YouTube for Beginners: Create, Publish & Grow Your Channel - Plus Tips and Tricks for Success

1. Welcome to Class: Hi and welcome to creating YouTube videos from start to finish. My name is Carol, and the classes I produce here are all based on the belief that we should develop practical skills and best in ourselves and create things that solve other people's problems. Simply put, I believe that more skills equals more freedom, the freedom to do the work we want wherever we want. Video production is a skill that is in-demand and on the rise. And YouTube is a major platform that allows us to produce all sorts of content, whether that be for entertainment or learning. I'll guide you through ten sections specific to YouTube, video success and production. Those include equipment and set up, finding your niche, generating video ideas, creating clickable titles, designing clickable thumbnails, writing a YouTube specific script, filming your videos, my editing workflow, publishing your videos to YouTube and how to analyze it. Ingest your videos so that you know what works best and what doesn't with your audience. I've personally taken my own YouTube channel and I've reached the required 4,000 h of watch time within a year, plus 1,000 subscribers for monetization status in less time with fewer videos and it takes the average person. Furthermore, my YouTube channel is dedicated to the topic of video production. And I want to take what I've learned through research and experience to help you make better YouTube videos. If you plan to start a channel or have fewer than 1,000 subscribers, if you wake up disappointed each morning that your channel isn't growing, that was me the first few months. Or if you feel that your videos aren't as good as you want, then this class maybe for you. So stick around for the next video. I have a lot to show you, plus and valuable downloadable files that will really help See you there. 2. A Word of CAUTION: Before beginning, ladies and gentlemen, I have a word of warning. One of the biggest mistakes new YouTubers make is asking friends and family to subscribe. I know we're all excited to get the word out to share the work that we're doing on YouTube. And of course, to get extra subscribers. But I strongly advise not asking family or friends to subscribe. Why this will only confuse the YouTube algorithm. Youtube is a highly sophisticated set of algorithms that try to match your, your video to the right people. And if your friends and family are not the ideal viewers for your channel, then the algorithm is going to get confused and it'll make it more difficult for it to find those correct viewers, thus slowing your channels grow. So let you to find subscribers for you. It's totally worth it, especially in the long run. This is also the reason that I'm not promoting my personal YouTube channel. The sure you'll be able to figure out what channel it is. But if you happen to visit my channel, don't subscribe unless it's really content you want to see on a regular basis. If so, fantastic. Having said that, let's get into our next video. See you there. 3. 1.1 Equipment & Settings: Hello, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to our first lesson on equipment and setting. As a YouTuber, you'll need the basic set of equipment and a sensible method for setting up that equipment in order to create content that your viewers will find invaluable, valuable enough that viewers will number one, click on your videos to watch as much as possible. And three, keep coming back for more. And as time progresses, you may see that you might want to modify your equipment, modifier settings and upgrade at 1 or another. Well, let's keep one thing in mind here. Fancy equipment does not make a good YouTuber. It's just not as necessary as a lot of people might think. It's not the equipment, it's the effort that you put into your videos. Nonetheless, equipment that least the basics is important. So keep these three things in mind as opposed to equipment. It's again, the effort that you put into your videos, the value that your content has for the viewer, and the commitment that you have to continually publish valuable content. So in this section, we're going to start with what I like to call a mystery question. Will have one of these for every major section of our course. Then we're going to look at six things that you're going to need just to simply get started. Youtube being. Those include the spatial record, a camera, a tripod, a microphone, lighting, an editing software. Then we'll get into the answer to our ministry question in what I like to call a quick win. So as they say without further ado, let's get into our first mystery question. 4. 1.2 Mystery Question: So mystery questions are kind of fun. They're gonna get you thinking about the content and they're going to leave you with the desire hopefully to answer a particular question as we cover this content. So as we go through this lesson and cover the basics of equipment, I want you to try and guess what equipment I'm using. Some of this will be obvious because I'm going to take you behind the scenes of how I film. Not only how I'm filming this course, but also how I film my own YouTube channel videos, they're the same. But I want you to pay particular interest, particular attention to the type of camera that I'm using. You won't see it in the videos because I'm using it to film. But you'll see everything else. And at the end, I'll show you, I'll reveal what camera I'm using and I'll give you a few tips on how to use this particular camera. So for our misread question, what camera, if you can guess as close as possible, what camera am I using? 5. 1.3 The Space Where You Record: Truthfully, the space where you choose to record will depend on the type of videos that you're choosing to put on YouTube. And ideally, your space should change from time to time because naturally, the viewer just like ourselves, we want some variety in what we're watching. Viewers want you to take them on a journey, so to speak. Not all the time, but from time to time. And to do that, you want to sort of mix up the shots. You want to mix up the angles that you have. So if you're filming in one location, like I am now, It's good to change angles from time to time. If you're filming outside, if you're actually moving from location to location, well, you've already got that covered. Nonetheless, in my opinion, you're going to want to designate a space that you can call your studio. And this is my studio right here. This is my designated space. It doesn't need to be fancy. It just needs to be functional. And that's what we're covering today. How to get yourself a functional Studio so you can make good videos. So let's go to vlog mode, and I'm going to give you a tour of this studio right here, the one I'm in right now, and here's a little secret. It's nothing special. And I've never shown anybody else this before. And at the end of this section, you should be able to create something similar in function style and layout. Okay, let's go to vlog mode right now. This story is my mini studio in my room. Let's take a look. Okay. So if we take a look around here, we've got a small area. So small areas you can do a lot with. Let me introduce you to what we have. So this is where the computer would go. I sit in this chair here and if we swim around, we've got this a light behind me, we have a key light right here. Then I have a little tripod. The cheapest you could possibly get up here. We've got my fill light at the top and we have my background lights right here. And we can turn them off and on. We can change the colors. We can control the intensity with this remote control. I have my tripods right here in my little accent light right here. And really, that's about it. As you can see, you really don't need a lot to make your own personal YouTube Studio. Now that you've seen what it takes regarding a space to film, to create your own studio area. What cameras are good for filming YouTube videos. Coming up in the next lesson. 6. 1.4. A Camera: So let's talk about cameras. Big question that everyone has. What is the best camera to use for YouTube videos? Well, that's not an easy question to answer because there are a lot of answers to that question and they keep changing as technology does. First and foremost, if you already have a camera that gets decent footage, just use that. But if you don't have a camera or you're curious about alternatives, well then I have a few options for you. There are hundreds and hundreds of cameras to choose from. Since this is not a course on cameras, because we could dedicate an entire course just to this topic. I'm going to go over three categories of cameras that you can choose from. We're going to look at number one, the camera that you already have. Number 2, the camera that you might want to buy for YouTube. In number three, the camera that everybody already has. So let's look at the camera that you probably already have. If you do already have a camera. Fantastic. But there are a few settings that I highly recommend for you to videos that you make sure that your camera is able to function with these settings as well. The first setting is that your camera can film in for K resolution. Most YouTube videos are uploaded in 10 ADP, something we'll talk about in a moment. So why would you need to film in for K? And this is when it comes to editing. If you have four K resolution, you're going to have something that's higher than 1080 P. And at times you might want to zoom in and zoom out when you're editing or uploading a 1080 P. If you can zoom in, then you will have resolution that is still crisp and clear. So for k is really a good choice to film in. But don't worry, if you're not familiar with what for K is in 1080 P, in 720 P. It's okay. Let me explain that to you right now. The dimensions that you'll see on a standard computer, if you're watching on a quantum computer at the moment, our 1920 across and 1080 up and down, those are the dimensions. That's why we say 1080 P for K is filmed in higher resolution, more pixels. And those dimensions are 3840 by 2160 pixels. So with for k, you get more data and theoretically higher-quality. Just take a look at this graph here and you'll see for yourself, for k is much larger than 10 ADP, It's also possible to film in 720 P. But you might lose a degree of quality if you're watching on a larger screen. Although most people watch YouTube videos on their phone, it might not make a difference. But as a rule of thumb, Let's try and record for K. All right, let's talk about the camera that you might want to buy. Again, there are lots of cameras out there. Get on Google and you can find out all kinds of great options. And it really depends on what's in your budget. But you don't need to spend a lot of money if you want to buy a functional DC camera to get good-quality video for YouTube. So canon, as well as others make fantastic cameras. Let me choose one camera as an example that would fit for you. Two videos, don't take this as the best option because there are lots of them, as I said. But let, let's talk about one particularly. And that's the canon G7 mark three, at least for the time being. It's compact. It shoots at a nice shallow depth of field and shoots and fork in at least 30 frames per second. Frames per second. We'll talk about a little bit later and get into our camera settings. So it's really suitable for talking head videos like you're, like you're watching right now, or on the go videos such as vlogs or filming outside. And third, let's talk about the camera that you always have. Which one is kind of obvious. It's probably right next year. Yes. It's the camera or set of cameras in your smart phone, whether it's an Android and Apple, doesn't matter. They're fantastic cameras, especially the newer models these days, smartphone cameras are amazing. The quality is fantastic and they're really comparable to what you would buy in a traditional DSLR or mirrorless camera, like the one we just talked about. And in addition to them being high-quality, they're really convenient. They they fit in your pocket and they're around you all the time. How many people leave their cameras at home when they go out? Almost 0. And there are some pretty sophisticated apps that are free. Some are free, but the better ones you pay a small amount for. And what they do is they unlock the potential that's on your phone because the native camera app, the native video app on your iPhone or your Android, it's pretty limited. When you buy some of the apps that are available. Bay really unlocked manual control and give you a set of settings that you would not have otherwise. And instead of settings that you would also find on a standard or traditional camera. Furthermore, on cameras, you'll probably have two or three different cameras to choose from or lenses to choose from. I know that my phone has three lenses on the back, the wide-angle, ultra-wide angle, and telescopic. So, so take a look at your phone, take a look at your lenses, and consider your phone as an option to film some of your videos. 7. 1.5 A Tripod: So whatever camera you choose, you're going to need to make sure that that camera is set up somewhere stable. You want stable, non shaky shots. This is important whether you're filming inside, outside or vlogging. Even when you're vlogging, you'll want something to hold onto a tripod or set of tripods will be your next best friends. Now, with the exception of vlogging, although this can serve as a tripod, when vlogging, you're going to want something to where you can place your camera, have a microphone, and it creates a degree of stability and better video. And just like cameras, there is a wide variety of quality as far as tripods go. But in my opinion, as long as it gets the job done here, okay. So don't worry, there's no reason to break the bank when buying a tripod. Let me show you a few examples of what I have lying around my mini studio. So there are all kinds of tripods that you can buy. And I happen to be a fan of this brand. If you can see right here, joy can, if that's how you pronounce it, it's better than the super cheap stuff that you buy and it's sufficient. It's not professional grade, but they do the job. They're easy to adapt to whatever situation. Got. They come in nice colors. This one is a sort of cobalt blue. And another one over here that's slightly different. But the joy can, and it's sort of some metallic orange. Nonetheless, you're going to use a tripod. You're going to need a tripod, invest a little bit of money into at least one. You'll be glad that you did. So these are all under a $100 and they're all definitely worth it. 8. 1.6 A Microphone: Okay, now, you hopefully feel a little more comfortable with your camera, but what about your microphone? You also have lots of choices when it comes from microphones, but let's not complicate things. However, keep this in mind. If you haven't already heard this when it comes to video, your audio is 50 percent of your video. Think of this, and this is a little cliche if you've already heard it, but it's really important. A person is willing to watch a video that has good audio, but bad visual video, but not the opposite. A person is not going to be willing to think about yourself. Would you watch a video that has good video visuals, but you can hardly hear. It's poor quality, poor audio? No, most likely not. So your microphone is really essential to your videos, especially on YouTube. I personally have several different microphones that I've used and I have nouns I want to take you through, let's say for the one I'm using right now is a lapel pi. It's one of my first microphones I think that I've ever purchased, and it was really cheap. I have much more expensive microphones that I'll show you in a moment about why am I using this one now. I think it sounds fine. So you don't need to spend a lot of money on a microphone? Yes, I could get better audio with a different microphone that I'll show you in a moment. But if used properly, you can get really good audio. Furthermore, you could enhance that audio in the video editing process, which is another lesson we'll get to a little bit later on. So let's start with this particular microphone. It's a lavalier mic. That means it's a it's a lapel mike. You can use it pretty much anywhere you go. Although it does have a fairly long cord that can get into the way sometimes, but sometimes it's, it's essential depends on what you're doing. This is a boy B0 YA microphone in I bought years ago and it's only $17 and the price probably hasn't changed much now. Plus shipping also, a desktop mic is great. They really come in handy. They just go right on your desktop and they get fantastic audio. This one is slightly more expensive. This is the hyper quad cast USB. It can connect with a USB connection. What's nice in a moment, we'll do a little sound check, little tests. You'll see that this turns on red. It's a little showing you you don't need to get something like this, but it it really gets the job done. This when I purchased it was about a $120. Another option is an on-camera microphone. This is the road. This is a type of smaller shotgun microphone that plugs in depends on what you have. This could go into your camera, this can go into your phone. It's pretty versatile as well. It connects on top and it's got really great sound quality. Now, the price of this is about $300. It's the most expensive microphone that I've purchased, but I use it the least. So what do you say? Let's do a little sound test and see how for microphone sound. So this is what the audio sounds like directly coming from my camera's microphone. Maybe not so great. The audio is going to change the further you are away from the microphone. So it gets a little bit better as I'm closer and not so great as I'm further back. This is standard within the microphone, just about let's see what it sounds like back with my my lavalier. Let's put this on. Okay. This is my lavalier. Hopefully it sounds a little bit, a little bit better. What's great about having a lavalier is out. When you move, if you turn away from the camera, you're still getting the same audio that you would anyway, because it's are always right here. Let's see what they sound like. If I go further away, you might hear different as I get closer. So you don't wanna get too close. This is to close the best place to put this. A lot of people make the mistake and try and put it up as high as possible. It's really best right at the chest bone plate writer, right about here. So perfect area for a lavalier. Alright, let's go ahead and test another microphone. So right now we're listening to the audio from my hyper quad cast USB mike. I think it gets great audio. And especially when I get close to the microphone, it sounds maybe a little smoother. But again, as I get further away, the audio will change. As I said, this one is a little more expensive. It lights up as you can see. And what's cool is you can turn it off just by, you can click mute, just by tapping this button. And back on. Okay, let's look at the most expensive microphone I have my rode shotgun, and this is my road on-camera shotgun mike. The audio should be pretty good. But for $300, you be the judge. And as I get closer to the microphone, you might get new, higher-quality. Again, as I get further back, it might go down a little bit, but these particular rode shotgun mics are great for vlogging the real versatile. And I use it more when I film outside of the studio. So what do you think? 9. 1.7 Lighting: Lighting will make a significant difference in your videos. It's considered both an art and science, but you only need to know a few of the basics to make sure that your videos are visually appealing. Let me give you a quick example of what I mean. So this is the studio lighting I have now. I have 123 different lights that I want to show you how they make the scene look different. The main light I'm using is what we call a key light. It's right over here. It's a lighting up the majority of my face. Now, it's possible for me to turn this light off 12. I'm going to turn this one back on. This is the most important light because this is the light, of course it's the majority of what's lighting up me, the subject. I also have what we call a fill light, specifically over here. So just to make sure that this area is not entirely dark, there's a little bit of a lighting here. Now you could put a light directly in front and that's possible. But it's less cinematic. It's in also, if you wear glasses, That's gonna be an issue. The light will reflect directly off your glasses and it won't look good. So let's go ahead and turn off my fill light. Let's see if you can see the difference. One reaching over to do it. One, 23. Okay, it's off. And now it's back on. The final slide I have for you is the background why sometimes they're called a hair light and they sort of outline your shoulder and your hair. It creates some depth. I don't have one of these and I'm not using one. But I do have a background light and I can change the colors with my remote control. For example, we could go to, let's say green. How about a little green in the background or red? In red in the background? But for the moment, I'm going to go back to blue. I like this purple color. I like it a lot. There we go. Got to get close to use it. And what does the background look like when I don't have a background light on? Not as interesting. Background lights really separate the subject from the background. They don't have to be this type of light here. You could just have an accent light in the background, whatever you choose, tried to have three lights. What we're going to refer to as our three-point lighting setup. If you're vlogging, then this doesn't really matter because the lighting is going to depend on whatever environment you're in. But just make sure if you are vlogging, that you've considered the light sources and that you have somewhat a key light, whatever the source is, filling in your face. Other than that, common sense will be your guide. Three-point lighting is the standard form of professional lighting and video production and still photography. It involves using three light sources placed in three different positions by playing with the size, distance, intensity, and position of these light sources, including their degree, an angle. It's possible to control how light and shadow fall on a subject, creating different moods. So again, try to use these three specific lights. Number one, your key light, number two, your fill light, and number three, your background light. The key light, again is the main source of light on your subject or your face. And it's typically placed at a 45-degree angle slightly above the subject's face. This creates a shadow on the other side, which creates a degree of depth in your video. The fill light just fills in enough lighting to where you still have a difference between both sides. You still managed to you to keep that degree of depth. And just like the key light, it's also placed at a 45-degree angle to the other side and the backlight behind us is placed at the bottom. It shines up. We don't want any light directly behind us because there'll be an exposure issue. But putting it down to where the light spills on the wall behind me or whatever is behind the subject, creates a nice separation effect in your video. 10. 1.8 Editing Software: Next we have editing. Editing is something you either love or hate. If you've never edited, then maybe this section will be a little uncomfortable for you or inspiring. I particularly like editing. I have a good time doing it. I enjoy it, but it takes up a lot of time. It's fun, but time-consuming. If you end up disliking editing, you can always outsource it behind fiber or Upwork. Editing is a skill in and of itself. And it's a skill that I really suggest that you learn the basics of, at least, although it doesn't take that long to get the basics down, depending on whatever software you use, it is worth the time and effort to do it. In. Remember later in this course, I have a section dedicated to editing. I'm going to walk you through my editing process from the beginning to the end on Adobe Premiere Pro, whether or not you use that software doesn't really matter because the principles, the steps, the process are virtually the same. So when it comes to editing software packages, there are tons of them out there, but there are a few that really stand out. Some are free, some are cheap, and some are mildly expensive in you kind of get what you pay for. I personally started editing on my MacBook Air. There's a software program called ScreenFlow. It's only for Apple devices. Screenflow goes for around a $150 onetime purchase. I have also edited directly on my iPhone. There is a fantastic application called luma fusion. You can purchase it for about $20. You can edit on your iPhone or on your iPad. But the two most commonly used software packages that are more professional grade in a little more expensive are Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro. I now prefer exclusively editing videos like these on Adobe Premiere Pro. Now, as you can see, the prices are a little bit different. Final Cut Pro is a onetime payment here in Adobe Premiere Pro is payment by year. And here's a little tip before you go out and purchase your software editing package, some people assume that it's best to start out with a lower tier software package, a cheaper software package, and as they improve, then they worked themselves up to something more professional grade. I disagree what I've heard from the pros and what I would suggest doing as well is choose one and just stick with it. Learn it inside and out. There's no reason why you can't learn the basics now on something like Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro, there are lots of tutorials that you can find probably here on this platform as well as YouTube videos. So keep that in mind. Find one, stick with it. So which one will you choose? 11. 1.9 My Camera: So have you guessed the answer to our mystery question yet? Do you know what kind of camera I'm using at the moment? If you haven't already noticed on him and Apple fan, I have two max into iPhones. And my camera of choice is the wide angle lens on my iPhone 11 Pro. Along with that, instead of the native application on my iPhone, I prefer to go with a filming app called filmic pro. It's great. It makes a huge difference when filming. It's available on iOS and Android. So check it out on your app store. It's not that expensive. It's worth the purchase. Whether or not you plan to film with a DSLR or mirrorless camera, traditional camera, or your iPhone or your Android. There are going to be times that you're going to want to fill something with your smartphone. So why not have the best app possible to record the best video possible? But before you make a purchase, keep going through these lessons because we're going to come up to one lesson. We take a closer look at filmic pro, the app that I use, plus a few other application options that who knows you might prefer another app as opposed to the one that I'm using. But before that, in our next lesson, I've got something I refer to as a quick win in. It has to do with your phone. Click next video. 12. 1.10 A Quick Win: As I said before, we wrap up with this section of our course, I want to give you what I call a quick win. And this is a simple exercise that you can do to learn something of value right now quickly. As I mentioned just a moment ago, no matter what camera you use, there will come a time when you want to use your smartphone to take video. Whenever this happens, if you're going to use your native app, there's something simple to do and it's to a lock focus and lock exposure. A lot of people are unaware on how easy this is to do. So let me show you real quickly. So if we go into your camera, your native app, and this is basically what you'll see in my might be a little bit different from yours. This is an iPhone 11 Pro, and I do have my grid lines on. That's really important. You can see the lines vertical and horizontal. Now, something a lot of people don't know is that if you just tap on the screen, I'm going to tap on the cactus. Boom, you get this square that illuminates, and this is important. So wherever you move, wherever you tap on the screen, this is going to have focus. Let's take my other tripod and let's see the difference. I'm going to raise it up right about here. So it's in shot and sort of out of focus. Now, let's, let's move this a little bit and move camera angle slightly. All right, So if your focus and exposure is going to be automatic unless you do something about it. Okay, so if I click on the cactus, we get the cactus in focus. If I click on the tripod, the tripod is in focus. When you move your camera, it will automatically shift if the software thinks it's relevant. So in order to lock it, what you can do is tap and hold. And you can notice that the top you have this a0 forward slash AF lock. That's automatic exposure. Automatic focus is locked. If you want to change your exposure, you can go slide your finger up and notice how things get brighter. You can keep sliding up and you can slide down as well to adjust the exposure. This can really come in handy if you're only using your native. And to get out of it, just tap anywhere else on the screen. And there you are at the beginning. Okay, test this out for yourself. If you haven't used it, it really comes in handy. 13. 1.11 Wrap Up: Great job. You made it through the first section in this course on equipment and settings, we have several more to go with, more value that I hope to give to you. Now, what we've covered in this particular section on equipment and set up, we looked at the space that you'll record. Make sure that you designate a place that will serve as your go to Studio. It makes life so much easier. We took a look at what camera you may want to use. Make sure that you pick one that you're comfortable with and one that records clear video. Remember, for k is what we're looking for. Make sure you have a tripod, make sure you have something, whatever you're doing that you have something that will capture Stable video. Consider your microphone. Remember, good audio is just as important as good video. Try and get your lighting the way you want it. Remember, we want to set up that simple. We took a look at lighting and the three-point lighting setup. Remember that lighting can have a huge impact on the quality of video and the mood that you're trying to set and your videos. And when it comes to editing software, take time to learn least the basics of editing. It's fun, in my opinion and totally worth it. In the next section, we're going to talk about your YouTube, Nietzche, how do you say that? I'm from taxes in in Texas. They say niche. I've moved and lived many places globally in the rest of the outside world says Nietzche. So for the moment, I'm going to go with niche. Finding. In identifying a niche is a common struggle YouTubers have. So we're going to try and make that easier for you. See you in the next section. 14. 