge. It's not going to make or break your channel. I will say it's
probably more important when starting out than later on. If you look at some of
the biggest Tubers, what they use as tags, which you can actually
see their tags using something like
two buddy or VDIQ, most of them will have
three or four tags. They don't really
need that anymore. Their brand is so popular. When they post a video, people are going to
watch it, right? So As you sort of gain traction, I think that metadata becomes
a little less important. But like with everything else
that we're teaching you, not a hard and fast rule. Put no description. Put one word in the title of your videos. Don't label your video
files, anything. Don't do any tags, right? See what happens.
Play around with it. I'm sure there are
successful YouTubers out there who don't follow
any of the rules, right? Sometimes rules are
meant to be broken. So that's all I've got
to say about metadata, and we'll see you
in the next lesson.
15. Other YouTube Content Types: Back to the Las YouTube. We have covered a
lot of information. Today, in this lesson, we're actually going
to talk about other content types on YouTube. I hope you're still with us. I hope you're
learning something, and hopefully we can get you off the ground up and running with your YouTube channel very soon. Other content types on YouTube. So as you may or may not know, YouTube has long form
video content, right? They also have shorts content, which is similar to TikTok
videos or Instagram reels. They also have a
community tab feature, meaning you can post photos, you can post polls. You can link other
videos or remind people to watch other videos that you've created in the past. So my sort of personal
philosophy when I can stick to posting well on YouTube is to have a type of content on YouTube
every day of the week. I like to publish one long
form video each week. I will supplement that
with a couple shorts, which I have
literally just yanked off the long form content. I'll find the best bits. Or if I'm reviewing a product, I will just do the unboxing
of that product as a short. So that gets rid of two
more days out of the week. So now I have four more days. I have found utilizing
polls on YouTube to be great because it helps with engagement
with the audience, and it gets again, these other sort of
supplemental content forms on YouTube just keeps your brand in front of
your audience, right? So it doesn't take as long for me to
create a poll or share a photo on the platform as it does to create a long
form video, right? So what we're doing
here is we're supplementing the other
days to keep your brand in their feed so they don't forget about you or who you are. Because if you publish
every Thursday, the rest of the week,
their attention is on another channel
or someone else. Most people, if they love YouTube, are on there every day. So why not share something
with your audience every day. There are other forms of content you can
publish to YouTube. They will probably
continue to innovate and come up with new ideas
for content as well. You could always just
start a live stream. There's tons you can do. And so if I was you, I would always be exploring new content types on the platform and trying
them out, using them. Again, all of this can
be batched, right? So for an entire month, say you like to post one
photo on your channel a week. Schedule them all. You can schedule all content
types on YouTube, which is so so helpful. The one thing I will mention though you can always
play around with this. Of course, these aren't
hard and fast rules, as we keep saying, but if you talk about
baseball on your channel, don't make a poll about your favorite type
of cat or share a picture of the nail that
got put in your tire, right? Share pictures of
baseball things. Ask questions about
baseball in a pole. Again, especially starting out, we're teaching algorithm, we're teaching your
audience who you are, what kind of content
they can expect and keeping them in that
community specifically. Now, if on your channel, your cat is like a
main character, right? Maybe your cat's in every video. People will start to love, even if you talk about baseball, maybe your cat is a
character, right? Could be a theme, a motif throughout your content, that your cat is a big deal. So posting a picture of your
cat would make sense, right? Or Doing a poll about your
cat would make sense. Just make sure to be intentional with the
content you're posting. And I think if you are
looking to grow an audience, well, stick to your niche and be very specific about
sticking to that niche. Again, it's up to you, you're creating this, make
it what you want. But I have found Again,
teaching the algorithm, teaching your audience
is really important to your channel growth and to
building a strong community. I personally have
found that like polls and photos and
sharing links to other videos don't get as much engagement and
traction as a normal video. But I think that's
one of two things. YouTube is a video platform. People come there
to watch videos. And two, I don't think YouTube as a platform pushes
that continent as much, but I still think
it's important to use those features because
they are available to us. And if anything,
you are interacting with even a small piece of your audience more consistently, and I think that is the
most important thing you can do on the platform. All right. We'll see
you in the next lesson.
