Transcripts
1. YouTube Success: Welcome to your course on how
to find success on YouTube. My name is Jeven Dovey, and I've been on the platform
for around six years. In that time, I've learned a ton about how YouTube works and the things that
you need to do to find success on the platform. Now, all of us are going to
define success differently. Some of you might
just want to have a creative outlet and build an audience around
the content you love, or some of you
might want to turn this into a full-time career. This course is
going to go through the fundamentals that
you need to know, no matter what style or
size channel that you are. These are the
fundamentals that I keep coming back to
again and again, and these are the
things that helped me get to where I am
on the platform. I'm going to give you
just the mile-high view of what this course is about, and then we'll really dig
into all of these concepts. First, we'll go through
the most important thing, which is, what are
you going to create? Then we're going to go
through a little bit of information on how
you can research that topic and know that it's a path that you actually
want to follow. From there, we're
going to dig into what makes a good YouTube video. I'll go through my four
pillars of success, which are the four
things that I think are essential for every
creator out there. The last thing that we're
going to go through in this course is all
about community, because YouTube is definitely
a place where you can build a solid community around the videos that
you like creating. If you're ready to get started, let's just dive right in.
2. What Will You Create: All right, guys. Let's have a conversation about what
it is that you're shooting. You're obviously here because
you're creating content and you want to
create something that people are going to watch. It is so important
that you understand why you're producing the
content that you're producing. If you're just producing content and you don't really have
a purpose behind it, then it's going to fall flat and people aren't
going to watch it. You have to come
up with your why. Why are you producing content? You really have to think about what it is that you want to do. You need to have a plan
of attack and you need to have a goal with that content
that you're producing. What I need you to do
right now is think about the content that
you want to produce. What is the purpose behind it? Now that you know
why you're creating that piece of content, I want you to think about
what's going to make you stand out over
the other people. What is it that makes
your content different than people's content
that are existing now? That idea I want you
to hold on to because that is what's going to get
people to watch your content. You always need to understand
why you're doing something. When you have that why and you understand what
makes you unique, then your voice will
come out on camera and people will be
engaged with you. That's one of the important
things I want to get across at the
beginning is to find why you're creating content and what you hope to achieve
by creating this content. Because if you have no reason or no purpose to create content, then you're basically
just going to be running in circles, making stuff, spending a lot of time doing it, and nothing's ever going
to come out of it. Put a clear goal in your mind
of what you want to achieve with your content and come up with the why of why
you're shooting it, and then we can get started on actually producing some content. What are you going to create? I really want to put this
upfront and we need to have this discussion upfront because everyone is going to be
creating something different, and it's really going
to come from you as a creator and
your personality. One of the pitfalls of YouTube is thinking that you
have to be this crazy, wild personality like
a Peter McKinnon or a Casey Neistat
who has this big, loud personality that's
really in your face, and people are
attracted to that, but not everyone is going to be like,
wow, let's do this. That's not everyone's
personality. Like not everyone's going
to be a Jake Paul or Logan Paul and that's one of those things that you have
to discover about yourself. You have your own identity and you have your
own personality and people will be attracted to what you are going to
create as a creator. When it comes to the idea of what content you're
going to create, it's going to come from you. You really need to think about what are you
interested in? What do you like? What do you care about? Before you keep going
forward in this course, I really want you to just
do a quick exercise and start thinking through the
things that bring you joy. I know it sounds simple, but it's the little things. It's what do you want
to create videos about? If your interest is
knitting clothing for dogs, then people are going to
be attracted to that. You're going to find a group
of people who are going to be interested in knitting
clothes for dogs. There's so many
different types of content being
produced on YouTube, and there's so many
different categories and niches and types of content. I think it's one of those things you really need to discover, what you want to
create and what you think that you can bring
to the table as a creator. Are you going to
be someone who has a personality that's
on-camera like visually, like are you going to do this, or are you going to be
more behind camera or telling a story or being
off-camera as a voice-over? This exercise I want
you to go through and think about what kind of
content you want to create? What you're passionate about, not what you think
will get views, but what you
actually care about, and what you would be happy
doing five years from now, 10 years from now
if you are still creating content on YouTube. That is going to be
essential in moving forward because that's where you're
going to be starting with creating your content. Another aspect is you
have to figure out the way in which that you're
going to create content. I really want you to find content that you like and
that you relate with, because this is how
you're going to discover what kind
of content you're going to create and what kind of personality you're going to
have in front of the camera. Not everyone has to be wild and crazy and
all over the place. You've got to get that
out of your head. There is a lot of
that in YouTube. There's a lot of people that are bigger than life on YouTube, but that's not
everyone on YouTube. Everyone has their
own unique voice and everyone can carve out their own little pocket of the YouTube community because
the community is so big.