2.1 Find Your Niche: Hello and welcome to the second section of our course. In this section, we're going to cover the steps you need to take in order to find your niche. If you already know the general area or topic that you want to cover for your YouTube videos, then, great. Perhaps you've already found your niche. However, some of you may not have even heard the word niche or niche before depending on how you say it. So let's take a moment and stop and talk about this word, but split this word into two separate categories, general niche and YouTube. Nietzche, generally, a niche would be a specialised segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service. When a company sells a product or a service, they don't want to try to sell to everyone. Instead, they want to narrow it down and be specific to give the audience or give the customer something specific that they need, the one. And you want to look at YouTube in a similar way. When we look at the word YouTube niche, let's define it as a focused genre or subject in which videos are made. The worst thing that a YouTuber can do is tried to make videos for everyone. Instead, you want to take the same approach as accompany would when offering a product or service, you want to narrow it down and target an individual or group of individuals as best as possible. Let's take traveling for example. Perhaps you wanted to create a channel on traveling and you make YouTube videos about your travels to certain places. Well, what you don't want to do is just be a channel generally about travel. Instead, which might be counter-intuitive. You want to niche down. An example of Neijing down in the travel industry would be perhaps a YouTube channel dedicated to traveling the Greek islands. And that's pretty specific. And the great thing about YouTube is that no matter what niche you choose, there's going to be an audience somewhere for it. In when you focus, when you niche down, you'll find that your channel is aligned to be much more successful than otherwise. Think of your channel has a particular resource for content. Viewers are going to come to you for that specific type of content. But if you already feel comfortable, if you already think you know your need, great, Perhaps this section isn't for you. Go ahead and skip it. However, if you're not 100% competent with the niche that you want to target, the channel that you want to develop, and the videos that you want to specifically create. Then perhaps stick around in this section as usual, we'll start with our number one mystery question. Then two, we'll get into identifying our niche and meshing down. Number 3, we'll talk about the importance of seeing what sticks. This is interesting because a lot of people that when they started a YouTube channel, that idea is going to be the one that continues. However, it's quite often not the case. And it's good to keep an open mind because your audience is going to tell you what they like and dislike. And you want to be open to altering your niche, altering your direction toward what the audience is looking for. And number 4 will answer our mystery question. Speaking of, let's go ahead and go on to the next video, our mystery question for this section. 15. 2.2 Mystery Question: Okay, it's time for our mystery question. You can find the strangest channels. And the strange is videos on YouTube. Some of them completely bomb, but some of them exceed beyond expectations and explode with success. I'm going to show you three specific channels that may or may not have become successful. And as we go throughout this section on discovering your niche, I want you to think about these three channels, level of success. And we're going to measure their level of success on number of subscribers. These three channels are number 1, a channel that does reviews of fast food and energy drinks. Number to a channel that crushes various objects in a hydraulic press. In number 3, a channel that answers questions about death. All real channels with their own unique niches, how successful that they do. Take a moment and think about it. I want you to try and categorize these channels by border of success. Which one is the least successful, the middle and the most successful? And keep that thought as we go throughout this section. At the end, when we get to cantering mystery question, I'll give you those answers. Okay, let's go ahead on to our next video about identifying and reaching down. 16. 2.3 Identify & Niche Down: So when it comes to identifying and kneeling down, here are three questions to ask to better identify which Nietzche you should be creating your YouTube channel around. The first question is, what topics interest to me? That's kind of obvious. However, it's an important question to answer. The YouTube game is not a sprint. It's a marathon. It takes time and dedication to get it done correctly. The last thing that you want to do is put a ton of time and effort into making videos and building a channel over a topic that doesn't really interest you simply because it's a subject that you think has been successful on other YouTube channels. And it'll bring you success as well in the beginning, no matter what you do, unless you're incredibly lucky, you're going to come to times where YouTube gets frustrated. And at these moments you want to be able to push through those times of difficulty. And if you are, let's say the cliche is if you're passionate about something, okay? If you're interested on the subject matter that you're covering, great. That interest is going to serve as the fuel, the push that gets you past that frustration. And it's that frustration where a lot of YouTube channels just fail. A lot of people just at that moment give up. But you don't want to be that person. You want to persevered, that perseverance will lead toward success. So picking a topic that interests you, that genuinely interest you will be a benefit in the long run. The second question you want to ask is, what do people come to you for with advice if it times friends, family come to you regularly for advice on a certain matter. Well, there may be a YouTube audience out there for you. Perhaps friends will ask you, Well, what do you think about this? Our family members might ask you, well, what would be your advice about this? And then there's a good idea that this is a topic that may be suited not just for you as a person before you as a YouTuber. And if so, what would that topic be? And are you interested in it enough to build a YouTube channel around? And the third question you want to ask, what am I really good at? You don't have to be an expert, but you want to be fairly skilled on that subject. Do you have a certain set of skills or knowledge? Have you built a wealth of knowledge over a particular area that you feel comfortable enough to teach others about. Remember, you only need to know a little bit more than someone else in order to teach them about that subject. So regarding those three major questions, you don't have to answer all three of them in order to find your niche. But you do need to answer at least one. But let's do a little exercise at the moment. I want you to take a moment to brainstorm answering these three questions as best possible. So go ahead, push, pause on the video, get out a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, and for about one to two minutes, just brainstorm, write down ideas. Don't think about it too much. Just put some ideas on paper and that will get the thought process going. Okay, Go ahead and push pause. I'll see you in one to two minutes. Okay, we're back. Now that you have a few ideas about possible niches or niches, ask yourself this key question, we have another question or are you already on that list that you wrote down? Which topics? Well, either entertain people or educate people, because that's what we're going to see on YouTube. This is what works on YouTube. You have content that either entertains, educates, or as a combination of those two. If you have any topics that don't meet that criteria, entertain or educate, then it's probably not best suited for a YouTube channel. Take those ideas and scratch them out and see what you're left with. Though, let's talk about entertainment for a moment. If you could entertain someone on a regular basis, if you're pretty good at making someone laugh or cry or you just keep their attention, then you have a YouTube idea that would probably work. Let's talk about education just for a second. If you can provide instruction or information on a subject on a regular basis, for example, Tips and Tricks, tutorials, if you can provide that type of information, again, you probably have a good idea for a YouTube channel. Can you provide education information that will answer questions, explain how to do something, helps someone build a skill where viewers can return to your channel for more. Keep that in mind. Entertainment, education, the winning combination if you can do both, especially, let me give you a few examples of Nietzsche down earlier we talked about the idea of a Travel Channel. Nietzsche's down to specificly travel about the Greek islands and the entire channel about the Greek islands. Let's say you're interested in tech videos. You could leach down to the two specificly productivity applications. Let's say you're interested in gaming. You could niche down to exploring Minecraft, caves, and cliffs. It's a real thing, let's say product reviews you can leach down to specifically what type of products cosmetic review, instead of just tutorials generally you could niche down to editing video on Premiere Pro, like we'll see in a few lessons. Let's say you're interested in vlogging instead of logging, how about exploring the sites in foods of soul great city in South Korea? If you want to make a food channel, instead of generally food, generally Italian are generally French. It's still too vague, it's still too broad. How about something like baking bread at home? More niche? And finally, let's say you want to do something on fashion. Instead of generally fashion. Something more niche would be close fashion for plus size men. That's pretty neat and you can bet there's an audience out there for that. But don't worry too much at the moment about your niche. It doesn't have to be perfect from the beginning. You need to get out there, make a few videos and see which videos outperform others. And those videos will lead you in the direction for the best niche that suited for you and your channel. And that's what we call see what sticks. That's our next lesson in the next video. See you there. 17. 2.4 See What Sticks: So you want to see what sticks. Once you've posted a few videos now I would I would say 10 to 15 videos. Just go out there, post them, get them up on there. This is the first barrier you need to break. Now once you have those ten to 15 videos online, live, public for a YouTube audience, you're going to start seeing that some videos or doing better than others, you'll have more views than others, or you have more watch time than others and you want to look at your analytics. And that's something we'll get into a little bit later when we get into the analytics section of our course, when you can identify some videos that are outperforming others, this is really important. This is where you get to see what sticks. And once this happens to you when you've identified that there are few videos that are outperform the others, you basically have two choices. One is better than the other. One is what typically most people choose to do and believe it or not, most people don't make the best choice. Let's talk about these two options. First choice could be you can continue making the same content around the same area that you've been doing, make no changes and just forge straight ahead as planned. Or number two, you can take another look at those outline videos that are doing successful and redirect your channel to focus on those specific areas, leaving the other content behind which one is best. Option. Number two, because what you've done is you've identified that there is an audience for one type of content and potentially not much of an audience for the other type of content. So at this point, it would be my advice to go all in on those videos, those videos that are outperforming the others GO ALL IN, change direction. But again, this is just my advice. However, if you do a little research, you will hear time and time again that YouTube experts out there give the same advice. Where do you think I got it from? And it's that advice that helped me with one of my YouTube channels. I took that advice, I shifted gears, change direction, and it made a big difference in the growth of my channel. I like to share with you something I once heard about finding your niche. It's like an upside down funnel. You start at the bottom and you start bouncing ideas off the sides and something will hit and stick. And then instead of going straight up to find your niche, you gotta go bounce to the other side and see what sticks again. So it's sort of a back and forth until you gradually make it up to the top to where you've identified your niche. That's just the process you want to expect to have to go through. You're not going to initially, we are really unlikely to initially hit that home run, hit the ball out of the park. It takes some trial and error. So don't be discouraged. If you just push through those frustrating moments and you continue to publish. You continue to work at building your channel and finding your niche. You, you'll make it there. So expect that at 1 you find yourself in a similar position following the data, as opposed to following your emotions, is the key to finding your niche and thus success on YouTube. And speaking of success on YouTube in our next section, let's take a look at those three channels, those three strange channels and find out which ones were successful and potentially which ones weren't. Remember, we wanted to rank those in order of subscriber count. All right, see you in the next video. 18. 2.5 True Niche Stories: Okay, let's see how close you got to guessing how well those three channels performed on YouTube regarding subscriber count, did they totally bomb where the wildly successful? The answer might surprise you. Again, we're going to judge success based on the number of subscribers and to refresh your memory. Those three channels were number 1, a channel that does reviews on fast food and energy drink. Number to a channel that crushes various objects in a hydraulic press. And number three, a channel that answers commonly asked questions about death, okay, spoiler, alert. All three of these channels have been wildly successful. Surprised, well, if you were surprised, you shouldn't be because each of them have clearly defined and cut out a niche on YouTube coming in with the lowest number of subscribers. At the bottom is ask mortician. This channel at the moment of filming this video has about 1.65 million subscribers. That's huge. People are naturally curious about death. And the host of this channel is a mortician, someone who works in a funeral home and knows everything there is to know about death and who better to answer those questions about death. Number 2, coming in second is report of Louis. And they had at the moment of filming, 2.5 million subscribers. Again, huge. This is an example where there is genius in simplicity. This channel takes any fast food item that you can think of and gives the host opinion on how good or how bad those menu items taste? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there's evidence that there is a YouTube audience out there for everyone and coming in for the win at the top with the largest number of subscribers is hydraulic press channel with over 3 million subscribers. That is amazing. Yes, the channel does what it says. They put all number of different objects into a hydraulic press and crush those objects while the audience gets to see what happens seems break, things, pop, things burst, things get destroyed. And who wouldn't want to see something like that? This channel is great at grabbing people's curiosity. What about you? Would you like to see something completely explode in a hydraulic press? I probably would. But when thinking about these three strange channels that really blew up on YouTube. But keep in mind that there is a wealth of potential out there, pretty YouTube channels, as long as they have identified and niche down. 19. 2.6 Wrap Up: In this section on identifying our niche, we first defined what a niche is. Remember that it's not only the genre of your videos, but also the focused segment of that genre. We looked at how you can start to identify your niche and then how to niche down from there. Remember that one of the most important things about choosing a topic or a niche is that that topic interests you and we'll continue to do so. We talked about the importance of seeing what sticks. Remember that things don't usually happen. Immediately. Identify the videos that are doing well above the others, and then go all in on that content and move in that direction. It'll serve your channel well. And then we saw three channels that offer something truly unique on YouTube. Hopefully, these channels will serve as some degree of inspiration as you continue your journey on YouTube. And now that you know what to expect regarding your niche. If you haven't already, you're going to want to start posting videos. Don't worry about them being perfect, doesn't matter. Don't worry about having the perfect niche either. You just want to get some content up there so you can start identifying what seems to work and what doesn't. And speaking of successful videos, in the next section, we're going to set you up with a strategy to identify what video ideas would work better on YouTube. See you there. 20. 3.1 Generating Video Ideas: Hello and welcome to our section, our third section on creating the perfect video. Ideas. Reading videos can take a lot of time and effort. So you want to get it right the first time, or you want them to get it that have the most potential to get it right the first time. So there'll be more discoverable on YouTube. And people will spend more time actually watching those videos. And a common mistake a lot of people make is they make videos for themselves. They choose the videos or the video titles and topics that they find most interesting. But you need to keep in mind that you have an audience. And it's not really about what you find interests interesting. It's about what the audience is going to find interesting, and that's one of the secrets to a YouTube channels success. So I strongly suggest using a few tactics and using a few tools to identify what topics best resonate with your audience. So in this section, we're going to learn how to better pick the best videos possible. And as usual, start with our mystery question. And then after that, we'll introduce you to two of the top tools that will help you in your YouTube journey. And not just with topics, but with other things as well, but we'll focus on topics for this section. Then we'll learn a few tips and tricks on how to use YouTube's own search bar through it. It really comes in handy. We'll learn how to leverage ideas from your competition, other YouTube channels, and we'll cover the top three video types that really help. A, a YouTube channel, a young YouTube channel, a smaller YouTube channel, usually under a 1000 subscribers, really grow as quickly as possible. And then of course we'll answer our mystery question. So coming up next, our mystery questions. See you there. 21. 3.2 Mystery Question: So this mystery question is really intended to help you focus on video types when it comes to choosing topics that go hand in hand each step and piece of advice that we're going to cover in this section is really important. But when it comes to making your first video on your channel, or if you already have a channel, your next a video on your channel, there's one particular video that seems to do the best. Yes, one of these is especially effective in helping a channel grow from pretend potentially 0 subscribers or somewhere under 1000 subscribers up to the point to where you're eligible for monetization. So as we cover the material in this section, I want you to try and think which video types that I've been discussing that we're about to discuss. Which of these video types do you think is going to be the answer? Our mystery question? Which video is potentially the best one to get you more views and more subscribers? So to recap with our mystery question. The question is, what type of video should you make first or next, though, in the next video, let's look at two fantastic tools that not only will help your channel grow, but we're going to focus on how these will help you identify the best video ideas. 22. 3.3 Get Smart with VidIQ & TubeBuddy: When it comes to third party software, there are two particular software suites, applications that really are heavy hitters, really effective, top-notch when it comes to helping with YouTube channel grow. And you may have heard of these already if you've been in the YouTube game at all or you made some plans in doing so. Those two are vid IQ and Tube Buddy. They both have free options, but they also have paid versions. I'm going to walk you through number one with BET IQ, what you get with the free version. And then I want to show you too buddy, that you get some of this with a free version. But there's a little bit more that I think is definitely worth the price. And you'll like this price where we get into keyword research and special note, if you decide to download this software, both of these are one of these grid you really should, because remember they're free. Keeping. Note that when you download this software to your computer, you'll be prompted at 1 to add their browser extension. And this is where the power really comes into play. And this is what we're going to look at and I'll demonstrate for you in this particular video. So make sure that you install the browser extensions for BET IQ in too buddy, whichever ones or whichever one you decide ideas. Once you've installed the software and the browser extensions, all you really need to do is type in keywords that are relative to your niche or relative to the video types that you want to create. Throw in a few keywords, and then the magic starts to happen when you type in a keyword in YouTube on the right side of your screen, it'll propagate information that's relative to keyword. We're going to look at that in just a moment when I demonstrate, and this is really helpful information and you get all of this in the free versions, both of them. What's great about this is it, it'll give you an idea of which keywords, which ones are stronger and weaker generally on YouTube. So It's activity time. What I would like you to do is get out a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. Go ahead and push pause, get this out because this is going to be really helpful and this is something you're going to continue to build. Well after you finish to this particular course. So go ahead and get a piece of paper and pen or pencil, and come on back. Great. Now with that piece of paper. But I'd like you to do is fold it in half. And at the top, I'd like you to write on the top left keywords and on the top right topic ideas. You want to build a list of keywords and topic ideas as we go throughout this lesson. And keep in mind, you want to keep this piece of paper and you're going to add to it as we go throughout this lesson and throughout the rest of this course. So let's jump on the computer. Let's take a closer look on how to use that IQ. And kid buddy specifically for video topic ideas. Let's go to our search bar and YouTube and type in Greek islands as we've been doing earlier looking at Greek islands as our example in, when we type in, we get search results. If we look over here to the right, vid IQ has propagated some information for us. They've given us right here as score of 50 out of 100. This isn't okay score, but let's look closer at these two numbers. Here. Are these two areas we have volume and competition. Now we do need a fair amount of volume because those are, that's the number that represents the number of people who were searching this particular term, Greek islands. But even more important is competition. We do not want to have a search term to where there's a lot of competition because that just means that video will be buried over all of the others who do, who outperform. So a competition score that's in the red, dark orange or light orange really is not something we want. Ideally, we want to move this little triangle into the light green or even better into the dark green. So we want to narrow down our search term a little bit more. So let's look up here. When it comes to Greek islands. There are Greek islands like Santorini, Mika, nose, and roads. Let's be a little more specific. So instead of Greek islands, Let's go traveled to roads. And what do we get? Okay, this looks a little bit better, so we still have a decent amount of search volume, but our competition score has increased now. It's in the light green. Great. Now can we go even further with this? Let's go ahead and type in traveled to roads. And let's do 2021. And what do we get? Oh, look at this amazing. We get a total of 68 out of a 100. Still a good amount, the same amount of volume. And when it comes to competition, it's in the dark green, very low competition. So what does that mean? That tells us if we make a video that uses these four words exactly in this order, traveled to roads 2021. We're going to do fairly well with competition, will show up and we'll probably get a decent amount of views even more. So if you have a good thumbnail, a good title, and good content. So this is a great way to use vid IQ. But let's, let's look a little bit further. Let's go back to what we originally did in type in Greek islands. And if we scroll down a little further, you'll get to Buddy. To Buddy gives us the same sort of information, although it's slightly different, they'll have a different score and different numbers because they are different sets of software that use different information to come up with our answers. But still we have search volume is high, but the competition is poor. It was too much competition is what we're saying. Now if we go in to what we just did, let's say travel to roads 2021. We got that 668 score here. Good information here. Let's see what too buddy gives us. And they give us basically the same thing. We have a better score for our competition. But let's look a little bit closer at too buddy itself. Up here in our browser, in our extension, we've got two buddy. And if we scroll down specifically to keyword explorer, we have an extended set of tools for ourselves. In this keyword explorer, let's do what we just did. Let's type in Greek islands. Now. In Greek islands, we've got a score. We have high searchability, high, high volume item in, but bad in competition. When we have a word or set of words or keywords like this, what too buddy does is it gives us options here they're related searches that might be a little bit better. For example, Greek island crews, if we can click on that, we get a little bit better. There's search volume and maybe a little bit more competition. Not only does that offer us this extra information, but we have video topics up here. If you click on that, there's some ideas for video topics. So let's go to travel to roads 2021. Again, fair search volume, pretty good with competition. But could we get it closer to the green? That's ideally what we wanna do. But where this really comes in handy is when we type in general keywords like Greek islands. Here, you'll get more ideas for related search terms. And you'll get more ideas for video topics. So when it comes to vid IQ and too buddy test out your keywords and see which ones get better scores. Again, we want higher search volume and a better score here with competition, though, go ahead and plug in those keywords and see which ones work best for you. And one thing that's really great about too, buddy, yes, it's free. But one of their pay plans, which is their Pro plan, one that I'm using at the moment, is they give a great, huge discount to any channel that's under a 1000 subscribers. Instead of there. I think it's around $7 or so over $7. If you toggle this button here, you'll get 50 percent off per month and it comes out to be only $3.60. That's almost free. I really suggest you do it. It's, it's worth it. All right, I hope you liked these two pieces of software. They're fantastic, but there are more tips and tricks to help you generate great topic ideas. The next one we're going to look at is how to use the YouTube search bar coming up next. See you there. 23. 3.4 YouTube Search Bar Hack: Remember that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world who were being first. What's great about that is using YouTube itself. We can see what people are searching for in real time, what's popular at that moment using their toolbar. So we can uncover a wealth of information related specifically to the keywords that you are using. So we're going to do a little activity on YouTube itself. And as we do this, you might want to pause the video or do it after you watch the lesson and use some of your own keywords and follow the same process. And this is going to help you add to that list that piece of paper that we just use number 1, auto-fill, which you've seen before. I'm sure you have. Number two was what what has been called the alphabet game. Let's hop on the computer and let me show you what I mean. So let's go back to YouTube search. In, in our search bar. Let's type in Greek island, just island singular. And let's see what propagates now, press the Spacebar and these options are the ones that come up in order of most searched. So at the moment, Greek island holidays, IELTS listening is number one. But that wouldn't really apply to us if we're doing Greek island getaways, traveling and so on. We do have Cafe ambience resorts, island, happy music cruises. These are all good ideas for potential videos. So let's go ahead and choose one, Let's say Greek island crews. And if we scroll down Greek island, Cruz does pretty well. We've got a decent amount of search volume in our competition is pretty low, so fantastic. So one thing you can do is just see what autocomplete here. After you take one of your keywords and then type the space bar and go from there. Now you can always add more to it. So if we do grep, Greek island Cruz, we have one more word here. Let's press the Space bar and see what we get. Now we have even more. 2022, 2023. If we go Greek island cruise 2022, this is okay, but not quite as good as Greek, Greek island Cruz alone. Our next option is what has been termed the alphabet game. And it's pretty much just the way it sounds. Let's take a search term like Greek island, press the space bar and then start with the letter a. We have all these options in order of the most searched at the top. Greek island Animal Crossing, ACE and H don't know that is ambiance or Omby odds architecture. Adventurers, all of these look pretty good. So if we were to look at adventures, not bad, but we still won or a competition to be in the green. So let's go ahead and go to Greek islands. B, we have beaches, beach walk and so on. Let's try boat trip. And we've got still, we're not quite in the green. Let's go a little further and we can continue doing this throughout the alphabet. Let's go to h. And when we go down to, this looks interesting. Greek island honeymoon. What do we have? Okay, this looks a little bit better. Greek island honeymoon. We're in the lower part of the light green. Let's try and type in one more word just to make it a little more nice. I just saw the word destination, but try destinations. In Greek island, honeymoon destinations, this looks fairly good. The competition is low, the volume is decent. So for someone in this niche, making a video on Greek island, honey, designate a honeymoon destinations. Just might be a winner. So go ahead and try this technique with some of your key words. Put in a keyword space, and then start with the letter a in, see what you get. But we haven't looked at the competition yet and that's really important. Looking at the competition, what they're doing, what they've done in the path, and what's trending at the moment can really give you some insight on not only the type of videos that you want to create, but if you look at the videos themselves, that'll give you some ideas on how to craft those videos. And that's coming up next. See you there. 