16. Audience Engagement: Back to the Lazy YouTuber. In this lesson, we're
talking about engagement. Now, whether you like it or not, if you're starting
a YouTube channel, you are first and
foremost trying to garner a community or an audience
around your ideas, around how you review products, around your love of baseball, whatever it might be, you
are creating a community. What's the worst thing you
can do to create a community? Not engage with them. I don't care how big your channel gets. You need to try and find ways of engaging
with your community, because that's why
they're there. They're there to have a back and forth discussion to learn things from
you specifically, as your channel
grows, especially. They're there for you. And if
you're not there for them, lose them or it never
grows to begin with. So many small channels
will be like, I don't really want to
respond to comments because they don't need my answers or
something like that. I still try at 12,000
subscribers to respond to every comment because I appreciate not only that
person watching the video, but taking the time to
share their thoughts. That's what I love
about YouTube. Honestly. That's why I like
it more than other platforms. There's this like, here's
a grand idea that I've taken the time and effort to put into to share with the world. And for you to say something
back to me is fantastic. Let me then respond to
you as a thank you. There are multiple
different ways. We've talked about
different content types on the platform where you can
engage with your community. The biggest thing is just
to engage with them. Now, a really cool, easy tip is when people respond to your
video with a comment, reply to their comment with
an open ended question. So if someone's
like, great review, right? Say, Oh, thanks. Anything I could work
on or someone says, I actually don't like
that water bottle you reviewed because I
don't like the color. Oh, man. I could see that. I could understand that. What else don't you
like about it, right? So asking them open
ended questions, where they then have
to comment back. One is teaching the algorithm that your channel and your videos garner a
lot of engagement. Well, there's so many
comments on this. Which these platforms love because it's keeping
them on the platform. It's keeping viewers
on the platform if they're engaging more, right? Not only is it
teaching the algorithm that your channel
is very engaged, and your audience
is very engaged, but it's also making your viewers feel like they have a connection
with you, right? If I only post videos and
never respond to comments, or my comments are just
things. Great. Love it. Like that doesn't really do much more than not even
responding to comments, right? So creating that one
on one connection with a comment and then a reply is a great way to just build like, I love for your
content, and I love for your channel and
build that community, and people think they
actually have this, like, community and
connection with you. I think, too, I have found, usually when I
respond to things, other commoners will
respond to other commoners, and they just make
friends in the comments. And you really do start to build a good community
where everyone's friends. We're here having a good time
talking about what we love, learning things.
Engagement is huge. It really adds to
your credibility as a content creator and allows you to grow
that community that will love you
and support you, no matter what kind of
content you publish. There's other ways
to engage as well, right like live streams
or Q&A sessions, ways that you can include your community in the
content that you're making. So being engaged is huge because ultimately It
shows the algorithm. It shows YouTube
that your community is engaged and you're keeping
people on the platform, which is all YouTube
wants to keep more people for more hours out of the day on the platform, so it will push your content to more people because
it knows you have that ability to grab and hold attention and just the
human nature of it, creating that one on one connection as much as
possible over the Internet, even in comment sections with your community
and your audience. Engagement is huge. That's
it for this lesson. We'll see in the next one.