3. Research Your Idea: Now you have your idea. In the last video we talked about coming up with your idea. This is essential because
this is what we're going to style start
building off from. Your idea might change
throughout this entire course. However, we need
this initial idea. Do you want to be a travel
vlogger or do you want to be a filmmaker or do you want to do camera reviews or do you
want to do comedy sketches? Do you want to do
fitness programs? What is it that you want to do? Now what I need you to do
is head over to YouTube. What we're going
to do is just do some basic research
around that topic. I want you to come up
with some questions, some things that
people might search. Right now I want you to
just start typing this into the search window and see
what videos start popping up. If you're doing fitness, maybe you want to
do fitness videos and you want to do
fitness programs. What I want you to do
is start typing in different fitness video ideas. For example, type in 10 minute ab workout or
20 minute HIIT workout. Start looking at the videos
that are popping up. Here we are on YouTube
and I'm just going to do a quick sample of the process that I want you to go through. Say you're looking for fitness, that's what you're
getting into, you want to do fitness videos. I would type in 10
minute HIIT workout. I'm going to start
looking at and see what videos are popping up. I've got this 10 minute
full body HIIT workout, it's got 6.3 million views. We've got 10 minute
HIIT, 300,000 views. This express calorie
burn, 10 minutes. What we're seeing is not only the videos that are
doing well in a search, but we're going to start
seeing some names pop ups. I can tell you with the fitness
niche, POPSUGAR fitness, FitnessBlender, these are very popular channels and you're going to start seeing
these pop up all the time. That's what you're looking
for. You're looking for people that pop up all the time and
videos that do well. This Emi Wong keeps
popping up all over. If we go to her channel, you can see that she's got tons of views on
all of her videos, a lot of workout stuff. You could see that she
has 800,000 followers. This is a good person
to write down if you're getting into
the fitness category. Now, don't forget to go
back and just search other ideas that you have around the niche that
you're getting into. Let's say we'll do ab
workout for beginners. As you're typing, you can see all the different
search results that other people are
looking for as well. This is even more of
a jumping off point. Start typing in ab workout and go through all of
these search results, so ab workout for beginners. Now we got different
channels, we got blogilates. This is another big channel
in the fitness space. You'll start seeing
different channels depending on the type of search
results you're going for. The idea is that
we want to paint a big picture of all the
different channels that are in the space and
who's the voices in the space and what type
of videos are doing well. It's also going to
give you an idea of the content that you're going
to create down the road. This is the basic starting
point that we're getting to when we're coming up with the content that you're
creating for your channel. The accounts that
you keep seeing, the people that are
producing content that are showing up on multiple searches, are the ones that are
doing it right and they're the ones who are a
voice in this niche. What we're doing right
now is basically just figuring out
what kind of content is being created in this niche and also
discovering your niche. As you do these searches, we're going to start
narrowing down what kind of content
is being shot around the videos that you
want to produce and you're going to start
discovering your niche. It's one of those things
that you have to know to be able to be successful
on YouTube, you have to understand
what your niche is. As you're doing these searches, I want you to start
taking videos, maybe putting them
in an Excel document on a Word document,
it doesn't matter. But I want you to
start pulling out the videos that are coming up in the first few results
and also I want you to start looking for the
creators that are coming up in the
first few results. As you're finding the people and the videos that are
doing very well, what I want you to do is make
a list of 10 to 20 creators that you're noticing are coming up a lot on
these searches. These are important
because these people are the ones who are a voice in the niche that you're going to start
creating content for. Now with this, I
also want you to figure out the videos
that are doing very well. What are the topics that are
getting millions of views or hundreds of thousands
of years versus the ones that are
getting 1,000 views? This is important
because you need to see what people are actually searching for when they're going on YouTube and
searching for content. But at its base level, what we want to find is just
the creators in the space that you want to create in and the types of videos
that they're creating. As you're finding
these different creators and the videos, figure out what
you actually like. What videos resonate with you, what videos that you actually
enjoy when you watch these. This might take
some time because you're going to need to
watch a lot of content. You're going to need to just dig through your different
search results. But the key is
finding those people, finding those creators that are popping up everywhere and also finding what videos are doing very well in this
particular niche. We have to talk about
another aspect when researching the idea and
this is outside of YouTube. You need to think about
the current events that are going on
or something that's new and exciting that people would want to
see or hear about. These are topics that you
should also keep on your radar. If a new product is coming
out and it's in your niche, then you should
try to do a video about that product because
there's going to be a lot of eyeballs that are going to be looking for those videos on reviews or just information
about those products. If it's something newsworthy
or topical or if it's just something that is being talked about on a large scale, then those are
different topics that you could use for your channel. Anything mainstream, anything
global, anything big, is a good topic to
approach because there's more people
searching for those topics. Keep that in mind
when you're coming up with ideas for your videos. Is there something out there
in the world that people are paying attention to that you
could create a video around? Casey Neistat, when
Pokemon GO was a huge popular thing and everyone was talking
about Pokemon GO, he did a video called Pokemon
GO in Real Life and he timed it just right
because this was at the height of the
whole Pokemon GO era. He was able to get a ton of views and that
became a viral video for him. You need to think about
these different things that are happening in
the media and happening in the news or just
very topical at that moment and
then create a video around that if it makes
sense for your channel.