24. 3.5 Mine the Competition: Next we want to take a look at what channels have been successful in your niche, can see what videos, what titles, what topic ideas have been working specifically for them. Now, don't get me wrong. You don't want to copy the competition. You want to be different, but you do want to look at them for inspiration and to see what is working. And as we'll see in a moment, what they've maybe forgotten to do or haven't done, but the audience is looking for more information. So there are three ways of doing this that we're going to look at. Number 1, looking at what are the videos, which videos are most popular on these channels? Number two, which videos are trending? And in order to see what's trending, you have to download it vid IQ in number 3, mining the comments, there's a lot of valuable information that users have left specifically in the comment section, again, let's hop on the computer and I'll show you what I mean. So let's say that we've identified a competitor. Let's say this channel right here, torr OPIA, let's click on their channel. Let's go over to videos and we have all of these video. There's so many, there's a, they have a similar pattern to their thumbnails, which is great. And the first thing that we can do is sort by popularity. So we just scroll over here to the right, click sort by most popular and the most popular videos so far. By viewCount, 8.8 million views over the last two years is a listicle. Twenty-five best places to visit in Europe. So we know that Europe generally is a pretty popular topic to cover when it comes to travel. Now, notice here as well that the most popular ones aren't up here. Or 25, 25, 25. So this number for listicles 25 seems to be pretty popular, at least on this channel. As we go to a little lesser popular, they're more in the 10. So that should tell you something. Another great idea when it comes to most popular here is to click on the video, watch that video, and see what have they done within that video? How did they structure it? What kind of angles do they use? What do you think? What's the pacing of the video? All of these things can help you decide on how to put your video together. So searching by popularity is one idea. A second one is to search by trending. Now, notice next to trending here we have the vidIQ icon. This is only available if you've downloaded the vid IQ software package, and remember it's free. So if we click on trending, what's different here is that it's not really by popularity, but it's by who is watching this currently, the greatest number of views per hour. So what's really popular and trending at the moment are man made wonders. 30 greatest man-made wonders of the world. What's helpful about this option is this is going to show you some ideas that are popular. Now, this should give you a few ideas of what people are currently searching for, what people are more interested in at the moment. And you can take some of these ideas and apply them to your channel or your video. Idea generation. Remember, you don't want to copy, but you want to be inspired. Now, that's the second thing you can do regarding trending. The third thing you can do is go back to videos and maybe let's try videos that are popular and let's mine the comments. Now, India is a pretty popular one. Let's go into India. Will stop here. Pause here. Now. As we scroll down, the comments will propagate and we want to read what's in the comments taken. Know what have they done? Well, taken, know what have they done that's missing. And as we scroll down, read a couple comments and here's one that sort of sticks out to me right here. We have a question. What about monopoly, shim law? Cashmere, Mumbai, this person is asking, I'd like to know more about these specific places. Now, if you can find questions like this, for example, oh, well, what do you think about this or why didn't you cover this? That's a great idea for a video. It shows it, There's audience interests in that particular subject and that this video did not cover it. So look at the competition, see what they've done. Well, do the same thing perhaps, and see what they haven't done. What does the viewer looking for were more would they want from that video? And then you can deliver on that, making your video a little bit better than this one. Okay, I hope you're building that list of ideas. And in the next video, what we're going to do is look at specifically the three top type of videos that help a YouTube channel grow as quickly as possible. Usually is usually in, especially if you're under a 1000 subscribers. So coming up next, See you there. 25. 3.6 Top 3 Video Types to Grow: This section, in my opinion, is the icing on the cake. When it comes to video idea generation, as I already mentioned, there are generally three types of videos. They helped generate views and they builds a subscriber base. And those three types are number 1 versus videos. Remember to listicle videos. And number three, how to videos if you don't know what those are, don't worry, I'm about to show you versus videos. It's something I'm sure that you seen. They're all over YouTube. First is Vs, there's something quite simple. It's a versus B. It's some sort of competition, some fight, some direct comparison. For example, superman versus batman, iOS versus Android and Popeye's Chicken versus Kentucky Fried Chicken. People really like to see these type of videos because they're simple and they're controversial. And people love controversy. Get a few ideas for versus videos regarding your keywords. Let's get back on the computer and go to the YouTube search bar. And it's really simple. We've already done something similar using the YouTube search bar. But this time, all you really need to do is take a keyword space in the ass and see what propagates. Let's get back on the computer and I'll show you what I mean in when it comes to versus videos. We can go back to our YouTube search bar and let it do the work for us in finding topic ideas. So all you need to do is type in a keyword, for example, Greek islands, space and VS, excuse me. And then we have a few ideas. Greek islands versus Croatia versus mainland versus Amalfi Coast. Not only that, think of the Greek islands, the specific Greek islands. Let's look at me. Casinos make an OS space V S and you have Santorini, Santorini, Greece, a visa, Crete, and so on. So this'll, this'll give you so many options for versus videos. Go ahead and choose a few of your keywords. Type that keyword in here, space BS, and see what YouTube brings you. Right now you've probably fill your page with a list of keywords and a list of topic ideas. Now you've got a whole new line of video ideas. And not only does this topic idea, whatever you've seen in the verses activity, you've got a searchable keyword that you've already identified. It's part of your niche and you've added a another searchable keyword which will make your video twice as discoverable. The second type, art listicles, and that's pretty much what the name implies lists. You've seen them before, a list of the top. Well, we saw this just a moment ago with Greece, let's say, or Europe, the top 25 places to visit in Europe. The top best restaurants in Vegas, the top three movies of 2022, that ten effective steps to stay healthy. These are all a listicles and they follow a pretty simple equation. And that equation is adjective plus number plus keyword. Listicles are also effective because number 1, they're simple. Number 2, they cover several aspects of a topic. And number 3, they do it all in a short time. When making a listicle. Don't spin more than, let's say 30 to 45 seconds on one particular topic, especially if you're listicle is large, like 25, maybe a little bit longer. If you're listicle, if only includes five things, remember, we want to maintain audience's attention. So one of the, the secrets that YouTubers have is what we call killing your darlings. What that means is really trimming out, taking out information sections that aren't really necessary. So when making a listicle, keep the amount of time that you devote to each section fairly short so that you maintain audience's attention. And the third type is how to videos think about anytime you wanted to understand how to do something, the first thing most people write in is how to, and then whatever they're searching for. For example, how to fix a leaking saint, how to make pizza at home, how to get better sleep. People are regularly looking for solutions to problems and that's what, How to videos do. They identify problems and they offer quick, hopefully simple solutions to the audience. And this is a great chance for you to share your knowledge and skill on a particular subject. It's a chance to add real value for your audience. Furthermore, you have the option to update these how-to videos because over time, the answer to these questions may change, especially if it's technology related. So not only do you have you identified a good topic, you can revisit that topic six months, a year later and create another video that is just as relevant, if not more so, so there are great topics to use. So which of these three topics do you think is most effective? Actually, that the answer to our mystery question, yes. One of these three is my suggestion that you make for your first video or your very next video. Which one is that? Let's go to the next video and I will tell you. See you then. 26. 3.7 Your Next Video: Though, have you guessed what my advice is for your next video? Is it versus listicles. How to? Well, the answer it is reverse is, well, people are psychologically drawn two versus videos above the others. Again, they have an element of controversy, a spark interests, because they want to know who or what is going to be the winner. And they get people engaged, especially if the audience disagrees. So you'll find lots of engaging comments. And YouTube loves user engagement. A YouTube video is much more potential to get likes and to get comments. And when you get these comments, this is your opportunity to engage with your audience. Answer those comments as if you had the opportunity to answer them all. This can really explode a video on YouTube. So revisit the activity that we did regarding versus when we type in a keyword space versus to what propagates. Focus a list on those versus topics in, compare them on vid, IQ and too buddy and see which ones seem to have the most strength, then make that video. You'll be glad you did. Don't worry if it doesn't blow up initially. In my experience, it might take a little while before it really catches on. And when it dies, it can be pretty successful. And that's really my story. My most successful videos are versus videos. So I hope versus videos works as well for you as they have for me. 27. 3.8 Wrap Up: So in this section, we started, of course, with our mystery question. We introduced to the top software packages which weren't too buddy and vid IQ, we took a look at how to use the YouTube search bar itself and how it can help propagate and identify video ideas. Remember that this technique will show you real time data for what people are currently searching for. We've looked at how to look at our competition. Looking at specifically popular videos, trending videos, and what's in the comments in. You now know the top three type of videos that you can produce to help grow your channel. But keep this in mind at this point, you have a video idea. And the next thing that most people do is they start to record their videos. And that's generally a mistake. Most successful YouTubers will tell you, don't start filming yet. That's not the right order. Number 1, you want the video idea. Great. You've got several of those now, remember too, what you wanna do is find a good title and using that IQ and too buddy, help with keywords to put into your title. Once you've established a workable title, the third thing you wanna do is create a good thumbnail. Titles and thumbnails work as teams. They work together, which we're going to see fairly soon once you have a good title and a good thumbnail, that's going to serve as your foundation for writing a script. If that's what you'll be doing, writing a bulleted list keywords that that's what you're going to be doing to follow when you record or just simply having that before you record. This is going to help you make an all around good video. So the next thing we wanna talk about our titles specifically. And there are two types of titles you can generate. One is a title for search, which most people think is what they should be doing starting with. Because it's a search engine, YouTube is a search engine. The second type is for suggested. Suggested is where a lot of the views really come from and we'll take a look at that. So in our next section, let's dive into titles and specifically titles built for search and built for suggested that don't know what that means. Let's find out in the next section coming up soon. See you there. 28. 4.1 Crafting Clickable Titles: Hello and welcome to our fourth section on creating clickable titles. At the end of our last section, I mentioned that it was a mistake to start recording video after you have a good video idea. Instead, what you wanna do is first have your video idea. Second, come up with a title. Third come up with a thumbnail, and then maybe write your script or record. So what we wanna do next is get busy on making good titles. And what is just crucial as far as YouTube goes, is not only creating a good title, but in our next section, creating a good thumbnail. But a thumbnail and a title that work together where they have a degree of synergy, you're going to work as a team. And when you do that correctly, you're going to increase what you call your click through rate. Let's talk a moment about what your click-through rate is also referred to as CTR, something you want to remember because it's vital. So your click-through rate is, as we see here on the screen, the number of clicks divided by the number of times your title or thumbnail is seen on YouTube. For example, if you're a title thumbnail is Scene 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 times on YouTube. If as many impressions in front of the audience and 100 people click on it, then that's a click-through rate of 10 percent. And 10 percent is really good, but your click-through rate is going to be different from niche to niche channel, the channel. And there is no one good click-through rate. You want to focus not on a general standard for click-through rates. You just simply want to improve on your clickthrough eight from video to video. Keep that in mind. But again, in this section we're focusing specifically on titles. So in this section, we can expect to cover, of course, beginning with our mystery question. Then we'll go over and we'll look at a few guidelines that make good titles. From there, we're going to cover techniques on what we're going to call titles for search. Then we'll go into techniques for titles, what we call in suggested. Don't worry, I'll explain all of that soon. And then we'll answer our mystery question and go from there. So speaking of the mystery question, Let's go ahead and get into that in our next video. 29. 4.2 Mystery Question: So regarding our mystery question, there are two major areas where YouTube videos are discovered. Number one would be searched and that's simple. It's what everyone would expect because YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. And this is where a person actively seeks a video. They'll type in a set of keywords, one or several keywords. And they'll get videos that would propagate. So we're going to call that in search pretty simple. The other one is what I will refer to in the rest of this video with the rest of this course, as in suggested. Now this is when you open up YouTube and you see on your homepage a list of videos, or you're watching a video that maybe you've found in on the sidebar. There are other videos that are being recommended or anywhere else. Basically, suggested is where YouTube is actively pushing videos that it thinks that you might be interested in. So we have two things, in search and in suggested, and they're both important. And you want to understand how to harness both of them depending on what you want to do. So when it comes to your titles and your thumbnails. But specifically now when it comes to your titles, you have the choice to craft, design, your title, or either search or first suggested. And they're really not the same as we cover the next few lessons, you'll get to better understand what is search related and what is suggested related. So my mystery question to you is, which one do you think you should be doing? Should you be crafting your titles more for search or crafting your title more for suggested. Keep that in mind and we'll answer that question at the end of this section. But coming up next, let's look at some basic guidelines from the rules of thumb for crafting titles generally. 30. 4.3 Title Rules of Thumb: Writing titles for YouTube is a skill that you'll develop over time and it'll become easier for you as you know, the more you do it. Practice makes perfect, right? Not only that, I think it becomes a little bit fun, I enjoy the process. Nonetheless, there are a few guidelines or what I'll refer to as rules of thumb that you want to generally stick to as you create your titles for YouTube, whether they're in search or whether they're for suggested. And let's go over those right now. Number 1 is you want to try and keep the number of characters to 60 characters or less. And the reason for that is these days, most people watch YouTube videos on their phones. And if a title is too long, what's going to happen is that Tidal is going to get cut off. And it'll just remain these three little dots. So you won't be able to see or the viewer won't be able to see the title unless they click on the video. And remember, people are going to a new, you've probably done the same thing. People scroll through their phones or through the computers really quickly, and they only look at thumbnails first and then titles for a fraction of a second. So you want to get viewers attention. Therefore, it's best to keep your titles 60 characters or less, because when you do that, the entire title will show up when a person scrolling on their phone. And when the entire title is available, it's going to have a better impact on the viewer. Thus, probability of getting them to make that click. Number two is optimizing for people, not the algorithm. Youtube does use algorithms to get the right videos to the right people. And you might, you may have heard of this before, the YouTube algorithm. The truth is, it's not one algorithm. There are several algorithms. There's an algorithm for search. There are different algorithms for a suggested because they're, suggests that it's a little more complicated than I'm making out to me. In a lot of people try to hack the system. They tried to hack the algorithm. So they'll put in keywords and certain areas. And I'll adjust the titles in order to try and get the computer, the software, the algorithm to take notice, however, the algorithms on YouTube or AI based and they're extremely sophisticated and they only get more sophisticated each day. What you want to do instead is understand just the core principle of what YouTube is actually trying to do and follow that principle. And the principle is really two objectives here. Number 1, YouTube is trying to get viewers of the videos that they want really quite well. And number two is once they've gotten someone to watch a video, they want to keep that person on the platform as long as possible. So the best thing that you can do when creating your titles, your thumbnails, and your content is to think of the viewer. First. Don't worry about the algorithm. It'll take care of itself because it's trying to do. What we're trying to do is think of the viewer. And because the algorithms are so complex and advance, if you try to hack the system, the algorithm will pick up on it in time. So write your content, right, your titles with the viewer in mind, not the algorithm. Number three is think headlines. Think about writing your titles as you would see them in a news article. Good headlines, grab attention. You want to use the right words placed in the right areas and it should not be too wordy. So don't use any words that aren't necessary to get your point across and make sure you have proper formatting. It's kind of a rule of thumb to capitalize the first letter of all of your words, except what we would think of as unimportant words. Prepositions in, on, at, and articles. The and everything else is a rule of thumb. Capitalize the first letter. It looks more professional and it's something people are more accustomed to just seeing titles in general and seeing titles or headlines in the news. For experiment using all caps, that means capitalize the entire word. You may have a title that has, let's say six words. And what you might consider one of the more important words, it could be a power word or a special keyword, habit, all caps, everything capitalized because that alone will get the attention of the viewer. Experiment doing that and see what you feel works better for you and your channel. But stay away from using all caps in all of the words that looks unprofessional and it can be off putting too many viewers. Number 5, as a rule of thumb, try to put the more important words first. Now, those can be your keywords that would come first. Or they can be power words, more emotional, driven words first. This is something you just need to use common sense with. And you can always test it out and change your, your titles. Because remember, people will only spend a fraction of a second looking at a thumbnail and then a title. So you want to make sure that they see the more important words. First, number 6 is something we've already done. Checkout the competition. See what titles they're using, see how they format their titles. Because in your niche, other viewers will already have some set of expectation to see with entitled structure. So you don't want to copy the competitions titles, but you do want to use them as inspiration. And that can help you better suit your titles to your particular niche or your particular niches audience. And number 7, hopefully it goes without saying, don't use clickbait. Clickbait is putting in some extraordinary, amazing title and thumbnail that will get people to click. But it doesn't relate directly to your content. Now, what that will do, it will get people to click. Great, but that's really shortsighted. What we'll do. On the other hand, which is much worse, is it will turn off the audience and people will no longer trust your channel. And you will lose not only views, you will lose subscribers and your channel will just continue downhill. So stay away from clickbait. It is never worth it. So now that you know a few rules of thumb, Let's go ahead and go more in depth about titles for search and titles for suggested coming up next, titles for search. 31. 4.4 Titles for SEARCH: Regarding titles for search, as you may have guessed, your titles want to be keyword driven. Putting the right keywords together in the right order as well, we'll give you a higher probability of people finding your video. However, getting the right keywords together isn't always that simple. Now as we saw in our previous section on generating the best possible ideas, we used Tube Buddy in vid IQ. Go ahead and go through that as well and identify the best keywords possible. Remember, we're looking for keywords that have a high amount of demand, views. And 2, we want keywords, more essentially, keywords that have lower competition. So the last competition out there, the more likely that those keywords will put your video toward the top, you'll be more discoverable. So just as a reminder, once again, when you're identifying your keywords to possibly use in the search dot's here, YouTube search bar, type in one or a set of keywords. Look to the right side of your browser and compare what vid IQ is giving a score for the volume and competition. And then scroll down to, to Buddy and see what they say for your volume and competition. Make a list, write down the scores right down the competition, and decide which keywords are set of keywords, do you think will give you the highest probability of being discovered compared to the others. In addition, using those keywords, the ones that you consider or that you've through research you found that have a higher likelihood of being successful. Try writing titles with our three major types, right? Titles for birth is right, a few titles for listicles and write a few titles for how to. And that'll help you narrow down what might work best for your videos. Furthermore, try to incorporate one or two, what we're going to call power words. These are emotionally based words that get some visceral response when a person sees this word. And let's go ahead and jump on the computer real quick. And let me show you a website that will aid you in the future for identifying power words. It might be more suited for your particular topic. So once you click on this link, this is a great site to find some fantastic words and I think that you're going to like it. So, so as you screwed now we have more or less a table of contents of what you can expect in this post. We have words down below. Words, for example, that call to action, promote anger, encourage community, curiosity, exclusivity, fear, greed, logic, and so on. So depending on what you're trying to do with your video, you can use some of these words to help make your titles more effective. Let's just look at a few as example. So if I come down to words that are better used instead of good, amazing, amazing, astounding and so on. These are stronger words. Let's scroll down further and see words that provoke anger or this is great to get clicks. For example, appalling, dreadful, heinous, fantastic us do one more example. Let's do words that you'll see in a moment when we talk about titles for suggested, we want to spark curiosity. Here's some great words that can help do that. For example, bizarre, controversial in, let's say, forbidden People want to know what is behind these titles. So keep this site available. It'll come in handy when you're crafting your titles for search or four suggested. Also, I'm leaving a link to this site that comes along with this course in PDF format. It's your checklist so you can always reach it there as well. So thinking of our three types of videos and thinking of power words, let's go ahead and put a few together for examples. Now, I'm a big pizza fan. So let's use the topic of pizza this time when it comes to a versus title, my example here is homemade pizza versus a Dominoes pizza. You'll be amazed. Go ahead and type that into Google and you see what you get. You'll see here that at least is a power word. Yes, I've put it at the end because homemade pizza is probably the keyword people want to see first, regarding a listicle, my example is top five remarkable pizzas. You can make it home for under $5. Remarkable is going to be our power. And under $5 can make a difference too. So this type, this one into YouTube and see how this might perform. And regarding my how-to example, how to make the perfect margarita pizza at home. Perfect is a power word and it's sort of in the middle. Nonetheless, it served its purpose. So these are three examples. How to make a versus a listicle and how to, these are all search related titles and how to use power words somewhere within those titles. So go ahead and practice making one for each practice making one versus one listicle and one how to with power words and see what you get. Great. So now you have a better idea of titles based for search. But we still need to take a look at titles base for suggested coming up next. 32. 4.5 Titles for SUGGESTED: Titles that are based for suggested are not the same as for search. It's a different formula altogether because they're not necessarily keyword driven. They can be, you can use keywords. But we really doing a different approach here. Let me explain. Remember that YouTube is going to test videos. If I haven't told you that already. Once you publish your video, YouTube is going to test it on people's home screens, people's sidebars. Nonetheless, YouTube is going to test for clickability and the click-through rate. And titles that are made for search are typically not as interesting. However, titles made for suggested are because what they do is they intrigue the audience. They place some sort of question in the audience's mind. The audience wants to have that question answered. So there should be some element of mystery and intrigue, not only in the title, but also in your thumbnail, as we'll see in our next section. This of course, is going to make crafting your titles and thumbnails a little more complicated. But the more you do it, the easier it gets. So for you to start off, I have a few example, let's say title templates that you can model off of and create maybe more clickable titles for suggested. Let's take a look at those right now. Now on your screen and also on your PDF guide, your checklists that I'm, that I've included in this course. We have the same information here just waiting for you so you can find it there as well. Let's look at some examples. I, and then something strange or shocking, I did something. Here's what happened or this one here's one I love. Remember we want to solve people's problems. So struggling with something, try this. For example. Struggling with titles. Try this, or some sort of mistakes that causes certain problem. Five mistakes that cause people to click off your videos. For example. Most people ignore this but they shouldn't. That's a good one. I've used that one before. And in the tight in the thumbnail you might have a circle or an arrow pointing to whatever you're talking about to create more mystery and entry or I deleted something, should you? I just recently made one of these videos or I in some personal accomplishment that you've made. And here's how I did it. Next, everything you need for block. Now, notice as I'm going through these, these titles are not telling the viewer specifically what there is. The viewer's going to want to know what are they talking about. And that's the idea, that's the purpose of these titles to generate that curiosity. So I'll let you read the rest of these. Again, pause the video, take a look. You're going to want to try and craft some titles using these templates they are proven to work in. They should work for you. So do you see now how these titles differ in suggested they differ from titles. In search, we have a desire or the viewer was going to have a desire to see what the end result is. What happened, what mistake was made, what changes were made? These titles effectiveness, like all titles are compounded when properly used with a correct thumbnail. And don't worry, we'll look at thumbnails in detail soon. But first, I have a pro tip for you. And that pro tip is the answer to our mystery question coming up in our next video. 