17. You Have A Great YouTube Channel, Now What? : Welcome back to
the Lazy YouTube. You have learned a lot. You've watched a lot of content about how to get
started on YouTube, how to grow a
community on YouTube, how to have fun with the process of creating and posting
to a YouTube channel. That's what we're
setting out to do here. That's what we hope
we have accomplished with this course and these lessons. So
what do you do now? Say you've posted a
ton of videos, right? Say you've built your audience, say you've created
a nice community. Well, it's really up to
you what you do next. You can put more time and effort into your
channel just to make better and better content and serve that community better. You can hopefully at 1,000 subscribers and 4,000
watch time hours, now be monetized and make money
off of YouTube add cents. Or you can dive deeper, right? Think about ways
that you can serve your audience and steward them well and how you can
do that further. Right? You've built
a community by giving an audience
free content, right? You've given, given, given. And now maybe you can ask
for something, right? That goes beyond asking them to subscribe or like videos
or share your content, maybe you can now create a course to help them
or to dive deeper into something or write a book that you can then
sell to them at a discounted rate
and ask them to help you spread the word about
said book or course. Because if you build an audience
around a shared passion, you have something
really special. You have their attention,
you have their love. You are credible to them. And so anything that you
create and then offer to them Even if it's something
you're asking them to buy. They are way more willing to do so because they've followed
you through this journey. You've helped them so much
or you've entertained them so much with the free content
you've made for them. I think a natural step is working with maybe
some brands to find products or software or
other courses that you love, and you think your
audience might love. Then you can get a cut of the sales that you
make of that thing. Or like I said before, you can take it a step further and create your own product, create your own service, create your own course
where you personally helping that audience
that you have built and you have cultivated
and stewarded well. So from the start
of this course, I think we made it
clear that we're not trying to get
you rich quick. We're not even trying
to really push how to make money or make
a living on YouTube. We want you to have
a good time creating content because we love
creating content on YouTube. And we have found YouTube is just one of the best places we like to spend our time not only indulging and
watching content, but creating content. It's so fun. But this guys the limit with what you want to do now, right? You can find ways to monetize, or you can just keep publishing for the
joy of publishing. You can just keep loving
your audience well and being in those discussions with them. You'll never know. Like, I met Ben through he was watching my channel and reached out and said,
Hey, can we talk? Like, I would never, probably, I guess I don't
know this for sure, but I don't know if I
ever would have met Ben if I hadn't started
a YouTube channel. And now we're like
Super Bros, right? Like we love we text daily. And there's so much
you can get out of creating YouTube channel,
and we love that. All this to say,
there are ways to monetize an audience
once you've created one. And I think it's a good
natural and logic step to pay yourself back for
everything you've done. And to help provide for your family a little
more, things like that, I have found some extra income through product reviews
on my main channel, and my wife loves it. Like I love it. We have
two kids in daycare, and I'm not taking
advantage of that audience. I'm just hopefully honestly
sharing products that I either personally would use or I think would make sense
for someone else to use. If they buy it through my link, great, if they don't
buy it, also great. If they go directly
to the site and buy it not through my
Also great, right? Like, I'm trying to
love the audience well and guess what? I get to make some money too, and that's a fantastic feeling. Just adds that extra step
of love for the platform and all that it can do
for normal folks like me. Again, this course is
called the Lazy YouTube. You can put as much time and
effort into it as you want, but it's not as
hard to get up and running as some might think. And hopefully, if you've made
it this far in the course, you're ready to get started
or maybe you already have. So what you do
next is up to you.
18. Final Remarks & A Bonus Bromance Song: Did it. You made it to
the end of the course. Congrats on surviving. We hope you were at
least a little bit inspired to continue on
your YouTube journey. Yeah, thanks for
sticking around. We've had a blast sharing our lazy tips and
tricks with you. Exactly. We've
covered everything from brainstorming ideas all the way up to exporting
and publishing your content. We hope that you've got
something out of this course. Our goal was to help you create something
you're passionate about without breaking a
sweat. The key takeaway. Keep it simple.
Don't worry about making it perfect and
enjoy the process. We hope you feel more
confident and ready to take on this YouTube journey with as little effort as
humanly possible. Can't wait to see what
you lazily come up with, and don't forget to share your
videos with the community, and cheer everyone else on. Thanks for joining us on
this laid back adventure. I'll leave you with this. Keep it simple, keep
it fun, and remember. If anyone can do it, you can. Two friends, sti by stide, on a creative quest. Spencer and be putting
the skills to the test. The cameras hand and
dreams in their eyes. Then bark on the journey
under the open sky Spencer. Capture Boas with a
keen eye flop with Magic cer pick side
together with the craft. Block the rankles Obtain
a friendship for all to see two friends United
in the creative tribe. Spencer and ance together, they drive with every video. Every course they made
fins for friendship sake.
Spencer Pugh, Husband / Dad / Creator