4. YouTuber Mindset: There are three things
that's really going to hold you back in terms
of your YouTube journey. First is fear, second
is procrastination, and third is perfectionism. I want to touch on
perfectionism for a minute. One of the issues that
plagues creators is this idea that you have
to have things perfect. This isn't in YouTube, this is through
any sort creation. If you're so focused
on being perfect, and not getting
stuff up and out, it hinders you from
moving forward, and moving forward is a super important factor
when it comes to YouTube. Now, in other modes of
artistic expression, perfectionism might be something that you want to strive for, but when it comes to YouTube
and creating content, there really isn't
a perfect video and sometimes perfect videos
actually hurt a channel. There's this middle ground because this is a world
of self production, so we are self producers. We're creating content for
other people to consume, and it's more on a
customer to customer level versus a big business or a
big studio to a customer. There is that level of
imperfection that's going to happen in any video that
you create on YouTube. Something that's
really going to hurt your journey is if you're really focused on being technically perfect with everything
that you do, so that you don't create. You need to have this balance
of creating content in a timely manner where you
can be consistent and continue to create
content in the same way. But you want to be able to
not be so worried about perfection that you
can finish your video, move on to the next. From this, I want to segue into the idea of getting started. The first thing and the number one thing that you have to remember when you're creating content and
becoming a YouTuber is that you have
to press "Record". If you don't press "Record", if you don't get over that
fear of making content, then you're never
going to become successful as a creator. That's my big number one thing, and that is you need to
get over your fear of pressing "Record" and moving
on to the next project. You need to start making
your content right now. You need to press "Record". Fear is one of those things
that's going to hold you back this entire process with all the content that
you're creating. If you're worried about what
it is that you're creating, then you're never going to
move forward and you're never going to
grow as a creator. The biggest tip that I'll give you right off the bat to be able to start this journey and be successful on this journey, is to hit "Record" and
then from there you edit, and then upload, and
then do it again. But you can't psych
yourself out. You can't stop the process
because when you do that, then you're ultimately
going to fail, but it all starts with
that initial video and hitting "Record" and
then doing that again, and again, and again. I think one of the
hardest things when you're starting
out as a creator is comparing yourself to those who are
already successful. But the thing that you have to realize as a creator starting out or a smaller creator is that things don't
happen overnight. All of us started somewhere. All of us started with zero, and one of the things
that has changed from then until now is that, there are more resources
for you out there to be successful and to make this
journey happen faster, but it's still a journey. Every time you start a journey, you're going to be learning
from your experience, you're going to be learning
from your mistakes. You're not going to
start out knowing everything there is to know
about a topic right away. It doesn't work like that. You have to spend time creating, you have to spend time in
the trenches going for it, and getting after it, and doing everything
that you need to do to be successful
as a creator, but you're not going to
find success immediately, it doesn't work like that. There will be times
where things will happen and you'll have
this moment of success, but you can't let those
moments takeover. You still have to
put in the time, you have to put in the effort because nothing's going
to happen overnight.
5. Consistency: Before you get out there
and start shooting, we do have to have a
talk about consistency. Now think of it
like a restaurant. If you just showed up to
your favorite restaurant and it wasn't open when
it's supposed to be open, you would get upset
and you might not come back or you might get
frustrated with the restaurant. Well, think of your YouTube
channel like a restaurant. People will expect
it to be open. What that means is
you want to make sure that you're putting out
content week after week. If you have the
time and you have more technical skills so you're able to produce more content, then try to do two
videos a week. It really comes down
to you on what you can create and how much time you
have to create the content. Now I wouldn't push
you to do seven days a week or six days a week
or anything like that. Doing daily vlogs is really
tough and it's really hard if you're trying to
create content every day. When you create
content every day, it's an interesting
challenge for yourself, but I really don't think that anyone should be doing
it for long term, and I don't think you
should start out doing it. Takes too much time to be
shooting all day, every day, and then edit that night to put it out the
next morning to really see strong growth and to really be successful
on the platform. There's so many other elements that we're going to
be talking about. Things like titles and thumbnails and keywords
that we're really going to dive into researching
where when you really understand how to utilize
the YouTube ranking system, it might take you
an entire day to do just the metadata that
goes into a video. I don't want you to
get so fried that you burn out through the
course of these weeks. What I want you to do is
be consistent and create something that's realistic
for you and you at this time.
6. YouTube Video Structure: I'm going to talk about
YouTube story structure because it is a
little bit different. In general, when it comes to
creating YouTube content, you're going to have
to find a structure that works with your audience. There's not one structure
that works for every video, and we're going to
figure this out as we dive into the analytics. When we start looking at
audience retention and we start looking at where people are dropping off your videos, that's going to help us develop a story structure that
works for your content. For me it's constantly evolving. I'm always changing up
the structure of how I do my videos because we have
so much analytical data that shows us where people are dropping off our
videos or where people are watching to and then go into another video or leaving
YouTube altogether. Because we have this
data and because we have this pool of people
watching our content, we can know that
we need to change our structure because
of X, Y, or Z. But before we get into some ideas around YouTube
content specifically, I want to go over just
basic story structure, a three-act structure. This is the structure
that all films and TV and documentaries and
everything's based around. It's the general idea of how you approach a story
and tell a story, and this is general
storytelling. There's three acts in a story. In Act 1, you're basically introing your hero
or main character, and you're introing the
conflict of the story. What does this hero want to do? What is against this hero? The hero is just
your main subject, the person that is the
subject of your video. Now, part of Act 1 is
you want to create curiosity because if you
don't create curiosity, then people aren't
going to watch through the rest of the video. You're setting up
the story and you're creating curiosity
for the audience. The section is going to
set up the obstacle or the challenge that this entire
video is going to answer. Now, Act 2 is like the meat
and potatoes of your videos. Act 2 is the hero's journey. It's where everything is
happening in your video. You've set it up in Act 1. Act 2 is the journey
of your character trying to solve this problem
or answer the question, whatever you set up in Act 1. Act 2 is going to have scenes
that build upon each other. Each scene could have its own
beginning, middle, and end. What I mean by this is you
can have little mini-scenes that are within the bigger
story that you're telling, and I'll talk about this
a little bit when I talk about vlogging towards
the end of this video. But when it comes to your video, it's not just one storyline
from beginning to end. You have your overarching story. But then you can set
up little scenes, and when you do a scene, you have to intro that scene, show the course of that scene, and then have a
closing on that scene. That's why I mean, there's
a beginning, middle, end to everything
that you produce, and you can have multiple of
these throughout your video. A lot of these are going to
happen within this Act 2. You're going to have a
lot of these mini-scenes that are driving
the story forward. Now also, this is where
the main character is going to attempt to
solve the problem, but a lot of times this is where more
challenges will come forward or things will
push that character back. Good storytelling is keeping people on the edge of their seat as they're trying
to move that needle forward to get to
that resolution, and things will happen. Things will come up that
are going to change where that character is going or where the story is taking you, and that's the whole
part of storytelling. It's a journey,
it's an experience that you're taking
an audience through. Good storytelling
is not going to give everything away in Act 2, it's basically going to
keep the ball moving forward to get to Act 3. Now, Act 3 is your resolution, and this is where you
wrap up everything. This is where you
tie it neatly with a bow or you leave
a cliffhanger. Whatever you set up at
the beginning in Act 1, Act 3 is the resolution
and that's where you solve the problem and
it ends the story. Now, from here you can do a
cliffhanger, like I said, and keep the story
moving forward and give people something
that they want to watch in the next video. This is something that
you're going to do in YouTube because you want to
keep people on your channel. Now, another super
important aspect of storytelling is the hook, which comes at the very
beginning of the video and that is taking something from
the entire experience, the entire journey from Act
1 to Act 3 that's going to grab the audience's attention and you put that right upfront. That is the hook.