33. 4.6 Search VS Suggested: Congratulations. Now you have a pretty solid idea of insert and in suggested and creating titles for each of those. So when we come back to the mystery question I posed to you at the beginning of this section. The question wise, which title? Which type of title should you be focusing on more? Is it in Search or an suggested? I'm going to guess that you think in suggested. Actually the answer is both. Let me explain. Number 1. It's good practice, right? One for search and one for suggested. But not only is it a good practice, you very well might actually want to use both initially. In my opinion, it's better to write four suggested and publish for suggested. Because remember YouTube, as soon as you publish your video within 24 hours, 48 hours, and maybe immediately, YouTube is going to start testing your video, your title, your thumbnail, to your audience, or to your subscribers. And not only to your subscribers, to other people as well. If you've created a good title and thumbnail for suggested, it has a higher probability of exploding because the majority of views on YouTube, 75 percent or so or more come from suggested. What typically happens with a video is if it does fairly well in suggested, it'll take off, people will click on it. But then over time, YouTube will stop testing it. And this is natural, so don't, don't panic when we see your analytics and analytics is something we'll cover in another section. Sin will see a graph to where abuse go up and then they potentially will taper off. Once that happens, you have an option to leave things as they are. It's possible that YouTube will pick it up again later and test it more, it might become successful. Or what you can do is consider to change it, to search from there. To make that change, you may want to change your, your YouTube thumbnail. It depends. But you could then take your title for search and just change it, and then your video will then start to become more discoverable when people search for those key words. And it might have more success in the future. So what I've done in the past is I've created videos for suggested. They've done well. When they start to taper off, I alter them for search and then they do well for more of a long-term period. So it's up to you. Nonetheless, it's my suggestion to you both. 34. 4.7 Wrap Up: So now you're on your way to being a tidal master in time. Remember it takes practice, have fun with it, test it out. Don't worry too much because it's, remember, YouTube is not a sprint, it's a marathon. So in this section, we looked at our mystery question as usual. We went over a few guidelines for titles, rules of thumb, stick those. Remember you don't always have to, but again, they're good guidelines. Then we covered what type of titles you would expect for in search. Remember that these are more keyword and driven. And those keywords are better when they have high search volume and low competition. We look at titles for suggested. Remember they plant a question in the viewer's mind. They have some sort, some degree of mystery and intrigue. And go ahead and use those suggested title templates to help you build your suggested titles. Furthermore, remember it's my suggestion that you create titles for both. Actually whenever you make a video, right? One for search on, for suggested and use both of them. So I'm sure you're curious about thumbnails and that's our next section. Remember your title and your thumbnail work as a team. What kind of thumbnails will work best with your titles coming up next. 35. 5.1 Designing Clickable Thumbnails: Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the fifth section of our course, designing clickable thumbnail. I've mentioned more than once already that your titles and your thumbnails, they work more as a team. I want to elaborate a little bit more on that. Consider your own viewing experience. Most likely, you're scrolling through your thumb on YouTube. The majority of people are doing that, and that's only going to increase in the future. In Azure scrolling through YouTube on your phone, people only spend a fraction of a second. First looking at the thumbnail. And if that thumbnail grab their attention, then they'll only spend a moment looking at the title. When we're considering in search, what the thumbnail does mostly is it confirms what they were searching for. And then the title will further confirm or generate more interest in that thumbnail. And then hopefully they'll click in suggested. It's a little bit different with the title does is it creates some intrigue in mystery in the thumbnail. And then the title, we'll fill in some of those gaps. But still leave enough curiosity and the beers mind hopefully to get them to then click. So in this section, of course, we'll start out with our mystery question coming right up. Then we're going to cover which designs work basket regarding thumbnails. When it comes to in search. After that, we'll look at which designs, in which format, which tips and tricks you want to use when designing thumbnails for suggested. And of course you're going to need to create these thumbnails. So I want to share with you what is my favorite software option for creating thumbnails? And not only is it online, it is also Ferrari, at least most of it. You have the option of getting the free version or the paid version. The paid version is a little bit better, but the F31 is still top notch. And then we'll wrap things up with an answer to our mystery question and speaking out, and let's do that now let's go ahead and go into the next video and see what Section five has for our who mistreat question. 36. 5.2 Mystery Question: So you're going to hear me say, and you already have heard me say that your title and your thumbnail go together and they work as a team to have synergy. So there are clearly some things that you want to do to make as much synergy as possible. So you get a higher click-through rate, however, believe it or not, there are some some things that you do not want to do when it comes to your title and your thumbnail. This is something specific when they come together, believe it or not, a lot of YouTubers, even with the top YouTubers, make a common mistake. That if you don't make this mistake, you will find a higher probability of getting that click on your thumbnail, on your title, on your video. So the mystery question I want you to consider as we go throughout the next couple of lessons in section 5 regarding designing clickable thumbnails, I want you to ask yourself the question, what should you not do when it comes to the team of the thumbnail and a tidal, this may become obvious as we compare the thumbnails that we see with the titles that we see throughout this section. Of course, I'll have the answer for you coming up soon toward the end of this section. So let's go ahead and get into our next section is with designing thumbnails specifically for search coming up in our next video. See you there. 37. 5.3 Designing for SEARCH: Okay, It's thumbnail time. Designing specifically for search and keep things as simple and straightforward as possible. There are three things I want you to consider when you design your thumbnails for search, and this is the same thing I do. Of course, those three things are number 1, make things obvious because this is what people are looking for. You want to confirm in the viewer's mind that this is what they found. It's the right video they're searching for. Number to text. Text is optional. But it does help me because people read texts quickly as long as there's not a lot of it. And number 3, emotion, emotion is important, although it's, it is optional. It is important because people pick up on emotion so quickly and it has a visceral or strong effect on the viewer. So let's look at these three in a little bit more detail. First, make things obvious. When someone is searching on YouTube, they're typing something in with a visual idea of what they want to see and you want to best match that as best possible. So my example here we're looking about, we're looking for pizzas. So if you were to type in, for example, pepperoni pizza, pepperoni pizza recipe, you want to see a big image of a pepperoni pizza because it reinforces the viewer. This is what they're looking for. This is the right video. So let's use pizzas as an example. We talked about homemade pizzas a little bit earlier. So if we were to type in homemade pizza in YouTube and the YouTube search engine, what images do you think that we would see first, the top images? Well, let's go ahead and find out. Let's go ahead and get on YouTube right now, type in homemade pizza together. Let's see what we find. What I've done up here on YouTube. I have typed in homemade pizza, and these are the top search results that we get. So when it comes to obvious homemade pizza, look at all of these images that are close up photos of pizza itself. So clearly, when someone has searched homemade pizza, they're getting what they were looking for. This second thing you want to consider is text. Text is optional, but if you use it, there are a few guidelines that you should probably stick to. Make things work as best possible, though, a simple image alone can be powerful, but there are times you might want to use texts. And when you do use text, number one, you want to keep it simple because remember, people are looking really quickly at the thumbnail. So as a rule of thumb, war or less, I would stick to no more than three words on a thumbnail. Now, there are four or five. You're getting a little too much, anything more than that you don't want to do. 12 or three is really the sweet spot when it comes to text on a thumbnail. Number two is use a large and clear text. Remember we're on a mobile phone. Most people are at least and sometimes people put the text a little too small, it's hard to read so people just skip over. Also, a common mistake that people make is they'll use sort of fancy fonts. And that can be nice in an artistic sort of way, but it doesn't work well on a thumbnail. Why? Because these fancy fonts are initially difficult to read. If you make it difficult on the viewer to read your thumbnail, have a higher potential of just passing through scrolling to the next thumbnail. So stay away from fancy fonts. Instead, you strong, bold, fully all caps capitalize fonts. So it's really clear for the viewer to read, which leads me to number 4, capitalisation. Now if you're going to spell a word, it's okay to capitalize the first letter of the word and the others are lowercase. It'll probably be clear to the viewer if you put everything in all caps, everything capitalize, it makes it a little stronger and clearer. So I would stick with all caps. So let's go ahead and jump on YouTube. And let's look at the top three to five results when we type in homemade pizza and see what their use of text is. Now when it comes to text under the same search term, homemade pizza, what text do we see in our thumbnails? Well, the first one we only see a number 101 and that's not a common number. So that might grab some attention. Down here below. We see just one word in an arrow and that one word is home-made. So it's obvious because we've been searching for homemade pizza. And notice that it's also bolded and it's all caps. I could go down here to the third example. We have three words this time, perfect pizza dough. This is a good thumbnail, but in my opinion, I would say that the text is a little small. I'd make it larger. And finally down here at the bottom, this one, let's just say it really doesn't have any text. The small amount of text at the top and left, really no one's going to be able to see that in when they're on their phones at least. So in my opinion, this is a bit of a mistake. So these first three images regarding texts did done, they've done a pretty good job. And number three, we want to target emotion if possible. Emotion is very effective, and it's usually best done with facial expressions. Now you don't have to use your face. It's not a requirement, but it is a suggestion. And if you don't use your face, it is possible to use other people's faces. As we'll see when we come up with our software Canva that I'm going to introduce you to in a moment. But facial expressions are interesting for a few reasons. And that's because people identify with others quicker. People are able to instantly recognize and emotion simply because they can see that on a person's face and that alone will have a greater impact on conveying your message to your viewer. It's almost cliche. If you look at a lot of the YouTube thumbnails you've seen, there are lots of emotional faces and the, these emotions are sort of over the top. Believe it or not though it does work. That's why that's why you see it so often it's because it is effect. So let's go ahead and look on YouTube again, see what facial expressions and we see when it comes to pizza on the same results for homemade pizza, what emotion do we see? Well, we only see a motion here in the third image. A woman about to eat pizza. She's got a big smile on her face, but let's look at something else. Let's go to delicious pizza and see what emotions we get. We get the same pizza here, not a lot of emotion, but down here we have three people eating. There are some emotion here. Let's go to How about this one? How about worst pizza? Worst pizza instant emotions, the top ranking video to people not happy about what they're about to eat. As we scroll a little further down, we get the same results. People's emotional reactions to the worst pizza. And this gives us some degree of interest, curiosity and tree to click and find out why. So now you know the three things you really should be doing when designing thumbnails for search. But there are some similarities and some differences when it comes to designing thumbnails for suggested. Let's go ahead and take a look at what those are coming up in our next video. 38. 5.4 Designing for SUGGESTED: So when it comes to designing your thumbnails for suggested, just like your titles. Your thumbnails for suggested are better off being designed differently. For surge, this isn't always the case, so it's best to use your judgment from thumbnail to thumb now, depending on what your video is about, Nonetheless, I have five things that I want to look at to show you what I use when it comes to making thumbnails for serfdom of these are highly recommended in others or more suggested. So again, use your better judgement on these. But those five things are and include mystery, emotion, tech, circles and arrows, whichever ones you want to use. In numbers, though when it comes to mystery, the thumbnail for a video in, suggested, it should create some sort of intrigue, some sort of mystery. A question in the viewer's mind. That sort of it's like an itch that the viewer needs to scratch. They need to have that question answered. Essentially, you want the viewer to think, well, what's happening in that image, or what's the outcome going to be? We all love this. This is ingrained in our psychology, and that's of course why it works so well here on YouTube. And although this might sound simple, it's a, it's a skill that takes a little time to perfect. So don't worry getting it right the first time as you work on this over and over as you practice somehow generating a degree of mystery and entry, you'll get better at it and you'll see more of it as you see more YouTube videos on the search engine. Though, let's go ahead and take a look at my YouTube home screen. Remember it's the home screen or the majority of videos are videos that are designed for suggested. Let's see which thumbnails here have that element of intrigued by my homepage. I have these four results for videos. Let's look at mystery. What would give us an air of mystery? Well, over here, Mr. BCE, a super YouTuber, we have this person wondering why what's going on and there's something in the background. There are some mystery here. Over here. $0 pointing to this man over here, mystery. All of these, a lot of these have some degree of mystery. Again, down here at the bottom, Mr. Beast a, before and after example, I'm curious how does Mr. B's how did he go from all this trash to a clean beach? So some of these are great examples of generating intrigue in the viewer's mind. Now just for fun, take a look at your own YouTube page, your own YouTube homepage. Can you identify which thumbnails are more designed for? Suggested? Do you see ones that make you curious, give you a sense of intrigue and mystery. If so, take note on what they're doing because you might want to do something similar on your thumbnail. Next is emotion. And we already know that emotion plays a big part in generating curiosity, making a connection with the viewer, and getting that click when combining an emotional reaction with a person's face and some degree of intrigue and mystery like we just spoke about. Those also create a degree of synergy and increase your likelihood of getting a click. Though, once again, I suggest using your face with emotion if possible. However, of course, if you're uncomfortable with that, consider some stock images or stock footage with emotional faces that you can use on your thumbnails. Let's go back to my YouTube homepage and look for any emotions that we see in those thumbnail. What about emotion? One, we have someone holding their heads looking down, looks like there's some, someone's really concern. So we have a bit of emotion but the issue ears, the face is a little small. So our a really optimizing for mobile. I don't know That's debatable. Here, facial expression is pretty big, too big smiles, lots of emotion here. Down below. Mr. Bce, arms wide out. A big expression on his face. Over here, hand over face, a bit of a laugh. So we've got a lot of emotion going on here. By number 3 is text, and we've already looked at this in search. We also have a similar option here with suggested here the text should not be obvious if you do use text, of course, adhere to the same guidelines we saw in suggested, again, adhere to the same guidelines we saw in search. However, what texts can you use that would generate more mystery for your thumbnail? Simple words like in here or AHA, or what? These are words that don't give an explanation of what's in the video. But again, they do generate curiosity. What words could you use for your thumbnail? Now when it comes to text, what do we see? Well, the first image, 0 texts. The next image, 0 tax is just a number really over here, no tax, but here we have text, It's prominently displayed, it's not all caps, but that's fine. We are sticking to the three word rules, so that's great. Right here. This is an interesting example of texts. It's one word, it's the entire screen, it's the entire thumbnail. Yo, it sort of makes me want to click y yo here, before and after. This is a common use of text, which is also together used to generate that degree of curiosity and mystery. Because before and after, what was the process going from one to the other? And these two over here don't, aren't really using task number 4 of circles and arrows. Adding a circle around an area in your thumbnail or using an arrow to point to something in a thumbnail can draw the viewer's eye to that area and again, generate more interest, especially if it's unclear what's in that circle are being pointed at by that arrow. This is a technique that has been used quite often. It's become a little bit cliche because it's been used so much, but it's still effective. So if you do use it, use it in moderation, not in every thumbnail. Nonetheless, it does work. Give it a try. All right, how about the use of circles and arrows? We don't see much of that at all, except here at the bottom right, we have an arrow. Clearly, this arrow is in a color that's contrasting to the background. And what are we trying to point out here? Well, who's this man? Yes, Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger. So that would generate some interests. What's going on with Arnold Schwarzenegger here? And number 5 is number. People are drawn to numbers. And we've already seen this with a listicle. For example, the top five or the ten most are the 25 places to visit and so on. So if appropriate to your video, consider using numbers in your thumbnail. And here's a quick tip. Unusual or unexpected numbers work even better. People might expect round numbers like 10 or simple numbers like 5. But if you put in something like 6.2, people are really going to wonder why 6.2, and they're more likely to click. Of course, it needs to make sense for your thumbnail. So consider experimenting with the numbers in your thumbnails. Numbers, we don't have a lot of numbers here except for this one here at the top center left, and it's zero-point 000 dollars. That's a strange number. It's not, it's not something you would expect to see. And that number alone, $0 would generate enough curiosity, at least for someone to pause and consider clicking, if not clicking themselves gray. Now, you have an idea of what to put in your thumbnails for search. And you have an idea of what to put in your thumbnails for suggested. The next part is actually designing. So let's go ahead and go into the next video and look at one of my favorite pieces of online software Canvas to get you started on designing your own thumbnails. 39. 5.5 Using Canva: So you may have been curious about how you create your own thumbnails. And you may have been a little bit worried about it because perhaps you've never done it before, but don't worry, even if you've never designed a thumbnail, not even once I have a solution for you. Not only is it easy, in my opinion, it's easy to learn, it's also free. However, if you already have the software that you're looking for, if you already have maybe Adobe Photoshop or something else, Fantastic. You might want to skip this section or stick around because this section might have a few things that are more advantageous. What you're currently using. Nonetheless, canva is a great solution. Yes, One of my favorite software packages for making anything that's design-related. His canva.com, that's www dot ca NBA.com. There's an extensive free version. That's fantastic as I said. But because I use it so much, I've opted for the paid version, which isn't so expensive. Once you become familiar and comfortable with Canva, if you want to upgrade, go for it. But for today's purposes, let's just stick to what's available in the free version. But quick disclaimer. This video, this lesson is not on how to use Canvas itself. This is just to give you an idea where to go in order to make the best thumbnails possible with this software. However, if you would like to know more about how to use Canvas, and more specifically, let me know in the comments. And I might make a course dedicated to Canvas itself. So the first thing you wanna do is create the thumbnail size that you want to use. Let's call it a canvas. And the right dimensions that I would suggest are building your thumbnail so large that the resolution is 1920 by 1080, that would work perfectly. It'll be higher-quality and when it's sized down for YouTube, it'll look even sharper. So I would go for 1920 by 1080. When it comes to the photos, the images that you use, a lot of people are tempted to take screenshots of the videos that they've recorded. That is what I would call a mistake because they're not going to be high resolution as far as images goes. Instead, dedicate some time to taking photos specific for your thumbnails or use stock images that you find elsewhere. In Canada does have a lot of stock images available for you if you would like to use them. But make sure you take your own photos or use stock images to make sure that your images are as crisp as possible. Next is contrasting colors. To make these really pop, you want colors that work well together, that compliment each other. And another word for complimentary colors are contrast in colors. It's really the same thing. The easiest way to know which colors are contrasting or complimentary is to look at the color wheel anytime you want to access it, you can easily Google it. Or you can just type color wheel into Canvas and you can see their options. Nonetheless, the colors on the color wheel are the same. For example, if you're using the color blue, then the contrast in color on the opposite side of the wheel would be in this example, orange. If your background is blue, like you see here. The contrast and color is really my skin tone because typically a lot of the skin, skin tones, all skin tones, believe it or not, whether you're Caucasian, African-American, Asian, or what have you to really along the same color line that's around red to orange. Those tones exist. So the blue background compliments the pale to, to reddish highlights that you might see my face. That's why I've chosen that background. Next, you want to avoid clutter. Don't make things busy. Remember, we want to make things simple for the viewer so their brains can quickly calculate what's going on. Make sense of the thumbnail and the decide if they want to click or not. If it's too cluttered, it'll be an annoyance more or less, and they'll probably just scroll to the next thumbnail. So this means you should avoid using too many colors or too many distracting images, though your background most likely should either be one color, very simple, or perhaps even blurred out to a degree. That way you have more focus to whatever item or face you have on your thumbnail. Once you've designed your thumbnail, you want to do what we call is optimized for mobile. Remember, a lot of people are going to be on their mobile phones. So you want to make sure that your image, when sized down, is still clear to the eye. In order to optimize for mobile, make sure that your text is large, your images are large and on Canvas you have the option of really scrolling or sizing down to the smallest possible dimensions. And if you can clearly read the text and you can clearly see the images, then it's probably a workable thumbnail. And once you've got everything ready to go, once you feel comfortable with your thumbnail, all you need to do is download. But the Download button at the top right click the format that you want. I would suggest PNG, that is a file map for images. That is an image that has more clarity quality and is of higher resolutions. So a PNG is probably your best option. So why don't you go to Canvas, give it a try, get familiar with it, and then the next thing you know, it'll be your best friend. And speaking of best friends, going back to our titles and thumbnails, we still want to find out what is the answer to our mystery question. And that's coming up in our next video. 40. 5.6 The Team Mistake: So I mentioned earlier that there's a common mistake whether people are new or old to YouTube thing that they make with their combination of title and thumbnail. And I'm curious, have you picked up on what that mistake might have been after watching these last few lessons. And that mistake is when using the same text in the thumbnail as they do in the title. In essence, that's a redundancy. You have a valuable real estate in your thumbnail. Valuable real estate in your title. You don't want to duplicate those texts. You don't want to duplicate those were the Don't do it. Let me explain. Let's say that your title is top five pizzas you can make at home. You don't want to use any of those words in your thumbnail. So if in your thumbnail you put in big bold words, big bold letters, top five pizzas. Then you've created a redundancy in your thumbnail titled team. So make them work together. Instead of saying something twice, keep this rule in mind the next time you're making your title and thumbnail work together. And if you've already been YouTube, go ahead and look at past videos. Have you made that mistake if so, corrected, It's an easy mistake to correct. All right. Good luck on your titles and thumbnails. 41. 5.7 Wrap Up: So to wrap up section five on designing clickable thumbnails, we looked at how to design thumbnails can search. We looked at how to design thumbnails in suggested, and we also took a quick look at the software, the online software program called Canva.com. If you haven't already, give it a try. I think it's, it's of such great value for, for what they offer. And again, remember to avoid the redundancy issue by using the same text in your titles and thumbnails. Don't do it. And by now, you should be about ready to create your own video content. And many people at this point would start filming. But I'd like to caution you, otherwise, it may be best to have a solid plan on what to film and when to fill in. I'm a big advocate of having an intentional structure to what you're going to say. Your video content really should be laid out in a certain format, in a certain structure. So it goes across as logically as possible, is as easily consumed as possible and keeps the interests as much as possible for your viewer. Because this can be the difference between somebody clicking on your video and watching through its entirety, or clicking on the video and losing interest after 20 or 30 seconds and going somewhere else. So I'd like to share with you a simple structure at least to start off with, that can help you retain your audience's attention as long as possible. And we're going to look at that coming up next in section number 6, CAS 42. CLASS PROJECT: Now is the perfect time to get into our class project. And this is about click-through rate, titles and thumbnails. Youtube considers your click-through rate CTR a very important metro. And the CTR is the number of times people click your video after having an impression or seeing that title and thumbnail on their screen, why is this so important? Well, if no one likes your thumbnail and title, no one's going to see your content, are they? So let's put theory into action and practice making clickable titles and clickable thumbnails that work as a team to generate enough interests to get that click your class project is as follows. Number one, choose a video topic for YouTube, this can be real or imaginary. Number 2, write a video title that is either designed for research or for suggested, and remember to keep it to 60 characters or less. Number 3, design a thumbnail that goes with your title and stick to the guidelines we covered for thumbnail. And finally number 4, post your title and thumbnail here on Skillshare. Look under the Project and Resources section and then click on the green Create Project button. What's great is that by the time you finish this course, you may have already gotten some valuable feedback on your thumbnail and title. And I'll keep an eye out to for your class project so I can give you my own $0.02 as well. So post something soon and consider posting more than one. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. 43. 6.1 Constructing Your Script: I'm a big believer in crafting a script before filming. What I do personally is I'll write out the entire script word by word, so I really know what I want to say. And the word that I do want to say, I make sure that I do say them. However, if writing a script turns you off, That's okay. Another choice is to write bullet points. You can fall, follow bullet points one by one, and use your talking point from there. However, I want to just go off the cuff. You might find that a bit difficult. So I really suggest either writing a script or using bullet points. The reason I suggest that is it's really going to help with audience retention on YouTube. And remember that word, audience retention. We're going to refer to this as we go throughout the rest of this course. And this is something that YouTube really takes a close look at. So you want to do the same. Audience retention is the average amount of time people are viewers your audience spend on a particular video. So if you have a ten minute video and your average audience retention is 50 percent, most people, on average will watch half of your video. The longer the better. This is a really important statistic to understand for YouTube, and it's one that we'll touch on in greater depth when we get to our analytics section at the end, when it comes to the meat and potatoes of your video, this is really a creative choice, your core content, and it will vary from video type to video type. And when it comes to a script or your bullet points, you don't have to follow a strict formula, but I do have a simple formula that should help you, especially in the beginning, because there are some basic principles of a video, which in essence is a story following a logical pattern that you should follow. And again, this will help maintain audience retention for your videos. Furthermore, repeat viewers and subscribers will be looking for some consistency in your videos as well. So following a formula can help your viewers will want to know what to expect from your videos. And if you can do this, that will help build loyalty and trust. Let's pop onto my computer and take a quick look at the script formula that I use. And then we'll go into depth on how to use it. So this is the script template that I like to use it. I suggest you start out trying this particular template I have available for you in the project in resources tab, you'll be able to open up this in Google Docs and modify it for yourself. Here's the basic structure and we'll get into the details in a moment when we get into the next lesson. But here I like to give a number and a video title. Now we have thumbnail copy. With our thumbnail, there might be text in the thumbnail. Now, here's an example of what we're going to look at in depth. I'm using this particular thumbnail and the copy is at night. So I put in that copy here. Remember we have titles for suggested and for search. My suggested title is this, this app does something special, the others don't. And the search title is what makes Moment app light trails. So special. Now, here's what I've actually put into my content. As you can see, I prefer to write a script. Now what I've put over here, Let's just copy and paste because they don't have this furious. Make it simpler for you. We're going to copy this and put it right into here. So this comes in handy when I type, when it comes to black font, this is what I expect to have when I have a talking head video, when you're actually looking at me, it's the main video that you normally see here in this course. Blue font is what I intend to be, a narration where you don't see me actually speaking, you just hear my voice. And there's some sort of B-roll or other video on top of that. Green is what I use as creative video or B roll sequence, which would normally go over the narration or over music. Having said that, let's see how I use this below. Now this is what I have in my hook. These bullet points here are what we'll talk about in just a moment. But just so you quickly see the blue parts are a narration. The black parts is what you'll see me actually speak. And the green parts are the ideas, a video that I want to put in as B-roll. And I do this throughout the rest of my script as you see here. Now what's interesting at the bottom over here, and I'm, I'm a little bit differently for you when it comes to publishing and even before publishing. Here's a, here's where I would enter your keywords. These are keywords that you've researched. And these keywords you want to put into at least somewhere in your hook or your content because the algorithm, YouTube, they're watching and listening. So put in your keywords here. This is where you can put in your description that you'll be publishing on YouTube. This is an area where you put in any links that you might have intended to use or that you've mentioned in the video, this is an option and these are timestamps, especially if you have a long video, you might want to put in timestamps. And this is something we'll talk about when we get into the publishing section of our course. So now you have a quick idea of what my scripting process looks like. Let's go ahead and jump back into the video ink, continue with our lesson. So in this section we're going to cover what you just saw on my computer with my script template. But keep in mind that one-channel may use a different video structure than another. This is just to help you get going because of log has more of a storyline compared to a tutorial, which is more directions based. Nonetheless, what we'll cover here is what we just saw, the hook, the introduction, content bonus in your call to action. But as usual, let's jump into our mystery question coming up next. 44. 6.2 Mystery Question: Okay, so our mystery question, and I think this one's an interesting one. How often have you seen someone at the end of a YouTube video say, thanks for watching, and then continue to talk about X, Y, or Z, maybe then they also asked you to subscribe or to like the video. I've seen this countless times as we go throughout this section. I'd like you to consider what that actually means. What do you think the average viewer will do when they hear someone say, thanks for watching? And what's really interesting, YouTube is paying attention. This is a statistic that you can track in your YouTube analytics. So my mystery question to you is, when the average viewer hears a YouTuber at the end say, thanks for watching. What behavior do you think happens next by the viewer? Do you think that this is helpful or harmful for your YouTube channel? As usual, I'll give you the answer toward the end of this section and give you some advice. It, I didn't discover for a long time that really made a big difference in my audience retention and something called session time. But before we get there, let's go to our next section, part one of our script of the hook. See you there. 45. 6.3 Part One - The Hook: Remember that your title and your thumbnail work as a team. But we have one more team member that's really important for your videos, audience retention. And that is the first 30 seconds of your video. This is what we refer to as your hook. And you really don't want it to be longer than 30 seconds. So if you can master your thumbnail, your title, and then your first 30 seconds of your video. Then you've really hooked the audience. You'd grab their attention and you've increased the chances of increasing your audience retention. Youtube really focuses it takes a look at the first 30 seconds of your video. So there are few things that you wanna do to keep your viewers there. And this again, is something that you can track in your analytics, something you're going to really want to look at in a little bit. So I have two pieces of advice that should keep viewers booked for the first 30 seconds of your video. Let's take a look at these two things. One of these is in this video. Now you don't have to use these exact words, but a lot of people do. You could use variation. It's really to you. What I'm talking about is in the first 30 seconds, you have your title and your thumbnail. The viewers need reinforcement that the video they're watching matches what they saw on the, on the thumbnail and what they read in the title. So you can do something as simple as say. In this video, you're going to get a, B, and C. And this matches your thumbnail and title. But just make sure you don't tell them the most interesting parts. Remember, you want to save the best for last. That way, the audience has a reason to stick around for something. In number two is show, don't tell. A lot of videos start out in a lot of newer YouTubers will start out a video just like I am here with a talking head and talk directly to the audience. Now, that's okay. I've done it a 100 times, but it's really more captivating to an audience to see something first. And maybe here a narration or just, or just music, you will hold the person's attention longer. If you have moving images in your video related to your subject matter that match your thumbnail and your title. So the next time you're making your first 30 seconds in your video, really focus on quickly telling the audience what exactly your videos about. For example, in this video, you'll say whatever it is. And to show don't tell, make things visually stimulate. And then you have the option of having an introduction. We'll talk about that really quickly in our next video. 46. 6.4 Part Two - The Introduction: Now this next section is debatable. It's what we'll call your, your introduction. It's an introduction of who you are and your channel. Now, when it comes to YouTube videos, what we really want to focus on is delivering value to the audience. Are you delivering value when you introduce yourself and your channel, again, it's debatable. So if this is something you want to do and I've done it sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. When I do. When you do as well, I suggest really limiting it to one to three sentences. Maybe quickly say your name, what your channel is about, and what to expect with some sort of logical order. For example, what I would say is, Hi, my name is Cao. Welcome to my channel, the right place for mobile video enthusiasts. Pretty simple, straightforward, quit. Secondly, you might want to give a quick overview of what the viewers should expect and do that in a logical order. You could say that you're going to cover a, B, and C. Say C would be the best, best for last, let the viewers quickly know the importance for benefit of the content. For example, what's in it for me, That's the question they'll have on in their minds. Why should I be watching this? So let them know what the benefit is for them as quickly and simply as possible. And then tell them in bullet points style what you'll cover. So whatever your introduction is, if you use one, make it short and sweet. And some people want to have these introduction reals, where there's some sort of splash across the scene. You've got a logo and you've got some music. A lot of people use these, but don't do it. Why? Because they don't offer any real value. And if you have people coming back to your channel, they've already seen it. Why would they want to watch it? A second, third, 100th time? A lot of people's audience retention decreases the moment people use those, those introductions scenes. So try and stay away from them. Instead, quickly say who you are, what your brand is, and what to expect, and then go onto your content because that's what the viewers are really there for speaking of content. Let's get into that in our next lesson, coming up next. 47. 6.5 Part Three - The Content: Although the content of your video is going to be the bulkiness, the biggest part of your video. It's really the least I'm going to talk about in this particular section. Why? Because content from one YouTube channel or one YouTube video to another can greatly varies. So It's really up to whatever you're doing. Nonetheless, it's a good idea to do two specific things when it comes to your content. So let's go over these pretty quickly. Number 1 is to lay out your content in logical order. The human brain looks for patterns and easily recognizable patterns. So you want to make sure when a viewer is following your content, it's easy for them to follow. And if it is easy for them to follow, you have a much higher likelihood for them to stick around, thus increasing your audience retention. Number two is what I said a moment ago, saved the best for last. Psychologically, people tend to put greater importance on the things that they hear first and last, not so much what's in the middle. It's especially things that they hear last. So that's why we want to save the best for last. Hopefully, you've already hooked them in the beginning and your first thirty-seconds. So leave them at the end with what you would consider the biggest benefit or strongest section of your content. If you follow these two pieces of advice, you should be pretty good. Now the next section is what we call a bonus. Let's go ahead and look at that. Coming right up. 48. 6.6 Part Four - The Bonus: Everybody loves a bonus. Everyone likes a little something extra than expected. And the concept here is when it comes to your videos, you want to either meet expectations or even better, exceed expectations. So at the end of your video, once you've delivered your core content, if you could deliver also a little bonus. This means some extra information, some extra tips, something that's directly related to your core content of that video, then what you'll be doing is exceeding expectations. And if you do this consistently, viewers will start to expect that there'll be this extra bonus. And this will increase the likelihood of viewers not only watching more and coming back, but also subscribing to your channel. So the next time you're creating a video and you've got your core content down. What do you think you could offer that's related to your content? That could serve as a bonus. It doesn't have to be something big, but it needs to be something of value. It could be something like a tip or a link to a website with special software, a checklist that you've created or something quick and simple, that can just be the icing on the cake for your video. And once you've delivered your core content and you've given that bonus, the final thing you wanna do is end with a good call to action. Let's talk about that in our next video. 49. 6.7 Part Five - The Call-to-Action: So what do you think is a good call to action at the end of your video, most YouTubers, especially beginning you tumors, think that they should either asked for alike are asked for someone to subscribe. Let's take a look at these two request, the request for alike and the request to subscribe asking for alike. I personally believe that the best time to ask for someone to like your video is after you've delivered something of value, especially if it's a strong piece of value. So in your content, perhaps the at the end where you've delivered the strongest value point, or once you've delivered your bonus. Those are great times to ask for a like. If you begin your video asking for like it doesn't make any sense, why would someone do that? So keep that in mind. So once you've delivered that piece of value, you could do something as simple as saying, if you've found this valuable, how about alike? Or even better? Do something creative, do something different than most YouTubers will do. Do something specific to your content. The more creative you are in asking for a like a more likely you already get a light. But what about asking for someone to subscribe? A huge mistake that YouTubers make is asking for someone to subscribe in the beginning. Again, this isn't logical. Why would someone subscribed much less click like at the very beginning because nothing has been delivered yet, believe it or not, I have completely stopped asking my viewers to subscribe. Why? Because if I deliver good content, they'll probably subscribe anyway. But I do remind them, I do put over a little banner of subscription animation, something like that. That doesn't disrupt the flow of the video. So maybe I'll be discussing something and talking head format or delivering something that's a value. And I'll just have an animation that goes from subscribe and goes away just to remind them, click the subscribe button, Believe it or not, this tends to work. So then what called action, should you have at the end of your video earlier I mentioned something called session time. And that's when someone watches one of your videos and then goes on to watch another one of your videos. Youtube loves this. So your best choice for our call to action is to get your viewers to watch another video. Now, how can you do that? Well, YouTube has something called end screens. And on an end screen, there are different ways to do it and we'll look at this more when we come to our publishing section of our course. But what you would do is simply say, For more information about the law, something related to your current video. Take a look at this video right here. You do it quick enough so your viewers can see the next video before they click off. So instead of asking for a like, instead of asking for someone to subscribe, your best bet is finding a way to get viewers to click on your next video. That's your call to action. This is directly related to our next lesson. What to say last, go ahead and check that out next. It's pretty interesting. 50. 6.8 What to Say Last: So getting back to our mystery, questioned, the question was, what do you think the average viewer will do when they hear at the end of a video, the YouTuber say, thanks for watching. I have the feeling that you already know. Most viewers will simply click off. Why? Because that's a signal to the viewer that all of the valuable content has already been delivered. And maybe what's coming up next is some sort of YouTube, YouTube or promotion. So at that point, viewers leave and that doesn't work well for audience retention. So one thing you should not say ever in your video, it's my suggestion. Don't ever say thanks for watching because that will prompt a viewer. It might be habitual for a viewer to click off your video. What should you say last? Well, remember in the lesson that we just had, your end screens can come in handy a lot. What do you wanna do is make use of those 10 screens at the end. But do it this way. In an end screen, you're going to have the option of a few different things. You can put up one or two videos. You can put up a video and a playlist in addition to a subscribe option. That's a lot of information. Really, what you wanna do is a limit your viewers choices as much as possible. So let's do something a little unconventional, although it does work well, certainly has for me in your end screen in something we'll look at later in our publishing section, is only have one option. There's no option for subscribe. There's no second option for a video. It's only one video that they have to choose from. And that video should have some relation to the content that you just covered. So what you would do at the very end, the last thing that you want to say in your video and you do it real quickly. It say for more or something like this. And to know more about blah-blah-blah, click right here. Actually, the more detailed you are and the more that it relates to content that you've just covered or something similar, the more likely your viewers aren't declared. So once again, all you need to do is say something related to the video point over here. And then when you're publishing your content, you'll put up your end screen with an option to click a video that will increase your session time and increase YouTube's appreciation for you and your channel. So give that a try in your next video. 51. 6.9 Wrap Up: So now you have a simple formula on how to script your YouTube videos if you so choose to do so. In this section, we covered five components of a script formula. Beginning with a hook, remember that your first thirty-seconds are crucial. You want to master your first 30 seconds before you master the rest of your content. So really focus on your hook two, we looked at the introduction. Remember that this introduction is optional and if you do it, make it short and sweet 3 content, deliver your content as best you can. Just remember to do it logically in order and save the best for last, for a bonus, you always want to meet or better exceed expectations by delivering something a little extra for the viewer. And five, your call to action. Remember, it's not alike, it's not subscribe. It's watch my next video. Okay, you're almost ready to click that record button. But before you click Record, you want to make sure that your videos look good. And in the next section on filming, we're going to look at just that. See you there. 52. 7.1 Filming Your Video: Hello and welcome to Section seven of this course, getting ready to film, taking those steps to actually press record and make your video. At this point, you should have everything you need to start recording your video. But this is one of the more difficult parts in producing video or video production. At least it is for me because this is the part where someone needs to actually perform. And if this is your first time in front of a camera filming, well, you might be a little camera shy. It's going to be a little awkward at first, but don't worry, it gets easier the more you do. Remember, practice makes perfect and you're gonna make some mistakes. Don't worry about it. People probably won't even notice them. Mistakes are part of the learning process. So just let it happen and have fun with the process. In this particular section, Section 7, filming, recording, I'm going to show you the process that I go through in order to record a video. And it's really the process that I've gone through to record the videos that you're watching today. It's fairly simple, so I hope you have fun with that process. Let's get started with our mystery question coming up in a moment. Then we'll make sure that our camera is set up correctly or microphone is working properly in our script, is ready to go before you really get your video going, let's do a real quick test video and then let's answer the mystery question. Speaking of the mystery question that is coming right up in our next video. See you there. 53. 7.2 Mystery Question: This mystery question is a lesson that I had to learn the hard way. And this is why I'm bringing it up in this particular lesson because I want to help you help yourself. So you don't make the same mistake because if you do, trust me, it is frustrating. So let's go over our mystery question. So in this section we're going to go over several steps to get up and running as you well know. However, if you're new to operating a camera, you'll know that there are several different types of cameras, and each camera has its own way of adjusting settings and getting used to your camera's settings. At least really comfortable and able to use your camera settings with competence can be a little intimidating. It's something you want to learn, but you don't have to become a pro with your camera to look like a pro on video. So don't worry too much about that. Nonetheless, in this section, in a few lessons coming up as we go over the settings that I suggest you have for recording your videos. There's one setting in particular that is crucial that you have through your, your camera. And that setting is one that I'm going to leave as the answer to our mystery question. So our mystery question today is, so what setting do you need on your camera? This is a setting that you're going to need. No matter what camera you have, it will apply to every single one of you. And the answer to this, when you hear the answer, you go, aha, Now I understand. So no matter what camera you have, what one setting do you want to be aware of before you hit record? And you don't need to be a camera expert to guess what this is. So as we go throughout our lessons, specifically on camera settings, try to guess what setting I'm referring to. Okay, having said that, let's go on to the next lesson. Setting up the basics. 54. 7.3 Get the Basics Set Up: A basic component to teaching and learning is repetition. So let's go over some things that we've already covered and maybe a few things that we haven't just to make sure that you're clear with everything and that your setup and ready to press record in order to do that if possible, take your laptop, take your mobile phone, whatever, whatever you're using to view this video and go to the place where you plan to record. This is your studio for the moment. Go ahead and do that now, that way you can follow along as we cover each section. If you can't at the moment, that's okay, it's not a problem. You can run through this section now and revisit it later when you're ready to set up. So what I want to talk about first is our subject placement. And most likely the subject is you. Where are you going to sit? I'm sitting here in my small studio desk in front of me and everything else placed appropriately. So what I'd like you to do if you haven't already determined exactly where you plan to stand, sit, or whatever, if you're the subject. So go ahead, think about that now. Make a decision. You can always change it later and go ahead and place yourself in that position. Great. Now, let's think about lighting. We've already covered three-point lighting. If you have lighting, I'd like you to try and place your lights in those positions. If you recall that three-point lighting included three lights. Those are your that's your key light, your fill light and your background line. Your key light is the main source of light. To my left, maybe to your right is my key light and this is going to light up most of my face have at least a key light that your number one most important light. Make sure that it's not too bright not to dim. Your second is your fill light. Now this is a light over here. It's not as bright as my key light, and it's only bright enough to where it fills in some of the shadows. That way we have a contrast between the two and it gives a sense of depth. In number 3, have some sort of background light clearly in the background. I've placed my blue light. You don't need something quite like this, but you'll need something in the background if possible, that will give the illusion of separation between you, the subject, and the background. Again, it gives more depth to the video image. Okay, so go ahead and take a moment, push, pause and set up your lighting, and then come on back to this video. All right, so the lighting that you have now, if you haven't set up, you might change it later. We're just testing things out. And as you get better in you, you change. As you grow with your YouTube channel, you might change your lighting as well. So that's just a natural part of the process. Now I want you to think about your background itself. We talked about a background light, but what specifically is in the background? You notice I have a few things over here. I have some shelving, have a few things in my shelves. I want you to pay special attention to your background. It's it's best to have a purpose to what you place in your background. Make sure that if you have something, it's better if it is related in some way to your niche or your subject matter, your channel. And, or it could be something that symbolizes or is a reflection of who you are as a, as a, as a video creator or human be whatever, be creative, be unique. Try and make it simple also, but be intentional with what you put in the background. And finally, think about your tripod for your camera placement. Make sure wherever you put your camera that it's steady. It most likely will be on a tripod, but not everyone is the same. You want to have the camera more or less eye level. I've seen some people where the camera is placed way too low or way too high. And it looks strange. Usually. That's more for different types of filming, usually not YouTube. But again, it's your creative decision. Nonetheless. Typically, at least in the beginning, things work best when we're more or less at eye level. So be intentional with where you place your camera and your tripod. All right, Now that we've got that out of the way, let's get more specific with your camera itself coming up in the next video. 55. 