You're grabbing someone and pulling
them into your video. Now, let's talk about YouTube. That's just the basic
three-act story structure, and this is the story
structure that goes through most films,
videos, everything. It's set up in this
three-act structure, and that's how you tell a story and keep an audience engaged. Now, YouTube is a different animal, and
like I said earlier, you're dealing with
people's attention spans and you're dealing with
this audience retention. You're not sitting at a
theater and keeping people that are watching your videos
for the whole two hours. You're dealing with sidebars that have all these
extra videos. You're dealing with
ads, you're dealing with all the stuff
that's happening on the web that's drivings people's attention
away from your videos. So three-act structure
is definitely where you want to start when you're beginning
your videos. You want to come up
with a beginning, an intro, something that introduces what you're
going to do for your video, you're going to go
through that journey, and then you're going
to have some sort of wrap-up and then keep people on your channel by pushing them into
your other videos. In terms of a vlog, let's talk about
the vlog structure, and I use this same
three-act structure when I do my vlogs. However, I try to
keep things moving a little bit faster because
people's attention span. When I do a vlog, what I do is I set up what I'm going
to do in the vlog and the key when it comes to telling a good
YouTube video story is that you need to have a point and a reason of why
you're creating this video. You can't just follow someone through their day and
think that you're going to get the attention of a large group of people because
only people that really care about you as a creator
are going to want to just watch some BTS footage of whatever is
that you're doing. Even if you're a vlogger
and you're someone who is like a travel blogger, you're going to need to have a point to each
video that you make, and that's what you're
going to create your three-act structure around. Then obviously, a vlog is like a fun video where you're taking someone through
an experience. For example, if I was to go to Belize and go scuba diving, now one of my videos might be about diving in the Blue Hole, which is a famous
spot in Belize, and I would develop a story around that entire experience. Instead of just
saying, we're going to go through my day
of scuba diving, I would try to find some conflict or something of interest that's
around the Blue Hole. The Blue Hole itself is not
the safest diving spot. I might create a story around that aspect of the Blue Hole
and basically introduce the video in Act 1
that talks about some of the issues that happen
at the Blue Hole and why a lot of dive centers don't
want to take people out to this place to go diving and some of the things that have
happened in the past. I might do a little
research into this and get some data that can help support what it
is that I'm doing. Now, Act 2 is my journey. I get on the boat,
I'm going out to the Blue Hole, I'm
doing the dive, and you're trying to create curiosity and keep the
story moving forward. Like I said, there's many
stories within your stories. There might be like one story about just
getting out there, so there'll be a beginning
of finding the boat, getting the person to
take me out there, the journey to get
there, and then the resolution is actually
getting to the Blue Hole. That's a little
mini-story within the bigger idea of this entire
vlog that I'm creating. Then the second story
might be jumping into the water and then the
actual dive experience. Some things that might come up, some scary things, some
interesting things, and then the resolution is
you'd get back on the boat, talk about the experience. That's another
little mini-story. You can craft these
little mini-stories within your second act, that's basically
driving the story forward and getting to
that end, the resolution. A lot of times with
my YouTube content when it comes to the resolution, you don't want to
have these big, lengthy resolutions
because people will click off your video. In terms of the third act, a lot of times this
is getting shrunk on YouTube to basically just
finishing off the video, maybe creating a resolution to the story that you're saying. For this Blue Hole story, it might be that
we're back on land, a quick little talk
about my experience, what I learned from it, what I liked about it. Then in the video and push
people into my playlist, that's all about
exploring Belize and all these
different things that I've been doing in Belize. You could see how the
three-act structure will appeal to any kind of content
that you're creating. Now, when it comes to
something like a tutorial, this structure is not the same. You're going to have your intro, you're going to have your
storytelling elements, and then you're going
have your conclusion. You can do this with anything
that you're creating, but a lot of times a tutorial, for example, is more based on information so you're going
to intro the product. It's not going to be
like a crazy story, but you're basically introing a product or introing a concept. You're going to teach that
concept and then you're going to give people something to walk away from
the video with. Three-act structure is
just a jumping-off point. A big aspect is just start creating and as I've
been talking about is that you need to do your research and you
need to see what other creators are doing and start looking at
their structure. See what's working for them and either use that and build
your own structure from it or see ways that
you could deviate from that and create something
unique for your channel. It's going to come down to basically telling your story
beginning, middle, and end. Especially if you're
going to be doing more documentary-style content, then you're going
to be using more of this three-act structure. Then I want you
to really look at your competitors and the
other creators in your niche, the people that are creating content around the same style of stuff that you're
doing and look at their structures and see
what's working for them. But the biggest thing that
I want to leave you with, especially for new creators, people that have
only a few videos on your channel or you're
just starting out, is that it takes a little bit of time to
figure out your rhythm. A lot of times your first 100
videos are going to suck. Your second 100 videos
are going to suck. But that's just the
process of YouTube, like everything that you
create is going to get better and build on the last
thing that you created. I've almost shot up to
500 videos on my channel, and I'll look back
at videos I did a few months ago and those suck. You're always having
to improve what you're doing and you always have to be trying to better yourself, but you also have
to realize that it's a marathon, and