7.4 Ready Your Camera: Okay, here's the fun part. At least it is for me. I like cameras, I I like technology. And if you don't yet, I hope you will in the future, because it is a big part of YouTube. So let's talk about your camera. If you're unfamiliar with your camera settings, That's okay. Spend some time later, get familiar with it. The hardest part is beginning just that, taking that first step to learn about your camera or the specifics about your camera. If you are familiar, hats off to you, great job. But if you are unfamiliar with your settings, don't worry about that. Just follow along and everything should be okay. So before we get into settings, there are a few things you want to do first, and those are, number one, check if you have enough space on your camera, you want to make sure you have enough space to record. The worst thing that can happen. One of the worst things that can happen is you're in the middle of recording and your camera stops. And sometimes the camera won't even tell you it stopped and you continue speaking and the next thing you know, it didn't record. So make sure you have enough space on your camera. And secondly, make sure that you have enough battery life on your camera. It's the same thing. You don't want to run out of battery life. You don't want to run out of digital recording space. So check those two things. That should be the first thing you check when it comes before filming. Also, it's always a good idea to make sure that your lens is clean because it gets some dust sometimes. So give it a quick wipe before you start filming. Next, let's talk about the basic settings that I recommend. Just my initial recommendation as you do different things with recording and as you understand your camera better, you'll change these settings, which is natural. That just means you're able to use your camera better as a creative tool. But to begin with, I suggest recording in for k That's just adopt the highest resolution possible. It depends on your camera, but for K is great. Although you want to. Later we'll talk about exporting into a lower resolution, which would be 10 ADP, because you will be able to zoom in to your, your video without losing quality. So for k is great too. I suggest filming at a frame rate of 24 or 30. It depends. And this is debatable, but a film rate of 24 gives more of a natural blur effect. You can't really see that because now I'm recording in 30. Youtube is typically 30. But for a more cinematic look, people tend to use 24. It's not a huge difference, but there is a difference. So use one of those two. Unless you want to do a little slow motion, then that then we start using different frame rates. If you're curious about that, leave a comment. I'm happy to answer Questions. Thirdly, when it comes to Settings, make sure that you are in focus. Make sure that you've placed your camera, you've adjusted your focus to pinpoint either exactly where your place or to have some sort of a general focus. Because the last thing, you don't want to record something and look back and you're out of focus and then everything has to be done over again for you want to set your exposure. That means that you want to make sure that the highlights and the shadows are imbalanced. If I'm improperly exposed with a camera, then you'll see a huge shine here or I'll be too dark. So look at your way. Your camera uses exposure and make sure that things look natural. And fifth, you want to make sure that your white balance is set and hopefully locked. What white balance is is a degree of temperature where you can adjust things to make things look a little blue, are cooler, or a little more orange and thus warmer. And this is also sometimes a creative choice that the reason you want to lock white balance is as you change, as my face comes closer, the camera, my hands do, or further away. There will be some cameras will automatically adjust to that exposure and that temperature, and it'll change the picture. So if you're locked, things don't move in the video. The brightness and the contrast or the temperatures want to automatically adjust. So go ahead and learn how to lock your white balance. The last thing I want to talk about her filming applications. Now, if you have a DSLR or mirrorless camera, a traditional camera, That's fantastic. You'll typically get better quality than you will out of a smartphone. But smartphones are getting better and better. And the apps are really fantastic. And as you know, at the moment time filming on my iPhone 11 Pro. So I do suggest that you at some point find yourself a good film pap. Why? Because there are times where you might want to film something. If you, if you already have a standard or are you a traditional camera, you might want to take out your phone because it's just so convenient. And if you have the ability to take good video with your phone, you might find that it really works out for you in so many different situations, especially when you're on the go. So I have a few video applications I'd like to recommend to you. I'm quite familiar with each of these because I've researched them and I've made them part of my YouTube video channel. So here are five applications that I suggest. Take a look at and consider. The first one is filmic pro. It's the top of my list. It's sort of the it's the one that people in the industry use most often. So it's, it's very trustworthy. Second one is beast cam. I'm filming on base camp right now. I like it for certain reasons, but I use filmic pro quite often as well. I have every single one of these. I use them at different points. The third is Moment Pro Camera. Great product. They especially have amazing time-lapse abilities. If you want to do something like that. There's Pro Cam 8, it's a great choice as well. It's more of a budget option, so it's a little cheaper. And there's protein. And protein has some pretty cool features to, although you won't get any customer support if you need that from them because they're based far away. Oh, you they don't give customer support. So right now, let's go ahead and hop onto my phone. I want to show you what each of these apps quickly looks like from a display point of view, this real quickly say you have an idea. So let's go ahead and look at our first app, filmic pro. And you can see it right here on the top right of the screen. If it's my go-to app, really when it comes to mobile cinematography apps. And this is basically the layout here is going to be basically what you'll see on all the others, basically. So most of them have what equaled. I'm moving now. These are called radicals. One of them is usually for exposure. And this is the light levels for changes and move it over to one area, to another is automatically adjusting. Usually if you click on one of them, then it is locked and it doesn't change. And the other is usually for focus. Right now I am focused on the cactus and I can move it over here and focus on my tripod. And if you click on it once they tend to lock, as you can see, click on good, and they unlock that. Let's, There we go. Okay. So you can also use manual control. Some of them have a wheels like this where you can manually control shutter speed and ISO, which are here on the left. Unclick on click. And we over here on the right focus. And there's a lot more to these applications, but I just wanted to show you the basics and what the display looks like. So this is filmic pro, sort of the leader in the industry, but also the most expensive. Now, the next one I'll show you is beast cam. As you can see, it's basically the same. We have our radicals here, and you can do the same thing. What's kind of interesting here is you can move your fingers to adjust exposure by scrolling back and forth, which can't really see my fingers at the moment. But that's okay. And some instead of wheels to adjust things, we might have things like the scroll bars here, but that's basically what this application looks like. However, if you touch once on the screen, you can have the display open up like that and go back. That's kinda nice. So let's kill it on this one. Let's go into Moment Pro Camera. Another good one as well, and we don't have the same radicals. You see here. We have one here, but if you double tap, they split and sort of do the same thing. Double-tap again and then go back into each other for overall general or automatic exposure in focus. But you can also go over here on the right and you'll be able to adjust things manually, which is sort of the same. So that's Moment Pro Camera app. It's got that. Let's go into Pro Cam. 8 is the name. This is the more budget app. It's probably the cheapest one here. And as you can see, it's basically the same. There's always a few things that are different. A few things better with some, and a few things worth worse with some. But here we do not have the radicals, it's just tap. You can double-tap for auto double-tap again. We're tap again to move things around so I could tap here and it adjusts and here it adjusts as well. You can go here for more manually. By clicking on the M. Here on the left. You can scroll up and down and choose different settings, all kinds of stuff to do in these applications in the show you. The final one, which is protein. Protein is the only one that is subscription-based. But a lot of people loved this application. It's pretty good. But the unfortunate thing is, there is no customer service available for it, though. Nonetheless, it's a very good application. It does not have radicals. And you see I just changed a few. There will styles if you scroll, it's kind of interesting if you like the styles. I'm just scrolling my finger back and forth. Let's just go to Style off. And we have another wheel here where you can adjust things on the left and adjust your focus on the right, among many other options. So go ahead and check out some of these applications and see which one is more for you. Oh, I have one more thing for this video, since you've taken a look at your camera, your camera settings, the possibility of camera applications. The last thing in this video, let's talk about your camera lens. And this section is really more to do with the cameras lenses on your phone. So if you decide to use your phone, what camera lenses should you use? Which ones should you not use? As far as a traditional camera goes on, the lenses vary greatly so that the deaths of the subject we just can't talk about because they're so unique to each particular camera itself. But whether you're on an apple or an Android, the lenses are basically the same. Typically will find three lenses on the backside of a smartphone. That's your wide angle, your ultra-wide angle, and your telescopic your wide angle is the typical one that's used. It's one I'm using right now. The ultra-wide is where it really makes things look large and in depth. There's a bit of a fisheye going on and your telescopic is just something up close. It's magnified. It's up to you which one you use, but typically, the wide angle works best or its most, the one that's most chosen in YouTube videos. Now, a lot of people with their phones, they'll use their selfie camera. That's the one on the front. Typically there's only one camera there. And that camera out of all of the cameras tends to be the worst. It has, usually the lowest quality available, the lowest resolution, it looks the worst. So if you use your phone, has a camera, you're going to want to use your selfie lens because you can see yourself in the display. However, it's going to look bad. So try not to do that instead. Turn your camera around, use the other lenses and in order to see the way you look, do a few test videos. Place yourself where you want to be, make a few recordings and then see how they look. Or find a way to connect your laptop or use some other device that will work in connection with your phone to serve as a display. There are many different ways to do it. And if you're curious about that, you can either Google it or message me and I'm happy to help you with answering those questions. So when it comes to your phone, don't use your selfie lens. Okay, So having said that, let's go into our next section. Getting ear microphone up and running. See you there. 56. 7.5 Ready Your Microphone: So let's go over a quick reminder about your microphone. Different microphones, of course, require different setups. So get familiar with your microphone. If you don't have one, I do suggest you get one because remember, audio makes a huge difference in the quality of the production value in your video, whatever camera you're using, whether it's DSLR, mirrorless, you traditional camera, or it's your smartphone. Each of those probably have a built in microphone. Are you using that microphone? If you are? Don't. Usually because the built-in microphones, for whatever reason, they're not high-quality. They don't pick up good audio. So again, you want to invest at least in what I'm using now, my, my lavalier, which only costs around $20 and I think it gets pretty good audience. So use a microphone also. Once you have set up in place your microphone wherever it is, unless it's Elavil layer like this. Remember that the distance that you are from the microphone itself will make a huge difference. You want to be pretty close now, whatever microphone you're using, you can have it in shot. Sometimes we use a microphone that's placed on the table. Make sure that you're pretty close to it. If you have something that's out of sight, a lot of people will have a shotgun microphone or something similar. And it's just out of range because it's really important that you're close to the microphone. So keep that in mind if you want clear, crisp audio because once again, your audio is 50 percent of your media. So do a few audio test and see which placement which microphone sounds best for you having said that, let's go on to the next video and talk a little bit more about your script. 57. 7.6 Ready Your Script: We recently talked about whether or not you're going to use a script for your YouTube channel. And whether or not you want to use bullet points or nothing at all. Remember that I highly suggest having a script or at least having bullet points because it adds structure to your video. It adds more logic to your video. And overall, it makes a better viewer experience for your audience. Also, it just makes the entire thing better. So practice using a script. Something I haven't talked about, I don't think is once you hit the record button and you have your script, don't worry about making mistakes because they are inevitable. No one's perfect. He can't memorize a script, doesn't make sense, it doesn't sound natural. You just got to practice and get more comfortable using a script while recording. So what will most likely happen is you'll go through your script and you'll make a mistake and there'll be a little frustrating. Some people think that they need to restart the video and have a perfect video, but you don't. That's the beauty of editing. When you make a mistake, just stop thinking about what you did right or think about what you did wrong. And then do it again. The parts that don't work well, the parts that you want to get rid of, you can just take them out in the editing process. I make these mistakes all the time. It's natural, so don't worry about it. Also, if you have longer videos, consider recording them in chunks. Let's say chunks of about three to five minutes. This makes the video recording process much easier. It makes the recording process easier, the editing process simpler and the stress level much lower because that way you're not trying to get everything right in one recording. So consider that and let's go onto the next lesson. A few things to remember. 58. 7.7 A Few Things to Remember: We have made a lot of progress in this course. If you've made it this far, congratulations. You are just about ready to film your first video or your next video. But I have a few things I like to go over to things specifically before you do that. The first one is something a lot of people don't do, but they wish they had because later they will have realized they made a few mistakes. And that is to run a test video. Video. Once you do that, play it back, and check for everything that you should be checking for. Those would include does the lighting look right? Does the exposure look good? Make a few adjustments. Otherwise, readjust your camera settings or place your lights slightly differently. Are you framed properly in the shot? Makes sure that your head is in cut-off, that you're not too far to the side, too far back or too far down where you in-focus. That'll be plainly obvious when you see your tests video. How does the background look? Because believe it or not, viewers are paying attention to everything in your video and was the audio clear and crisp really important? So run a test video, make sure all of those work well together. Secondly, what I'd like to suggest that you do is do your best to be authentic on YouTube. You want to be yourself. What's interesting about YouTube is people come there to sort of make a connection with the channel or the host or whoever's making videos. You don't want to be boring. If you're calm, if you're really calm, then maybe that's not the best thing. You probably what a lot of people say is be yourself, but turn it up just a little bit. Be a little bit more enthusiastic on camera, but not too much. You don't want to look insincere or like you're trying too hard. You do want to be authentic. And the more you practice, the more real you'll be and the more of a connection your audience will make. And that really pays off later down the line. So having those two suggestions for you, I'd like to say that once again, to do you have questions if you're having if you're having any trouble with any of this process, especially your camera settings, let me know because if you have questions other people do, and that's kinda why I'm here. I'm here to help you. So if you have questions, go ahead and post them, and I will answer them asap. Having said that, let's go on to the answer to our mystery question coming up next. 59. 7.8 The Secret Setting: So hopefully you're getting more familiar with your camera. We covered the settings that I suggest you use when recording. But remember, there's one setting that no matter what camera you have, no matter almost who you are, you're going to want to pay attention to this one setting and make sure you've taken care of it before you press record. Has anyone guessed what that possibly might be, no matter what camera you're using, wherever you are, you probably have your smart phone in the area and most people even sleep next to their smartphones that you by chance. So your smart phone, whether you're using it as a camera or not, kin really be frustrating if someone calls you or messages you in the middle of a recording. It really throws things off, especially if you're recording on your phone. If you get a message or call, it, turns off your recording. So what setting am I talking about? If you haven't heard of it before, it is airplane mode, also known as Do Not Disturb Mode. So make sure that you whatever phone you have, make sure that you go into the Settings and turn off messages. Put on the Do Not Disturb Mode, put on the airplane mode. That way when you're filming, you're not going to be bother and you're not going to have your recording automatically shut off. This situation has happened to me more than once and not too many times because when it does happen to you, It's so frustrating, you tend to learn your lesson quickly. So the first thing I do every time I film, because every time I film it's on my smartphone. I turn on airplane mode. Keep that in mind. The next time you press record. 60. 7.9 Wrap Up: Great. Now it's time to put what we've learned into practice. Try recording a few tests, videos with everything that we've learned, your lighting, your camera, your background, and so on. And see which ones you think look best for you and which ones sound best for you? And remember in this section, we took a look at the general setup, your subject placement, your background, everything around you. Lighting is crucial. Make sure that your lighting is as best they can be. We've looked at your camera settings. Make sure you keep the checklist that I've provided in this course nearby. You might want to go through that checklist every time before you hit record until you've really become comfortable. And it's second nature that you have all of your settings up and running the way you should. We've talked about your microphone, make sure everything works well, and that your microphone is placed close enough to view your mouth. Make sure you have a script, or at least something that works like a script because it does make a better viewer experience for your audience. And don't forget airplane mode, so it's time to start recording videos. And after you record videos, the next part is editing. In the next section, I'm going to go over how I edit videos in Adobe Premiere Pro When I'm not going to edit the video right in front of you because that's a long process. We're going to go over an actual video I've put up on YouTube recently, and I wanted to show you how I've done it, some of this steps, the workflow in order to edit. So you'll have a better understanding of how to edit videos if you haven't done it already. If you have edited videos, this, I might lend a few tips that you haven't heard of or you might learn a few things that might make things easier, more simpler. So join me for the next section on editing. See you there. 61. 8.1 My Editing Workflow: Hello and welcome to Section 8, all about editing, least my editing workflow. Editing is a time consuming process. However, if you give it the chance, it's rewarding and fun experience. It's also a skill set that I really suggest that you have at least some basic understanding of because the world is really moving toward video consumption. And that's pretty obvious as it is, because of course, you, you yourself were interested in creating YouTube videos. Nonetheless, in this section, I'm going to show you my workflow in Adobe Premiere Pro and a few tips and tricks to help you get that better at it. And don't worry, if you're not using Adobe Premiere Pro, the same principles apply from whatever software program you're using. And don't forget to check that checklist that I've included in this course. And there's one specific for editing here that checklists will cover just about everything that we see here on the video. And we'll definitely come in handy The next time you're editing your video. Furthermore, in this section, we're going to look at an actual YouTube video that I've already uploaded. It's already live in. It'll serve as a good example of what we've already covered when it comes to tidal, thumbnail, script structure and so on. And that video is specific to my channel on mobile filmmaking. We're going to look at how to make a light trails at night in a timeline. And you might learn something interesting on Moment Pro cameras application. So in this section, Let's start out with our mystery question. Then we'll look at tidying up your files. Then laying out your files on the timeline will cover adding visual effects. Then we'll go into color correcting and color grading. A lot of people don't know the difference between the two, but you will pretty soon. Then we'll go into adding sound effects to enhance your video. Then we'll go to the last step, which is exporting your video and we'll answer our mystery question. So join me in the next video or mystery question, coming right up. 62. 8.2 Mystery Question: In filmmaking, in editing, there are two terms you want to be pretty clear on. And those two terms are a role and be a role. A role is what you're sort of seeing right now. It's like a talking head shot. It's the image in the audio altogether. Essentially, you can see me on your screen and hear my voice, my audio all at the same time. B-roll, on the other hand, is additional footage that would be overlaid on top of a role. It's your secondary footage. And this footage is usually used to enhance, complement, and reinforce whatever subject matter that's on the a role. For example, I might be talking about traveling or going to an island or the beach. And as you hear my voice, instead of seeing my face, you'll hear my voice. But the screen will display video that's travel-related, just as you can see right now. That's B-roll. B-roll really helps you tell your story and it also helps keep audience attention. That's great for audience retention, which you know, YouTube really takes a look at. So you should really consider using B-roll at some parts within your videos. You can either get B-roll that's already pre-made on different resources online, paid and free. Or you can create it yourself, just filming something that you'll overlay on top of what you might see here as your a roll. My mystery question to you is, once you have your B-roll, what can you do? What added effect or effects can you do to make that B-roll look more cinematic? Essentially make it look more professional. So keep that in mind as we go throughout this section on editing and join me in the next video as we start our editing workflow. See you there. 63. 8.3 Tidy Up Your Files: Okay, so here we are on my computer and I'm going to share it, share my screen with you in a moment. The first thing we want to look at is tidying up your files. This is really important. If you start off organized, things are going to be simpler for you. They'll go by quicker. You'll be, there'll be less frustrating. I highly recommend you organize as best you can, whichever way you want to do it, because you'll be glad you did. So the first thing I would suggest that you do is after you have recorded all of your files, you might record several video files. Make sure that you've looked at them and give them a name, name, all your files, you don't want them to be numbered. These random numbers that might be generated by your camera. So name everything that's number one. Number two, if you take a look on my screen, this is my layout. Now, in Premiere Pro, you can adjust things quite easily just by dragging things around as you see right here. What I like to do is up here on the left, I like to have my preview screen. This is where I can click on whatever while I'm looking at right here, click on it and it shows me what's up here. I can scroll across. And if I want a certain section and just press the eye, this is beginning. And then the O. And this section here, I can just drag. Now, I can drag if I just want audio right here, or I can drag just the video right here. Or if you want both of them just click on the file and drag it over to your timeline. But I'll explain the timeline in a second. Up here is the main the main display it shows as you go throughout the timeline, it shows you what's on here. Below, as you can see right here, there's the timeline and on the left, the, this is where you'll keep all of your files. Now, what I suggest you do is find a layout that works best for you in save it. And it's really easy. So I've, as you see here, I'm using what I call my IU, My YouTube to play out. Once you've got a layout that you like, all you need to do is go up to a window, workspaces, and then choose save as new workspace. And you can always return to that workspace. So it's always, we're ready for you when it's time to edit. All right, so make sure you have a workable workspace that works for you. A lot of work. There, isn't there. Okay, the next thing I suggest you do is once you've got your files now, I keep files always organized right here. I'm sorry. Let's go breath. Right. And my organization, I, I have my B-roll footage, graphics. I used to have intro reals, but I don't use those anymore. I think they're a waste of time. I think I might I might have mentioned that. Music, sound effects and transitions. So I'm don't think I'm going to use an intro real my little race at right now. Let's get rid of that into the trash. There you go. Good-bye. So what you can do here is you can just highlight everything and drag it into your files area at the bottom left. That's one option. You can do that and add to things. You can also come down here at the bottom edges, click this file icon and this, Let's get down here. I'm going to cancel this. Sorry, we're going to come down here and click this new bin. And then you can create something new. Whatever it is, new bin. If you don't like it, you can just click on it and hit Delete. So make sure you've named your files. You have a good workspace and you have all of your footage organized as best works for you. Down here. Once you've done that, you want to create a sequence. Now, usually when you start out right down here where you see the timeline, it's going to be blank. There's nothing there. You can either create a sequence by clicking, clicking on new item here and sequence, or you can take one of your video files, remain files and just drag and drop, and it will create your own timeline. So you can also have multiple sequences. For simplicity, we're just going to use one for this example. But I'm going to create an extra one just so we can hop back and forth. But the video that I've created here is just on one sequence. As you can see now, once you have put in a file or you've created a sequence, I suggest going into your sequence settings, go into here sequence settings in, under preview file format. Choose if you choose QuickTime. And then under codec, if you choose Apple ProRes four to two, this is going to come in handy later at the end when we export, it will make your export process quicker. It's not required. I haven't done it in this one, but I've been doing that in more recent videos. But if you do this again, it should make things easier for you. So keep that in mind if you have the option and that's about it. As far as tidying up your files, make sure you're organized. You will be happy that you did it. And in the next lesson we're going to look at laying out your files in the timeline. See you there. 64. 8.4 Lay Out Your Files: In this section, we're going to be working almost exclusively on our timeline. And we want to set out our role and our B-roll and make things make sense logically. But before we get there, let's go ahead and go into our sequence again. And I would like to say that I have suggested that you record in for k because we want to export in 1080 P is smaller resolution. So make sure here in your sequence settings that your frame size is 1920 by 1080. And because of that, when we put in, Let's say, let's make a new sequence real quick just for us to show you some examples. We're going to put it into sequence here. And in this new sequence, we don't have anything. We're going to take this file and throw it in here. And we'll do keep existing settings. So if we look at it, it's kind of large and we want to do is match the size so we can zoom in and out and still retain quality. So if we just right-click on here, scroll down and click on Set to Frame Size. And it goes to 1080. And if you zoom in and out with your effects controls up here, which you can use a little bit later. It's a scale of 50% of the moment. You can zoom in and out and still have, still retain quality. So that's great. Now, the next thing I would suggest doing is once you've put in your first file, I would, I like to unlink them and it comes in handy, but it's up to you when it comes to your video file. As I said, go ahead and set to frame size. When it comes to audio, a lot of questions people have is, how can I ensure that my audio is not too loud or too soft for uploading. What you can do is once you click on your audio here, go up to here two audio at the top. Click dialogue because you're most likely speaking. Click loudness here and then auto match. And that will make all the difference. Anytime you put up audio here, that's voice, at least go ahead and make sure you auto match the loudness and you're good to go. All right, so if I push play, it's at full, but sometimes it can be choppy. It depends on how strong your computer processor is instead of full, just to make things run smoother, I suggest clicking here and go to 1 fourth. Now when you play it back, it's going to look a little fuzzy. That's okay. It's normal. It's just not rendering fully and it makes things work quicker for you, so you're editing will be faster. I suggest click here, go to 1 fourth makes a big difference. And once you've done that, let's go to sequence back to sequence two here. Now, what I have here, I'm going to cut this out entirely. Let's go back to our footage. And our this is the first hook. Now, all of this footage, we can take the entire thing and just move it in, keep existing settings. And you can change how large it is here. Again, let's go ahead and set frame size, Azure going through here. Uk, I suggest going through and find out what parts you want to keep and what parts you want to cut. So when you find a part that you want to slice off, highlighted everything, cut it out, go through everything first, find the parts you want to keep. The parts that you don't know, the parts that you don't highlight. Cut it out. As you, as you go through this process, you're taking out the gains and the pause is and that sort of thing because people will lose interest if they hear that. You want to put everything together so it sounds good. Those are called hard cuts. After you've gone through your a roll and you've you've put in your hard cuts, then you might want to go in and put in some B-roll. Here is a little bit of B roll. I've got a few things here. For example, let's see what we have. We can click on one of these files and scroll across like so. Maybe I just want to keep it right here. Click i, and I just want to go up two right here. Click oh, and I can take this and drag it down and put it on top of my a roll. So you see it moves. And then we have that. And there we go and we want to adjust the size. We can right-click and again, Set to Frame Size. Watch again. And there we go. These are just examples. So if we go back to my main sequence, I'm done. Just that you can see there are multiple layers and we don't start out with a head shot. Instead we start out with video. Remember a hook, the first thirty-seconds is extremely important. So it's better to show instead of tell. Let's look at the first 30 seconds here. Comes up to right about, right about when you see me. So let's go ahead and look real quickly and I'll put it to full. So it's easier for you to see. Notice how it's a little choppy. That's because it's full row or protein. They have the ability to shoot time-lapse, is it night built into their software, and this is what you get. However, the moment Pro Camera app can do something quite impressive that other apps can. And in this video, not only will I show you what's so special about the moment out, I'll also show you what settings to use and what steps to take to get studying time lapses at night. Okay, and that was the intro notice that it began with B-roll only in music that's a capture attention. Then we heard my voice over with more B-roll, which would be over the a role in right here. I've ended up with just a roll. And notice that I said in this video, and I told the audience what to expect. So remember your first thirty-seconds, extremely important. Another thing you can do. What I like to do is you can rename and color-code on any clip. You can right-click and you can rename to help you understand how this is time-lapse. So k and you can color code, you can do the same thing. Right-click and go to label, and you have all of these colors to choose from. Notice that I've done that here. As we scroll this area right here, that's a bit rose color. This is my hook. Then in the green, this is my introduction to who I am. And then throughout here, this is the, the content, the body and so on. And everything's color-coded. So this will make things easier on you. So I do suggest renaming things and color labeling your files. And as you add things, we'll go and we'll look at a few of these and specifically later. And notice that we have a lot of layers here. At the very bottom layer, I usually have a, I usually have my a roll. And then above that we have other things like B-roll, text, overlays and effects. So if we look right about in here, what I've done is I have some B-roll, and then right above it we have an arrow. And this is my voice at the bottom. Then below that, I have this a2 area here just for sound effects. And you can hear that Dean listened to it real quick in the theme. And then below, we have some background noise and we'll get into the details of these coming up in the next video, specifically on adding visual effects. 