it's not a sprint. Your videos are not going to be perfect right out of the gate, and if you fail
and you don't get the perfect story structure
out of the beginning, don't be hard on yourself. Just keep creating and look back at your videos once
in a while and be like, how can I improve on this? As we get more and more
into the analytical data, you'll be able to look at your audience retention
and be like, look, people are dropping
off right here, you're going to go to
that point in the video and you're going to be
like, what did I do? Did I tell people the resolution too early and then they're gone? You're going to start using
analytical data to help you drive what kind of decisions you're going to make
with your story structure. Now, one last thing I
want to leave you with, with anyone creating
content on YouTube. Instead of just going out
there and shooting and not having any structure,
create an outline. Create some beginning,
middle, and end. Create some talking points or things that you're going to
cover throughout the video. I do it all on my phone, on my notes pad. I'll just create
a basic outline, a structure of what I
want this video to do, where I want this video to go. Things obviously change, especially if you're a vlogger, things will change over time, but you need to set up on
the front end and outline a basic structure of this video is about X. I'm
going to go through X, Y, and Z in this video, and these are different things
I want to hit and try to create that basic
flow of a story. A beginning, a middle, and end, and try to come up with maybe some ideas for many stories that go within a bigger story
that you're creating. When it comes to vlogging, a lot of times what I say is three mini-stories makes up
a vlog because that will give you around a
5-10-minute vlog and that's obviously
ideal for YouTube. You can typically have
three mini-stories, but depending on what kind of creator you are, that
I might go quicker. You might have more or
you might have less. It might be a video around one single idea and that will be the interest
of the entire video. You just got to keep
reinventing yourself. You got to keep thinking
about your structure and see where you want
to take your videos, and just keep trying things. Guys, if you have any other questions
about story structure, just please reach out to me. I'd love to help you
guys through this and see what's working
for your channel.
7. Creating Value: This is going to be one of
my four pillars for success. What the four pillars
are represent what it takes to be
successful on YouTube. These are the four things
that I've boiled it down to, that if you can optimize and crush it with these four items, then you will find
success on YouTube, and everything is going to
play into these four pillars. Pillar number 1 is your content. I've said this before
in previous videos, but your content is the most important aspect
of all of your videos. Content is king. That is
the number one thing. If you don't have good content, then everything else
doesn't matter because you can get all the people
to click your videos, you can get people watching, but if your content isn't good, then people are
going to click off and go do something else, and will go find another
video or something else. So your content is the most important aspect
of your YouTube channel, and it has to start
with your content. So in this training, I want you to think about a
few things that's really going to help you enhance your content and make it better. Now, the first thing is value. Value is the number
one thing that you need to think about when
you're creating content. What value are you
giving with this video? Videos need to have some value, and if you're trying to
grow as a small creator, the best way to grow
is by search volume, and search volume comes from
videos that have value. So if you do a video that's promoting an idea or a concept, but you only give
half of the idea out there and then
you're like, "Oh, go buy my product that
has everything," nobody is going to watch
your content after they watched that first video, because you're not
going to actually give them anything of value. So a lot of people in the
digital space talk about this and you basically have to give away all your secrets. This is not a new idea, but this is just how
things work down. You can't use YouTube as a
way to promote your products, but not actually give any
value on the YouTube side. So it all comes down
to giving value. That's why you'll see more and more with people's
YouTube content, they're giving you
all the secrets right there on YouTube. For example, with my video on how to shoot in low
light settings. This was a great video that
went through a bunch of different tactics
on how to shoot in low-light settings
with your camera, and this is with any camera. So this video is broad, you don't have to have
a specific camera, and it appeals to
a larger audience, and it's teaching you
something of value that you can go then implement. That video is doing very
well on my channel and it gets a lot of attention and a
lot of subscribers from it. My number 1 video is a beginner's
guide to the DJI Spark. The DJI Spark was a popular
product when it came out, and this beginner's
guide was what DJI was missing in
their startup series. So a lot of people watch this video because
they wanted to know all the different
functionalities and how to use the controller
and things like that. So I gave a ton of value. It's a 30-minute video that talks through everything
you can think about on this drone if you're just starting
out with drones. So that video gave
a ton of value. So when it comes
to your content, you need to give value. Depending on your niche, you could either go super
broad or super specific. For me, we're doing cameras and photography and
things like that. My broad topics are
the ones that apply to anyone shooting on
any type of camera, and it's more of the
bigger overall concepts. Whereas my very specific
videos might be on a single products
like the DJI Spark. So only people that have
the DJI Spark are going to be watching that video because
they have that product. When you're thinking of
value for your videos, think in a few different ways. Think in big broad
topics that will appeal to the larger group
of people in your niche. So think what everyone
in that niche might be interested in and
give value for that. Now, also think of
specific individual things that you're going to have
a smaller group of people, but highly engaged group
of people that are really going to get
something out of this video. I think if you think
in those two ways, if you think of broad and
then a little bit more specific and dance between the two when you're
creating videos, then you're going to
reach more people and you're going to see what
works and what doesn't work. I constantly am
playing this game. I'm trying different
types of videos, whether they're broad or
more specific to see what plays well to my audience and see where I get responses from. To see what videos take off
over time or ones that slowly decline and then end up not getting views in a few
months down the road. So you really have
to play this game. But the key to all
of this is value, you have to give something. Give a lot of your secrets away. That's the whole
nature of YouTube now is everyone is giving
away something, and if you don't give that away, then people won't
want to subscribe, because people are used to finding what they
need through YouTube. If someone is looking on
YouTube for a specific title, you need to be
able to fill that. Then in your niche, you need to look for
those opportunities to fill those questions
or those needs, and every niche is going to
be a little bit different. Some will have more
people creating for it and some will
have next to none. I was just working with my
buddy Jessie on a new video for his channel and he was
talking about fractal filters. When we started digging, there was like three
videos on these filters. So that was a very
specific topic in the photography niche, but not a lot of people
are creating for it, so there's an opportunity
there to create a video that will have a group of highly engaged people watching it, and then he'll be
able to rank in that, so when people are looking
at fractal filters, his video is now going
to pop up number 1. So you've got to look
for these opportunities where you can give
a lot of value and demonstrate something or do a review or something that gives value in your niche and fill
holes and answer questions. You want to be seen as
a voice for your niche. You want to become the
lighthouse for your niche. So you need to
demonstrate lots of value to be able
to get the people who are actively engaged and trust everything
that you say. When you produce a video, you want to know
whether that video is performing better than the
average on your channel, or worse than the average. Because if it's
performing better, then those are the videos that you're going to keep recreating. Whereas if it's
performing worse, those are the videos
you're going to start shying away from. Just looking at your videos
and looking for trends, you'll start seeing
that you have a baseline that you'll get
for most of your videos. I know on my channel
I get anywhere from a few thousand views
to 20,000 views, and that's range that I'm looking for, that's the average. Then if I get a video that
gets 50,000 or 100,000 views, I know that's a video that's
spiked and that's taken off. So you're looking for spikes, you're looking for those videos that take off on your channel, you want to recreate those
or you want to create versions of those or create
series out of that topic. Because when you see that spike, it obviously means
that this video is being searched
for more on YouTube, or this video is
being suggested more. So instead of just trying
different things all the time, if you start looking for
these spikes and finding what videos do very well in
your channel, recreate it. You don't always have
to be coming up with brand new ideas and looking
for the next best thing. You want to look for trends
and things that work, and then create videos
out of those trends because you know that they are
a do-well on your channel. Every time that I've done this where I've
seen a video that performs very well and then created another
version out of this, that second video does just as well or sometimes
even better. This works for a few reasons. One is that you've
already seen that this video has performed
well on your channel, so there's a good chance
that this is going to perform well again
on your channel. Now, one quick example is I did a video iPhone
gimbal shootout, where I took a bunch
of smartphone gimbals and did a comparison
between them. That video did particularly
well on my channel, so I did another video called
smartphone gimbal shootout, which was doubling down
on that idea that I already found that performed
well on my channel, and that video also did well. One thing about the
YouTube algorithm is that it does reward content that is similar to content that's performed
well on your channel. Well, because I already
had a video that was performing well
around the same topic, around the same niche
with similar keywords, YouTube's going to automatically give more value to
my new video that came out because
this style of video with these keywords has
already performed well. You'll start getting
more momentum the more that you double
down on content and you find those things
that really work well for your niche and for the topic that you're creating
on your channel. So taking risks is a huge part
of the YouTube experience. We've talked about how
you can find videos that have spiked on your
channel and recreate those. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, you
have to take risks. So you have to come up with new ideas and try
things, and yes, sometimes you're going to fail, and sometimes you're
not going to fail and these videos are
going to do very well. I think one of the
key things that you need to do is always be
reinventing yourself. So coming up with new ideas to talk about the topics
you do on your channel and come up with some
ideas that are a little risky and are hard to do. Now, you might have in your head like this might be
an awesome idea, but it might be a risk for
you and you might fail. I think you need to
realize that you got to just fail sometimes and you've got to allow yourself to fail. So don't push
yourself down and do not do a video because you don't think it's
going to perform. The idea of everything that
we're talking about in this course series is
setting you up for success. With that, you have
to take risks, and you have to try things. Now, I'm not saying
take a risk with every video on your channel
for four videos in a row, but what I'm saying
is do a video that you know is going
to perform well, do a video that you know is
going to perform average, and do a video that's going
to completely take a risk, and play with these
different formats that work on your channel
and see if you can find a whole new path of
different style of videos that your viewers might be very interested
in and might bring a lot more people
to your channel. That's the idea
with taking risks, is you're basically creating
this pool of people, you're going to be slowly,
gradually growing, but when you take a
risk and it pays off, what happens is it's going
to spike your channel, you're going to get a ton of subscribers and
you're going to find a new style of
content that you're going to want to
start repeating. The only way to do that
is by taking risks. So don't limit yourself to
just what you know works, but start playing around with
different ideas and just filter them in
here and there and see how they affect
your channel.