65. 8.5 Add Visual Effects: Once you have your a role in your B-roll laid out, we want to put in a few visual effects, make things pop. Now, one of the first things you might want to do is put in what's called a lower thirds. And it's simply an introduction to who you are. It can be complicated or a little show a, for example, your full name and a title at the bottom. It can swipe in and then swipe out. I sometimes do that, but I did a real simple one right here. If we look at the screen. Hi, my name is Carol and welcome to my channel, the right place or mobile video enthusiasm. Okay. So it was real simple. I just put in my firstName and that was it. We call it lower thirds because it's usually at the lower third of the screen. But I break the rules sometimes and I put it at the top, totally up to you. I also suggest after you've made the cuts in your a role, the hard cuts that you vary the scale. Because when you do that, it looks a little smoother and it almost looks like there are two cameras filming at the same time. And I'll show you what I mean right here. As I play this and stick around to the end, I'll show you see how we made that. But that shot over here, what angle it's zooming in, and then it cuts to another size. And we have a bit of a zoom like that. So let's look at it one more time. Please stick around to the end. I'll show you one more feature on the app that will get you into new this time acted upon. So when you add in different scales, sizes and you add in some zoom effect, it keeps the audience's attention a little bit more and makes things more interesting and people stay more engaged. So practice using that a little bit, but don't overdo it. Also, notice I have a few text overlays. Here's an example. When you're making, whenever you're making a point, It's great to use text. Well, you can see this. What we just saw here, that will get you the time off. Okay, that's kind of interesting. I also suggested doing it at the very beginning. People, I've noticed when we have text overlays in the first 30 seconds, people tend to be more engaged, at least that's my experience. So right about here, I have a text overlays here. This is the first 30 seconds we're at 14 seconds. App like filmic pro or protein a. The ability to issue time-lapse is it night built into their software and this is what you get, alright? Use texts overlays like this or something similar. And you use whatever style you feel is best for you and your channel. And when you do that, I think you'll notice that our audience retention will increase. That's at least that's been my experience. Now, when it comes to the text, you choose, I do suggest, let's go right here. And I'm going to click on our text tool, text here. And what kind of font are we using? Now down here? Montserrat is a great text. It's a cinematic tax. It's big and bold, it's fantastic. I want to suggest three styles that you might like. One is Montserrat. There are two others that I suggest using. One is a Gotham, GO THE am, just like the Batman city. And another one is divine. Want d, V, a and T. There are several to choose from, but those are three suggestions. And as you can see, Montserrat is one of my favorites. Also, at some points, you might want to put in transitions. Now, if we go up to our effects here, and we can scroll down to right here and video transitions. And they're lots to choose from. You can even download several paid and free. But the simpler, the better. For example, a cross fade is fantastic. It's really easy. And let me show you right here. If we look right here, this button, right, this, this area right here, it's symbolizes that a transition has been put in. So as we scroll through, we have a cross fade into the next image. And we'll do it again here. And we'll do a cross fade into the next video. So let's take a look at it. What it looks like. Push play with like maybe now's the time to get into time-lapse settings were not so quick if you had the option, okay. Time lapses also make things look a little bit more professional. So make note to put those in and at 1 or another. Now, you've mentioned me, talk about likes and subscribes. When it comes to likes. It's probably a good idea to ask for in the video. In this video, I don't actually asked for, I just have the animation. But you might find it more effective when you stop, look into the camera and say, You know what, I really appreciate, I would really appreciate it if you hit that like button. And that's about all you need to say. When should you do that? Do it after you've delivered something of value. Now, right about here, we have, we're comparing the average time-lapse to moment time-lapse. And the difference is, if you can see a moments here, there are these light trails. And it looks better if you can see these light trails right here. I've delivered some value to my audience right after that. Right after that. I use this for my unlike animation. Oh, let me show you how to get his same result. Birds get a tripod. And that's about it. It's pretty simple. It doesn't disrupt the video. And it puts the idea of hitting that like button in the mind of the audience. When it comes to subscribes. You might remember that I don't ask for people to subscribe and remember, don't do, don't do it. In the beginning of your video, you need to deliver value first. Instead of asking, I believe, if I've done a good enough job, I'll get subscriptions. And, you know, I've already passed the threshold for monetization, so it's working for me clearly, what I do instead is when I'm speaking and maybe after some degree of adding value, I'll put in a little subscribe animation to help remind people to subscribe. And this is what it looks like. It's right about here. Moving to the right, Let's lock white balance, so there's no fit in and mature during filming. And let's lock on. Pretty subtle. Nonetheless, people recognize it and hopefully we'll click that subscribe button. And when it comes to subscriptions, believe it or not, YouTube doesn't really care about the number of people who are subscribing. They only really care about that when it gets you up to monetization status. So when you get 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 plus subscribers, more people, the majority of people who were actually watching your videos aren't really subscribers, but that's something else to talk about another time perhaps. So, having gone over a few of my suggestions for visual effects, Let's go ahead and look at color correcting and color grading. See what the differences. See you in the next video. 66. 8.6 Color Correct & Color Grade: Color correcting and color grading can be really complex. I'm not a professional at it. Got a long way to go if I want to be, but I do know a few things and I want to pass along what I know to you right now. When it comes to color correcting and color grading, a lot of people think that they're the same thing and they use the terms interchangeably. Basically, color correcting is taking whatever image you have and just making sure that the tones, the white balance, the colors look natural, that they're set and natural. So what you'll do there real quickly is we can click on something. Let's say I'm going to take this off. If we click on my, my a roll here and we go to Color, Color Correction is right here in your Basic Correction. Click on that and we can adjust temperature, tint, exposure, and a few other things. By tweaking these, you'll get your image to look more natural. And the interesting thing about color correction is you need to do a color correction first before you cover gray. What color grading is, is giving it a stylized look. You'll notice in different movies, like at all kinda won't name them, but they're all, all of these different, interesting blockbuster movies that have a color grade to them that can be pretty impressive. So that's what color grading is when you go in and go into not basic correction, but into creative curves, color wheels, your HSL secondary, which is fantastic and so on. We're not going to go into this because it's really complex and this is a completely, a complete course in and of itself. If you're interested, let me know and I'll put something together for you, maybe. But that's the difference between color correction and color grading. Now you have a few options. Let's go back to YouTube to now here we are. Use this scenario. You have gone in and you've taken your a roll and you've hard cut everything, you have the option to go into each clip individually and color, grade color, correct. Whichever one you want to do, that's time-consuming, don't do it. If two options to much better options. Number 1, you can, if you take if you've had your one, a role clip, It's the same clip but it's been cut up several times. Click on it, go up here to Effects Controls. And instead of going to colors here and making your corrections, because that would only affect that one clip, this one sex, this one segment. Instead here, scroll over to source. If you scroll over here to source, if you change any changes that you make here will not only affect that one clip here, but all of the other clips as well. So it's a great time-saver, but that's not what I've done here. That's one option, another great option and something to use for more than just color correcting and color grading is creating an adjustment layer. And this clip right here is what I've done. All you need to do is come down here. Click adjustment layer, make sure these match. They do. Click Okay, and you've got this right here. It'll give me an adjustment layer. I've already done that. Now, let's look at the difference. Instead of making color correction and color grading on the file itself, I've made them on this layer here without affecting the one below. So anything I make on this layer will affect everything below it. Now, let's look here and I'm going to look at my face in the picture behind me, my background. I'm going to make this adjustment layer workable and visible right now. Makes a difference off on. So I've created a up the exposure here. And that's really about it. You can tweak things however you want to make things look the way you want. Adjustment layers are fantastic and we're going to look at them again pretty soon. So when it comes to color correcting and color grading, remember, those are two different things. First, you need to color correct before you color grade. And instead of clicking on every single slice of your files and you don't need to correct those instead, let's go to your source layer and adjust it. It'll propagate or create an adjustment layer. And you can stretch that adjustment layer across everything to great options. Next, let's talk about sound effects and music. See you in the next lesson. 67. 8.7 Enhance with Sound FX: When it comes to sound, this is definitely something you want to pay attention to because it's really the icing on the cake when it comes to your video, remember, Video, 50 percent of it is sound. So we want clear audio of you speaking, but we want to put in a few sound effects that really put that pro touch on your video. One of those things is music, and that's pretty simple. You have choices when it comes to music. You can download music off a paid service, which is great. You get the rights to it and you get higher-quality music. Or you can even go to YouTube. Youtube has their own library, their own music library, look it up and you can use their audio files for free. In the beginning. Notice that I do have some music and let's listen to it real quickly. This is paid. Now if we look down at the bottom, what I've done is I've cut to the music. Notice down here, this is what we call a marker. Any, anywhere you put your timeline just for an example, I'm going to put my timeline here and click on this file at the bottom. This, I'm going to click on this audio, this music file at the bottom. If I click em, It's created a marker that's to help you visualize where to where something is. So what I've done here is their beats and the music. I've marked them one, then two, then three. And to least at these two points, the first two, I've cut to the music to where the scene will change. The video will change to the music. One, and then two. Let's listen to that real quickly. And notice as we scroll across the timeline. So when you get a little more comfortable with music and cutting, go ahead and cut to the beat when you can don't overdo it because it becomes too predictable. But it does make a difference in the level, the quality, the level of quality of your video. In addition to music, there are two other types of sounds that I suggest using. One, synthetic sounds. Those are the deans and the sort of sounds. And number two are natural sounds. When we put in B-roll, you might not have sound or good sound to go with it. So you can download or create sounds that would mimic what you would probably hear in that environment. And I've done that over here. Let's scroll, scroll to the end. Right here. And we have the music. And then right here in the yellow, I've got a synthetic sound. And then right over here, I've got a natural sound. Let's look at these are, see if you can hear them. Actual time required. Now you're sad. Moment, although obvious Blur setting, in addition to light trails, you can essentially get the same professional looking. Time-lapse through five in daylight. Now, we have B roll that's in an outside environment. And I've included natural nature sounds, maybe some birds and so on. See if we can hear it. Essentially the same, except you fill in the day, said the time. I don't know if you can hear that is clear to me, but I'll show you in a second. The next thing I want to talk about is decimal level. Now, when we put in our sound effects or music or synthetic sound, international sounds, we don't want them to be overbearing. When we put in the music, Let's click on this file right here at the bottom. And we'll go to our effect control. I've put this at a decibel level of negative 30. I think that's really depends on the music track, but negative 30 is pretty good too, where you can hear the music. But it's not disrupting the audio or the a role voice. You can play with that. Now, when we get to certain areas, you can increase it, which we'll see in a moment. Here. Let's do the same thing. Now, I've got my synthetic, synthetic audio and listen to this now yourself. Wow, that sounds to me a little loud. Here's a little quick trick. If a little loud or a little soft. If you click on that clip, hit the G letter G, and you can adjust the gain. You can go up or down. Now if I want to go down, I'm going to go negative ten. Enter. And let's listen to it again. Now you're sad and lonely. It sound a little bit better. So that's something pretty simple, so you can adjust volume levels. Now, I don't know if you can hear the birds here. If I click on this here, hit G, I'm going to go up 10. See how? Let's see if it's a little more audible for a rainy day like this desk, essentially the same except okay, so little easier to hear. Also when it comes to music, we're at that negative 30 decibels at the end. We can maybe up that decibel level and make the B-roll more interesting. Let's see what that looks like right about here today. Instead, the time-lapse that effect, that motion blur. And for more details on moment to coach him a half, check out this video right here. Okay, those are my tips when it comes to audio. All we have an x left is to export C layer. In the next lesson. 68. 8.8 Export: Just about all we have left to do is export is pretty simple, but there are a few things that you wanna make sure you do. So there aren't any mistakes that are made. The first thing you want to do is pretty obvious, but a lot of people don't do it. And that is just watch your sequence from the beginning to the end and make sure there are no errors. So all you need to do is scroll to the beginning and watch. And if you find any mistakes or any corrections you want to make, go ahead and make them and then repeat the process. That's number one. Number two is we want to go up to the top here and click on Edit, and then scroll down and click on Remove, Unused. This is going to remove any files that we've put in here that have not been placed on our timeline. Because those files, if their unused, it can slow down the rendering or the export process, the process. So by doing this thing should be a little quicker than otherwise. Next, let's go ahead and export. Now you have two choices. What you can do is click on File, go down to Export and Export Media. That's fine. Or just why you're clicked in this blue box. Click here, at least on a Mac, click Command M. And we're in the export area in here, what I suggest doing is you can hit a preset. Let's go from the top to bottom. Actually, format, lots of formats to choose from. The default is ancient, H.264. This is what YouTube is going to want. So make sure that that's there and it should be anywhere. It should be it should be there already. But just double-check. Then what I like to do is click Custom and you can scroll to the bottom and you have YouTube options. That's pretty nice. Remember we want to export in 10 ADP full HD. So let's just click on that there. Once we've done that, make sure you click Output Name. Now, I've already done this. We're just gonna do our test video and just give it a give it whatever name you want. And I'm going to put it on my desktop. Then down here, Let's double-check everything now. Great word, 1920 by 1080 P and T caustic. I like to click render at maximum depth. That's going to give a little bit extra quality as we scroll down. And then down here, click on use previews if you've already rendered sections in here, this is something we didn't really cover. But if you've already rendered parts of your video within your timeline, it's going to use these previews and make the export process quicker. So go ahead and make sure you always click on use previews and then you pretty much set to go. All you need to do is click Export and then wait for things to finish. So if you're interested in the video that I've just created here, I'll go ahead and let you take a look at it. It's a real short one. It's only about four minutes. Let's take a look at that right now. Apps like filmic pro or pro cam aid have the ability to shoot time-lapse. Is it night built into their software, and this is what you get. However, the Moment Pro Camera app can do something quite impressive that other apps can't end in this video, not only while I show you what's so special about the Moment app, I'll also show you what settings to use and what steps to take to get studying time lapses at night and stick around to the end. I'll show you one more feature on the app that will get you the smoothest time-lapse as possible. Hi, my name is cow and welcome to my channel, the right place for mobile video enthusiasts. Moment Pro Camera has the ability to blur and blend light while recording your time lapses as each second passes and the result are smooth light trails like this. Notice the difference when we place a regular time-lapse against the Moment Pro time-lapse pro level. So let me show you how to get the same results. First, get a tripod and frame your shots. Any shakiness will make your time-lapse look like this. You may think now is the time to get into time-lapse settings. But an odd, so quick, if you have the option to choose Image format, tiff, or JPEG, although it might not make much of a difference. Nonetheless, I'd like to stick with TIF since they yield higher quality, then choose your preferred resolution for K is my preferred choice, but you could go Max, moving to the right, Let's lock white balance. So there's no shift in temperature during filming. And let's lock ISO and shutter speed for smoother or light trails, a lower shutter speed around one over five will allow more light in, and an adjustment with the ISO will balance the exposure. Now we can make use of moments, light trails settings down here at the bottom, tap the effect option to get light trails. You can then choose the duration of light trails. I find the sweet spot about 0.512 at the top left of the display. You can tap this bar once to switch between intervals and frames. Intervals represents how often an image will be taken. 0.5, we'll take a photo every 2.5th, one interval of photo every second, and so on. Once you've set your integral, the bar and set the duration by choosing the number of frames. Let's get five seconds worth of video. You can see that amount as your output to the left of output is capture. This estimates how long it will take to capture five seconds of video at 1 second intervals. But this estimate seems to be a little off in my experiments, the actual time it takes is as follows. At 0.52 intervals, thirty-seconds of filming produces 1 second of time-lapse At 1 second intervals. One minute of filming produces 1 second of timelapse and it 2 second intervals. Two minutes of filming produces 1 second of time lag. So the numbers stated in the capture field is really half the actual time required. Now you're sad. Moment also has a Motion Blur setting. In addition to light trails, you can essentially get the same professional looking, super smooth time-lapse. But in daylight, the steps are essentially the same, except you fill in the day and set the time-lapse effect to Motion Blur. And for more details on moments Pro Camera app, check out this video right here. 69. 8.9 Cinematic B-Roll: So with our mystery question, my question to you was, what effect or effects can we put into our B-roll to make things look more cinematic, more professional, more interesting to the viewer. Well, I have two options for it. Number one is slow motion, number 2 or black bars. Let me explain. Let's go ahead and go to our monitor here in Premier Pro. Now, I've downloaded a B-roll clip. Let's take a look at it right here, right here. Let's take a real quick look. Real. So we've got sunset on the beach. Fantastic. This clip was filmed at 60 frames per second. Now remember, we are either filming at 30 frames per second or 24 frames per second. For YouTube, if we have film something at 60 frames per second, we can slow it down and still have things look smooth. So here on this particular sequence, we're at 30 frames per second. This clip is at 60 frames per second. In order to adjust it to, to 30 frames per second or clip, we just need to cut it in half, make it 50% the speed. Now, if you're filming, if your sequence is in 24 frames per second and you have a 60 frame per second video clip. Well, it's just 24 over 40, 23, that it's just 24 over 60, and that's 40 percent. So in order to do that, all we need to do is right-click, go to speed duration and change the speed. This one, we want to make it 50 percent so that will match our 30 frames per second. It's elongated, but now let's take a look at the waves. Slow, silky, smooth, looks pretty good. That's more epic, that's more cinematic. Now, that's your first option. Second is to put in black bars. A mat bars depends on what you want to call them. This is pretty easy as well. It gives you that cinematic look as if you're looking at something on the movie screen. Now, in order to do that, we're going to make use of our adjustment layers. Remember those? Well, we can create an adjustment layer here. Click down here and click on Adjustment Layer. And it'll give us one of these. And we'll just drag and drop it over here. Let's extend it all the way over. And let's go to our effects. Let's click on our adjustment layer. Go to effects. And we're going to type in crop, see, ROP. There it is. And let's just drag and drop it onto our adjustment layer. Now, we'll notice in our Effects Controls, we've got this option or this set of options right here, crop. We want to crop the top and the bottom in the percentage. It's really up to you, but I would say 12 or 13 percent would give you a good cinematic look. So we're gonna go to the top. Let's do 13, 13, and they'll get that. And let's go to the bottom. 13, 13. And then now we have that cinematic look. So let's go back, look at it again. Press play. In. We've added a cinematic look and feel, a professional touch to our B-roll. So the next time you have some B-roll that you want to give that epic look at Epic field. Go ahead and incorporate slow motion and cinematic bars in that should do the job. 70. 8.10 Wrap Up: So that was the basics that I use for my editing workflow on Adobe Premiere Pro. Of course, there's a lot more to this software and there's a lot more to what I actually do in editing my YouTube videos. Also, if there's something that you didn't really completely understand or you have questions about something that I've done or something about editing in Adobe Premiere Pro or editing in general. Go ahead and leave a comment I love to hear from you. Editing is a skill that takes time and editing is something that continually evolves. And I hope that you take the time and the effort in the interest in learning more editing as you go throughout your YouTube journey. If you do, you'll be really pleasantly surprised at the improvements that you make over time. In this section on editing, we looked at tidying up your files. Remember that being organized is essential and makes things less frustrating and it makes things go by quicker. Remember, we looked at laying out your files, put out your a roll, make your hard cuts, put up your B-roll, and then put everything together in a logical order. Then go ahead and add your visual effects, your transitions, change scale, add motion at transitions, and so on. Then we looked at the difference between color correcting and color grading. Go ahead and play around with those settings. Then we looked at sound effects. Remember, sound is essential, put in if you can, music synthetic sounds and natural sounds. And we looked at the exporting process, follow those steps and you should end up with a quality video. And now that you've produced a video, we want to make sure you get it up on YouTube for the world to see. But there are a few YouTube settings and requirements you're going to want to understand. So your video has the best chance it can to find viewers on YouTube will look at publishing your video on YouTube coming up in our next section in this course. See you soon. 71. 9.1 Publishing to YouTube: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Section nine of our course. This is specificly on uploading your video to YouTube, essentially publishing your video. We're almost to the end of this course. Thanks for sticking around. We saw some interesting stuff to cover. So let's get into it when it comes to publishing your video to YouTube, this is one of the easiest things to do, but there are a few things you want to make sure you get right and a few things you don't want to miss. The overall publishing process on YouTube, at least to date, is essentially a four step process. Step number one is details. Two is video elements, 3 is checks and four is visibility on step number 1, regarding details, these are the simple things that you would expect any way such as your title, your description, your tags, which are essentially keywords and key phrases and a few other thing into on video elements. These are three specific and important things. Number 1, subtitles if you choose to do so, I suggest you do to your end screen and 3 video cards. Thirdly, when it comes to checks, this is just YouTube scanning your video to make sure that it fits within YouTube policies and guidelines. And it also checks for any potential copyright issues. And number four is visibility. This is where you have the option to keep your video private or make it public and available to the world. Additionally, you get to choose what date it gets published in at what time, because this section is pretty straightforward and short. What we're gonna do is a little bit different. We're going to skip our mystery question and we're going to put the entire publishing process into one video. So let's get right into it. Shall we see you in the next lesson entirely on publishing your video on YouTube. 72. 