8. Get The Click: We're going to talk about the
second pillar of success, and that is GET THE CLICK. What I mean by get the click is getting people to actually
click on your video, and it's super important to
have success on YouTube, to get the click. Because if YouTube
shows your videos, to a bunch of people, and they're clicking
on other videos, then YouTube's not
going to want to continue to show your
videos to these people. Seventy percent of the views on YouTube is from YouTube
recommending content, so you want to be in that 70 percent where
YouTube is recommending, because if they're
showing videos to an audience and you're not
the one getting the click, then they're going to
pick the videos that's getting the click
and show that more. Getting the click
is super important. It's probably one of
the most important aspects about YouTube, just right down from content. Now obviously content
is the most important, because once you're watching it, that is the most
important thing, but you have to get the click. Up front the click is more
important than content, because you need to get people
to click into your video. But you have to have sold
videos for people to actually continue to watch and then YouTube to
keep recommending, and it all works together. This is why I'm doing
it in this order, so content first, then we're going to talk
about getting the click. The click comes from your
title, and your thumbnail. Those two elements
are going to decide whether your video is
going to get clicked on, or whether someone's
going to move past. Let me show you this funnel
in your YouTube analytic, and it's something that you
need to pay attention to. When you go into YouTube Studio, click on the tab up here, that says reach viewers, and then you'll see
this little funnel and it says impressions
that led to watch time. Now, watch time is one of the most important
metrics in YouTube. Watch time is not simply how long someone watches
your videos, it's a lot more
involved in that, and there's a few
metrics that work together to determine
your watch time. Your watch time is a measure
of how much your video contribute to an
overall user's time watching videos on the site. You want a higher
click-through rate that leads to someone watching
the entirety of your video, and then moving on to watch another video on YouTube,
and potentially binge-watch. The more that someone
can enter YouTube, watch your video, and then
binge-watch more content, the more that
YouTube will promote that video, so overall, your videos will be promoted higher in the ranking system. When we're looking
at this funnel, what we're seeing is at
the top impressions. That's how many times
that your video has appeared in front
of someone else. This could be on the sidebar, this could be on the homepage, this could be on the news feed. Just whenever a video appears,
that's an impression. Then the next line down is
your click-through rate. Idea is that you want to get that click-through rate higher, you want to get
that as high as you possibly can, because
the higher that is, that means the more that
YouTube shows your content, the more that people
will click your videos. Then it's showing the views
from the impressions, which leads to an average view
duration of five minutes. Ideally, when you look at this funnel and you look
into your analytics, you need to look at your
click-through rate, and you need to look
at your watch time. Because both of those numbers
need to keep going up. That's going to give you
more power in YouTube, and make your videos rank
higher in the system. You want YouTube to be suggesting your videos
to other people, because if 70 percent of the content on
YouTube is suggested, you want to be in
that 70 percent. Let's talk about titles
for a little bit. Now, there's a few things
that you really need to think about when you're
creating your titles, so that they are
the most effective and that people will
actually click on them. First, comes from your
keyword research. When you're typing in keywords, when you're typing
in how to vlog, or smartphone gimbal or best place to scuba
dive in Costa Rica, or just different keywords
that you might come up with. Those are the things that
you're going to start making your titles out of, is keyword. Your title needs to start with that keyword, that's important. Now, the second
part is you can't just put a bunch of
keywords in your title. You can't just say
smartphone gimbal, iPhone gimbal review, like all these words
that are keywords that people might be looking up to find smartphone gimbal reviews. You need to write your titles like it's written by a human. You need to have engaging titles that aren't just
full of keywords. Let's take my low light
video as another sample. My title is how to shoot in
low light and reduce noise. That's like a normal
sentence written by someone, but I'm targeting the keyword
how to shoot in low light. You just got to
come up with ways to put the keyword in there, that makes sense, and try to get that keyword as far
forward as possible. Sometimes it's going
to be the first, because it won't sound proper, and you might need a word before the keyword,
and that's fine. You just want to get
that keyword as close to the beginning of
your title as possible. Now something I
have been playing around with more recently when it comes to specific
product reviews, is whether or not putting that product review
in the title. If a product is launched, there's usually a lot of
buzz around that product, and it's a good time to
basically create a video, because you'll get a lot
of views right then. However, that's a review video and people are going
to look for that, and then when the next
product comes out that's newer or better than the
product that you reviewed, your video's going
to slowly die. Whereas, if you make
a video where you incorporate the review
into the video. For example, I did a video about the new Peter McKinnon's
Variable ND Filters, and I released it on the day
that the filters came out. However, I didn't do a PolarPro Variable
ND Filter review. What I did, was I
created a video that's an educational
piece about why you need ND filters for video. This video has
more searchability for a longer period of time, because eventually these variable ND filters
won't be new anymore, and people won't be searching
for them in the same way. My idea behind this video was to create something
that's more educational, something that has
more long-term value, and then include
the product in that versus doing a simple
product review. You should start thinking about different ways to
incorporate products, or different ways that
you can use your titles to target something that's
more specific right now, or target something
that's going to get searches month after month
and year after year. You've got to think about
your titles in that way. Is this a title that's
specific to right now, or is this a title
that can last for a longer period of time?