9.2 Walking Through the Publishing Process: When we get into the first part of publishing, go ahead and jump on YouTube and all you need to do is scroll right up here to this plus sign it says Create, click on it and you have three options. Create a post. This is for Kim community posts which come later after 500 subscribers. This is where you can stream live and what you wanna do here is upload a video. So let's click on upload a video. And we're greeted with this screen, upload a video. I'm going to upload the same video file that we covered earlier on night trail is type of timelapse. So I'll click on select files. In here we are. I've got my video right here. Moment, light trails open, and we're good to go. So what YouTube is going to do now is in the background. If we look down here, it says uploading, it's going, this is where we're scanning. It's going to come over here and scan with this checks area right here. We'll come back to that in a moment. So the next thing we want to do is put in our title. Now, when it comes to our title, I want you to remember that you should hopefully have titles there, either designed for search or for suggested. Choose whichever one you want. Remember, I suggest going with designing for suggested first. So I'm going to go over to my, my script and I have my suggested in my search. Let's go ahead and choose my suggested title. Let's come back to YouTube and I'm gonna put it in here. Notice also that right here we have 48 out of 100 characters. Remember, I do suggest, or it is widely suggested that you keep your characters to 60 characters or less because it'll show up better on the screen, especially when people are on their phones. So we have our title here, fantastic. The next part is a description. Now, when it comes to description, there are several things that I would suggest. First is the importance. The importance of description does three things for you. It helps the algorithm match your video to your viewers. It helps your video be placed and ranked on Google. That's an extra benefit. And thirdly, it helps the viewer decide if they want to watch your video or not. So descriptions are not essential, but they do play a part in getting your videos viewed. In the description, you have two main areas you have above the fold and below the fold. Above the fold, you're going to have the first two or three lines that will be visible to the viewer. This is where you want to make sure you, you summarize and you tell the audience what is in the video. And you also put in a few of your major key words, put them in naturally as well. Natural language below the fold we have where everything else is below the fold. I suggest putting in a few links. These links would be anything that would be helpful to the audience, whether there are other videos or links to your playlist that I would suggest putting in a call to action specifically to subscribe to your channel. Now, to get that link, to put a link, make a hyperlink to this particular address. Https colon forward slash slash www.youtube.com, four slash channel forward slash your specific channel ID. And you can see that if you go to your channel, your page, it'll be there at the top, as you can see right here. And then fill out the rest with a question mark, sub underscore confirmation equals one. That will automatically how someone subscribe or how the option to subscribe when they click on that link really comes in handy after that. Use timestamps. Now this is an option as well. What, what's happening now is YouTube will probably generate timestamps for you if you don't do it yourself. So if you have a video that's over a few minutes long, consider putting in timestamps. But when you do that, you must start with 0, colon 000 because that will signify to YouTube that you are putting in timestamps and then give each section whatever it is, a number, as you can see down here with the example, we have around a six minute video and each has its own timestamp where that section begins. And it has a title. Make sure whatever title you give, it's still generate some degree of intrigue. You don't want to tell the viewer exactly what it is, because then people will skip around a lot. You want them to consume your video as much as possible. That's your increased audience retention. So consider timestamp. After that, I would put in a contact email for business inquiries only. After you have reached a certain amount, you probably will. Being contacted by people, unsolicited contacts from companies asking you to maybe review a product or, or possible sponsorships. So putting your contact e-mail address, and then you might want to put in a disclaimer. A disclaimer will help you with possible legal issues. This is something you really need to research yourself so it fits your channel is best possible. I'm not here to give you that legal advice, so it's not something I can't really comment on, but let me explain what a YouTube disclaimer is for your video. Let's just read that together. A YouTube disclaimer is a statement placed on a YouTube video or in the video's description that helps reduce legal liabilities or provide protection for original content. You may need a U2 disclaimer. If your video provides advice, your video features other people's intellectual property, or your video features your own copyrighted materials. So take a look at the PDF that I've, I've included the publishing checklist. And you can see an example of what I've personally included in all of my videos that may help as serve as an example, but do your own research. So as you can see here, this is where I put my description. I'm going to go, I'm going to go right over here. My script. I've got my description here. I'll highlight it. I'll just copy over this. And then there we go. I have my description. As we scroll down, I like to include a few links, a few links to other things here, as I described earlier, I've got some timestamps now, I'm not doing any timestamps in this particular video. So I'm going to take this out. I've got a link to a playlist. Then I also like to describe my channel a little bit. This is, you'll see this in the checklist that I've supplied for you. Here's my subscription. Call for action. There's possible if I talk about any links, there was a great place to put any links, but I don't have any for this particular video. Here's my contact email. If you want to contact me via email, here it is. Go ahead. I put it in a few credits. I use story blocks to help me with audio and video and so on. And I have my disclaimer. Now just real quick. Youtube has gone over to this check area and I have a notice and we'll get into that a moment. This is through story blocks which something has been flagged, but I already know what it is and it's not a big deal, but it's something to keep in mind in case this happens TO. So we've got our description done. Let's continue scrolling down. Now here's where we put our thumbnails. You do not want to use an automatically generated thumbnail. Instead, to click on here. And we'll choose one of our premier month, a pre-made thumbnail, one that we've already made. And this is what it is. I think you've already seen this image. Then let's scroll further down. Here's play. Here we are with playlist. If you have a playlist, if you don't, I really suggest making them, They come in handy. That's another suggestion, another topic altogether. But I'm going to choose mobile and video filming. Let's just use that for now on this in that playlist. By audience. This is really important. If you are making videos for kids, you are, you really need to make sure that you say yes, it is made for kids. Otherwise, you there can be some issues. However, mine is not minus for an adult audience, It's not specifically for children. So I click it as no, and this should be a default for you already. There are few other things that I don't think are really important. So we're going to skip over these. But when it comes to your tags, these are keywords and key phrases. Now when I come back to my video script, I've already got a few keywords here. These are ones that I think are important. I'm just going to highlight in these copy them, and then I'm going to paste them into here. Now. What's nice is you have about 500 possibility, 500 possible characters. He, YouTube, really it said that keywords or tags specifically aren't that important. So it's up to you whether you put them in or not, but they can be helpful if there are misspellings. For example, it might be common for someone to misspell a certain term and you can put in those misspellings and it might help you to send these people to your video, but that's really about it. Nonetheless, it's a good practice to do. I still do it in a lot of people do. I don't fill up the entirety anymore, but it's up to you. For good practice, Why not? It doesn't hurt, but don't spend too much time on. Then we have video language. I think this may help a little bit. I put in United States English. This tends to help the algorithm a little bit by placing your video right language. But these other things, for example, recording date and captions are really not necessary. When it comes to licensing distribution. This standard YouTube license is something I would use. The other option is Creative Commons, and that's just gives anyone the right to use it. But if you're here for any type of business purposes, if you don't want others to use your video without your authorization, you probably want to put standard YouTube license, basic, and then choose a category or a few options here. Choose what you think best fits your video. Mine is how to it's a how-to video, not necessarily style. And then when it comes to comment and ratings, I put down, you have these chose, allow all comments, hold potentially inappropriate comments for review of all comments or disable them. If you have a child. If your videos are mostly for children, you might want to disable. If you think that this is somewhat controversial, you might want to hide potentially inappropriate comments. I tend to allow all comments, so why not? All right, so that's pretty much it for the detail section. Now, as you see on here, the next section here is monetization. But you might not have that yet if you're not monetize. Once your monetize, this will pop up and it'll just ask you about monetization. We're going to skip over that because not part of what we're doing here. The next part is video elements. We have subtitles and screen and cards. Now, subtitles, if you can generate them, it will help the algorithm place your video because it'll use this content as key word. There are options on the Internet that are paid for where you can get subtitles generated for you. But if you do happen to have Adobe Premiere Pro, you can do this automatically. Let's go ahead and jump into Adobe Premiere Pro, and I'll show you exactly what to do. So here we are with the same video in Adobe Premiere Pro. And once you take notice right down here, this audio track here, every piece of audio and here is just from my voice. And that really is important when we're about to make a subtitle. So notice that that is on track a one. All you need to do is go up here to Captions and graphics. Go ahead and click Transcribe Sequence. And instead of clicking on mix, remember everything's on audio one, this track, so let's click on Audio 1. It's only going to use the audio from that track. Click transcribe, and let the artificial intelligence do it stuff. Great. Now we've generated a transcript. The next thing you wanna do is go through each section here and check for spelling in. Let's say you're in, if you're not sure what's going on in here, you can actually click on this pressure Spacebar and it'll play for you. So I'll press space now, a hand look at that and I built into your folder, okay, so when you find something that's wrong, go ahead and just click in this box and retype things and then everything should be fine. Once you've gone through the entire script and you're satisfied with everything. The next thing you need to do is just click here, create captions. And we're going to go over here. So keep it at subtitle. Default format is subtitle. All of this should be d by default, fine. Click on Create and again, let things go through the process. Okay, here we go and look at this. We've got subtitles. Fantastic. The final step is to get our subtitles into what we call an SRT file for you to upload to YouTube. In order to do that, click on these three dots right here, and click Export SRT. Let's go ahead. I'm going to put this on my desktop. I'm going to name it subtitles. Notice that it's a dot SRT file. Click save. In. There you go. You're ready to upload your subtitles to YouTube. Next we have add an end screen and I'll just click Add. Remember, you only want one element. This is what I would suggest. So this is what I do. I go ahead and click on this one video one subscribe. And then I immediately click on the subscribe icon and I hit Delete. That way now we have only one option for our viewers. I bring it over to the right and I place it to where I think is best toward the end. Because as soon as viewers see this, you don't want it here to launch. Soon as someone sees this, that's a signal that they're at the end of the video. So I keep it toward the end. But right here, when it scrolls in, instead of best reviewer, I make this intentional. I choose specific video. And let's just say, I'll choose this when our hair, just for an example. And there we go. We've got our end screen. Notice how it scrolls. And it has me pointing at some point right here to the video. This is actually different began, I would use, but this is just an example. Then I'll click Save. Then we have cards. Now, cards are links that come up, that will pop up at the top right of the video. These are optional, but if you do use them, do not place them in the first half of your video because somebody will click on it, they'll go to another video and it sort of hurts your audience retention. So your retention for that video instead placed them toward the end. I'll just place one around here if you want to be more intentional with this when we get into analytics, if you see what we call a dip in viewership on your video, that's a great place to place a card. Keep that in mind. So let's say we see a dip ground here. I'm going to place a video. Specifically, the same video that I chose for my end screen, which was this one. And voila, there we go with our cards, clicks it. And that's pretty much it for video elements. Let's click on Next. Now, this is an interesting example. This is the only time I, I've ever come across this on my channel. What has happened here is I have a copyright claim found. Your video is not eligible for monetization. In the first 30 seconds of this video, there is a video track that we're YouTube is flagged as a copyright claim. Now this is something I can have them check because the software that I'm using through story blocks, the subscription I have to store blocks that gives me the rights to certain video and audio is from here. So there's clearly been some issue and I can take care of that by making a claim later. But this is good for you to see. That's why I have it here for you. But what you will most likely see is another check just like this, does check mark, just like this under check. And it means your video is good to go. Once that's done, I can still post even though I have this check or this copyright claim, it's still okay. We have visibility here. You can choose to keep your video private, to keep it unlisted, or to make it public. Now you're going to most likely want to make it public. So let's click on public and then choose a date to schedule. You can do it immediately or have it posted later. Let's say I want to post, Hey, some point sometime in the future. Let's go to I, for me usually, Thursdays are good days to publish, so I'll click here. And for me it's usually around ten PM to ten PM or click here. So it's going to publish January 13th, ten PM. And then all I need to do is click schedule. And their ago. Ready to rock and roll. 73. 9.3 Wrap Up: Fantastic. Now you're better setup to optimize your videos for YouTube by publishing your videos in a consistent manner and in a way to better let the algorithm understand your content so it can serve up your video to the right viewers. Again, if you haven't already looked at the files that I've included for this particular course. One of those is titled your video description template. I highly suggest that you customize it to fit your YouTube channel as best possible and upload your video template. The Upload defaults so you can be consistent when uploading future video once you're in your YouTube studio area right here, go ahead and scroll down to settings here at the bottom. Click here, and then click on Upload defaults. And you can copy and paste whatever template that works best for you right in here into your description. And then the next time you post a video, this information will automatically propagate. So you can more easily create your YouTube video description, but we're not finished yet. A lot of YouTubers think that once they hit Publish and their video is up alive on YouTube, that their job is done. But that's really not true, Believe it or not, the first few hours and the first few days are crucial to your videos success. And there is something you can do about it. So you want to keep your eye on how things are going with their video and make the appropriate adjustments when you can. You also want to look at your analytics to understand what is working and what's not working for your future videos. So join me in the next section on analyzing and adjusting your YouTube videos. So you can use YouTube's powerful set of tools given to you so that you can better grow your channel on YouTube. See you there. 74. 10.1 Analyze & Adjust: Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you to imagine something. Imagine that your video was published three hours ago and you've jumped onto your YouTube Studio page to see how things are going. The first thing you see is latest video performance and your videos thumbnail. Under that you have a few metrics about that video. You take a quick look at views, CTR, an average view duration. Judging by the check marks and the arrows on the right, you can get a feel for if your video is doing well or not. Imagine further that your video just isn't doing that well. Or the opposite, if your video is skyrocketing and taking off, what do you do about that? Well, digging into your YouTube analytics will help you discover what's really happening and why YouTube Analytics is rather robust and takes awhile to get used to and understand. But that's okay. What we're here to do today is to go over some of the most important metrics that you want to understand to get your videos off to a good start and a few things to look back on so you can make future videos stronger. In order to do this, you'll also need a few videos already up on YouTube live, let's say about ten videos. Now, if you don't already have 10 videos, don't worry, you'll get there soon enough, so just keep posting. But once you're there, this lesson will definitely come in handy and keep this one thing in mind. All of us YouTube creators want to compare our videos against the competition, against other people out there on YouTube. But don't do that because their metrics are going to be different. They're variables will also be completely different than yours. Instead of comparing yourself against the competition, what you wanna do is be your own competition. You want to improve a little bit with each video as you continue. And if you do that soon enough, success should find you. In this section, we're going to go over our mystery question and it's the final one for this course. Then we'll look at what to do now with your videos. Third, we'll look at what to do later with your videos, and then we'll answer the mystery question. Speaking of that, let's go to our next video and see what that question is. 75. 10.2 Mystery Question: Are you ready for our final mystery question of this course? Well, it's an important one. In this section, we're going to go over a handful of metrics available on YouTube Analytics. And I want you to think, try and consider, which are the two most important metrics that will help your channel grow. Yes, there are two specific metrics that are incredibly important for your video and for your overall channels growth. Can you keep an eye out for what those two might be as we progress throughout this section. As usual, I'll give you the answer at the end. So let's jump into it. See you in the next video. 76. 10.3 What to Do Now: So in this section on what you should do now really has to do with the first, the first 24 hours of your video, let's say from three hours after publishing because that's how long it's going to take before you start getting data. And then about 24 hours, possibly 48 hours, but it's within the first few hours that are most important. So what you'll do, let's get onto YouTube Studio here. And you'll see this information as we just saw. This is your most recent video. Now, this is my data so far has been for 25 days, but yours is going to be for, let's say 24. Let me just show you what we have here. We have ranking number five, not so great, but not so bad. Views. This checkmark means we're doing okay, It's an average. My click-through rate is pretty good. It's above average 8.1 at the moment, but my view duration is down. That's only because it's a short video. So what you would do here is go into your video analytics. And the first thing you're going to see is this graph under the Overview tab. This graph is going to show you how well are you doing compared to past videos, the average and the average hears in the gray. Now, Let's go ahead. This is for 25 days. If you go right up here, you can change the time period. Let's go to first 24 hours. In the first 24 hours, my view count is doing above average. So that's something positive. If you're below average, that's of course, something you want to look at and figure out possibly why it might be your thumbnail and or your title. That's first thing you wanna do. Number two, I want you to go over to the Reach tab right here. And here we're going to look at two different things. Impressions and click through rate. Now impressions, this is the first 24 hours impressions. You'll need to look at your videos and look at past videos and see within 24 hours, what is the average now for me, it's a 1000 and this is 1.1, so it's doing slightly better. So we're doing about average with impressions. The second thing you want to look at is your CTR, your click-through rate. Now, earlier you saw it was 8.18. That's great. It got better because it made a change. And I'm going to talk to you about in a moment. But my average for my channel is about, say, around 6%. If it was anywhere below 6%, then I'm going to consider making a change and that's what I want you to do. If you have average impressions. But your click-through rate is doing well, or about average, just let it sit. That's fine You're doing okay. However, if your impressions or average, or your impressions are low, lower than average, and your click-through rate is below average, then you're going to want to make a change. And what that change is going to be. You want to take your thumbnail and your title and re-examine them. Start out maybe by switching your thumbnail. Wait a few hours and see if there's a change. If not, maybe change your title and see if there's a change in this sometimes takes 23 or 44 times. So it's a good idea to have a thumbnail and a title, a second or a third option ready for you. And that's what the pros do. Alright, so if we go to our analytics, Let's take a look. Since published. It took off, my video took off, started doing very well. And then it started to dip Into the average section in, around here. This is when I re-examined things and let's take a look what I did. I changed the title. I kept the thumbnail, but I changed the title. So my suggested this is the original title. I have. This app does something special, the others don't, and it did well, then YouTube didn't really pick it up as much. So we needed to consider going to something more search based. Then I put in this particular title, this app does one thing better than the others. And I put in Moment Pro Camera, which is the application I was using. And this is more search oriented. And what happened was here, it went from that 6 something click-through rate and then started going up. It's going up even more now to over 8%. So keep that in mind. What do you do when you have lower average impressions and a low Click-Through Rate, do something about your thumbnail entitled. 77. 10.4 What to Do Later: So what do you do later? This is really about at least 48 hours after you've published a video. Why? That's when you go here where we were earlier, your YouTube analytics and your overview tab. If you scroll down, you'll then see what is called your key moments for audience retention, this typically will not become available until after 48 hours. Now this is going to really help you for your future videos. What we'll do here, if you have a few things to look at now, before we get up to this information here, which is really interesting, Let's take a look at what generally a graph would look like. This is the graph that I have for our video, our example of video. Now, I think it's done fairly well. It's only a four minute video, but it's done fairly well. Let's look at a few things. We're going to look at the first 30 seconds. Then we're going to look at the graph itself. And then at the end, it's tail off. This graph is, let's say, let's see, it's about 48.55% of people have watched the entire thing through, which is okay, but I would rather it be over 60 percent. Nonetheless. Let's take a look at a few other graphs that I have for you from four other of my videos. And let's see what they sort of mean. Here's a graph from a six minute video, and it's pretty, it's almost exactly level, but it's up and down. So we see a bit of a, a valley and then a peak. When we see something like this, it means that something from here as it goes down, viewers lost interest. Then when it picks back up, viewers gain interest. Anytime you see something like that, these curves are sometimes these jig jags. It's something important to keep in mind because as the slope goes down, this is content that you probably, there's something going wrong there you want to identify and try not to repeat. And when something's going up, there's content here that your viewers are interested in. You might want to make other videos around that subject, something to keep in mind another graph here. Now, the difference here is look at the time, it's 25 minutes. And this graph is pretty typical of a long video. You'll start out, you're gonna get something that crashes. Now I wish my first thirty-seconds were above 55 percent. We'll talk about that in minute. But what will typically happen? You'll get this sort of hockey stick and it goes down and continues, actually, this is one of my better performing videos. If you have a long video, this is most likely what it's going to look like. So don't worry. The longer the video you have, the more you're going to see this type of progression in a video. So keep that in mind. On the other hand, this video was only two minutes long, 60% retention, which is so, so for such a short video. But look how it sort of went straight across. This is really what we want to see in a typical video, if possible, around this 66 percent, if you can maintain that fantastic. But look, we have a drop here and then a drop again. So what I've done here is I had signaled to my audience that the video was about to finish, so people dropped off. Keep that in mind. That's one of the reasons when we end the video, we quickly say, Hey, next video, look at this and done. You don't need to say thank you. Just have that end screen with another video and you'll get less of this drop-off. And finally, this other video here, this video is six minutes, but look at these, this jig jag up and down. This is a great indication of points of interest where people are sort of skipping. Now, remember in your description you can put in timestamp. When you put in timestamps don't make them obvious, make them a bit, have some degree of intrigue so people don't skip around too much. But what's happening here is you can see denoted by these dotted, dotted lines going up and down. People are skipping from one section to another. And most likely they're going back to watch this particular part again for if it's, for example, if instituted, if it's a tutorial that want to see that information again so they understand it. So these are the typical graphs that you'll see. Ones that I don't really have to show you are ones that really just slant down and they just go straight down. We're doing something wrong and you want to see at CY, okay, having said that, let's go and look at the top, you're going to see these four things. Most likely you'll always see intro, but you might see spikes and you might see a dip. We'll see we have all three. So I'll use this as an example, worked out well. The intro is the first 30 seconds. This is crucial if you can get people to stay above this line, let's say above 66 percent. You have a much higher chance that they will continue to be engaged in your video. So really focus, of course, focus on your thumbnail and, and your tidal. Get that click. Then really work on your first thirty-seconds. So this video has performed well. We've got 70 percent retention for the first 30 seconds. Great. Another interesting thing is I've got spikes here. This means areas that people found interesting what I would want to do and what you'd want to do if you have these, go back in here, click on them, and then replay. This will tell you this will start to give you some information, some ideas of what you're doing well. And it all depends on your videos and what you're doing. So keep that in mind. I'm happy that I have four spikes, but I do also have a dip. At DIP is, is of course the opposite right here is YouTube is considering a significant drop off. Now let's take a look. What am I doing wrong? Dips are things that are turning your audience off. Now, I think I know what I'm doing wrong. If we look at this, scroll in a little bit, I'm going to push play. Look in my eyes. That looks little led to me. I don't feel that I should look that way. Looks a little arrogant to me, I feel that way. So I maybe I shouldn't squint and say bla, bla bla. That's sort of maybe not authentic, understandable. But the rest of this looks okay. And notice at the very end, just a quick dip. It's not, it's not dipping any earlier. That means the viewer is still interested in the video and I have not signaled the NDA. So keep these things in mind. Your key moments for audience retention is a fantastic graph for you to understand what you're doing well with them in your videos. Where you're doing poorly in your videos and things that you can improve upon. So once again, really focus on that first 30 seconds. Then take a look at your spikes and your dips so you know what to do for future videos. 78. 10.5 The Top Two Metrics: So how do you guess which two metrics have the greatest influence on your videos regarding YouTube? Well, those two metrics are number one, CTR, your click-through rate, and number 2, average view duration. Remember that YouTube essentially wants to do two things. Number 1, YouTube wants to serve up the right videos to the right people. And number 2, YouTube wants to keep those viewers watching as long as possible. Ctr click-through rate is essentially when a viewer is shown your thumbnail entitled, What percentage do they actually click on your video. So if you're not getting clicks, essentially everything else is a waste of time because viewers are not watching your content. So spend two to three times more than usual on your thumbnail and your title. Next, average view duration is obvious because YouTube will reward videos where people are watching are spending more time. You'll see that as your videos increase, whatever videos you may, as people watch more time or each video, YouTube is more likely to promote it. So the question might be, what's the best length for a video? And that really depends. It depends on Nietzsche's, depends on topics and depends on channel. What works for me. Usually what I've found is that if I have a video that's around 10 minutes, it's going to do fairly well. My shorter videos don't do as well. My longer videos do. But if they're too long, people might lose interests. It depends on how skilled you are at keeping people's attention. So in essence, should just have to experiment with time. So work more on these two metrics and dive in to YouTube analytics and learn as much as possible. Get familiar with it, get comfortable with it, because it is worth the time and effort. 79. 10.6 Thank You & See You Soon!: Congratulations. Now you know just about all there is to know about creating YouTube videos from start to finish. You know what equipment you'll need, how to find your niche, how to generate video ideas, how to write clickable titles, and how to design clickable thumbnails. How to write a script, how to film your video, how to edit, publish, analyze, and adjust. The next thing to do, again is to put theory into action. Continue producing videos. The more you produce, the better you'll get at it. And the next thing you'll know, you'll be looking back on past videos and you'll see how much you've made improvement. I personally have had a really good time putting this content together for you so that you can make better video. And I hope you found some value in there. Thank you so much for being a student of mine, and congratulations for making it all this way. And I hope to see you in more classes of mine because for every skill you learn, you double your chances for success. Take care, and see you soon.