You should do both. You should do some that
will last for a while, and some that are more
recent, more relevant. Because you always need to be experimenting with
your YouTube channel, and seeing what's working
and what's not to direct which way you want to go with
your titles moving forward. The last thing that I
want to talk about is thinking of keyword
alternatives. If you were creating
a video about the best camera for vlogging. The keywords that
you might go after are the best camera
for vlogging, or the best vlog camera. Now a lot of people might be
targeting those keywords, so you might want
to come up with similar keywords that
have high search volume, but people aren't creating
as many videos for, and this is where
TubeBuddy comes in. When you do a search on
the right-hand side, TubeBuddy will give you alternatives of different
keywords to look at. This is why you want to
always be searching and finding different keywords
around similar topics. Because what will happen is that you will find
a keyword where there isn't a ton of
people creating videos for that specific keyword,
and you can rank. Whereas if you go
after the main keyword that you were
originally thinking, maybe there's a
ton of videos and your video wouldn't
rank as well, and the idea is you want to rank in more places at more times. Go after the keywords that
have high search volume, but not a ton of people
creating content for it. Another title you might
go after would be, the best vlog camera
for travelers, or the best travel vlog camera. You're starting to add in other keywords but
around the same topic, and it might have a
little less views because less people are searching
for that specific keyword, but if your video ranks
at the top of that, it's way more important to
get your video to rank, than it is to just have your video in this
giant pool where your video is not
getting seen and it's not ranking at the
top of that search. Now if you do
everything right with your title and your
video starts to rank, what's really cool
about this is you could shoot up above
some bigger channels. For example, with my
video how to vlog, that video is doing very well, but part of that it's
ranking number one, and I've done
everything right on this video to make it be
able to rank up here. If you look at the people
underneath this video, I have people like
Casey Neistat and Peter McKinnon who
made similar videos, my video pops up
ahead of theirs. That's the really cool thing about the ranking
system is that, you don't have to be the top dog to get the number one spot. You can have a small
channel and still rank if you do
everything properly that tells Google
and YouTube that this video is about this
keyword and this topic, so this video needs to be
higher in the ranking system. Then if people sit and watch your video after they've
clicked on your video, then that's going
to tell YouTube that this is a solid video, and it's better than
these other ones, because this video is getting more audience retention and
more watch time overall. That is what you're aiming for. You're aiming to get your
videos to rank higher, and it definitely can
happen even if there's much bigger channels creating videos around specific keyword, you can still rank
ahead of theirs, and that's one of those
things that's really going to propel your
channel and make it grow. Now, let's talk about
your thumbnails. This I would say is more important than the
titles themselves. Because your thumbnail is more engaging for someone
to click on. It's more important
that you really make an awesome thumbnail, because you need
to stand out from all the other thumbnails
and get that click. A lot of times people don't
even read the titles, they just look at
the thumbnails. There's a few things when it comes to working with
your thumbnails. This is something that I've been really focusing on recently, because your thumbnails
are important, and you have to treat your thumbnails like they're
an individual shoot, or an individual
aspect of your video. A lot of times I'll create an entire shoot around
the thumbnails, or I will stop the shoot
that I'm currently doing, and spend some time an hour
or two and actually shoot a thumbnail and think
through my thumbnail. It's really important that you think through both
your thumbnail, and your title, before you even hit record for your videos. Because if you don't
get the click, what's the point of
even making the video. With your thumbnails, think of it like your Instagram feed. When you look at
someone's Instagram feed, you want a nice style
through all the photos, and you want to make
sure that they look good and it's good photography. Same thing applies for YouTube. If you go to your videos tab, you want to see a similar
style across all your videos, and you want them to look good, you want to use
photography skills to take awesome photos. What you don't want to do is pull your thumbnail
from the video, you don't want to just
pull a screen grab, you want to actually focus
on creating a thumbnail, that's going to be
engaging for the viewer. Now, let's talk about
a few things that you can do for your thumbnail. You want to take obviously
good photography, so whatever it is
that you're doing, think through an
image that really represents that video
that you're creating. You also have to remember, it's going to be in a little box like this big on YouTube, so you got to make sure that you walk closer into your subject. If you have wide shots, they're not going to show up
on a little tiny thumbnail. Get closer, really
fill the frame with whatever it is that is the representation of the
video that you're creating. Now, another thing to do with your thumbnail is put
people in your thumbnail. A lot of times I'll put
myself in the thumbnail, and I'll put myself a medium shot or a close-up
where I'm looking at camera, and then if I'm
working with a product or something else I
have that in my hand, or I'm showing it in some way. There is something too connecting with the person on the other side of the screen, so people like seeing people
for those thumbnails. Now, what about text? If you're going to use
text in your thumbnail, you need to make sure that
it's only a few words. It's got to be a short phrase, and it's got to be something
different than your title, and that is key. If you're putting text
in your thumbnail, make sure it adds on to
what the title is saying. You don't want to use
the exact same title as the same words that you put in the photo
for that same video, so put a few words and make it stand out if you're
going to use it. Put some color behind it, or make it stand
out on the photo in a way where you can
really read that text. You've got to make sure it's
going to be this small, so make sure the
text is readable. Now, the next thing
you want to do is you want to edit your photos. What I mean by this
is you want to do some color gradient
on your photos, and make them really
pop, and stand out. When these photos pop up
in the search results, you want to look at the other photos in the search results, and make sure that
yours stands out. You don't want to do the same that everyone
else is doing, you want to do
something different that your photo stands out, so someone's eyes goes right to your photo and
clicks on that photo. That's why all of
this is important, because you're being ranked against a bunch of
different videos, and you want to stand out
so you get the click. I use Lightroom
and Photoshop for all of my editing when
it comes to photography, and adding them words and
everything like that. When you're coming up
with your thumbnails, just make sure that
you're looking at everyone else's thumbnails that you find in
specific keywords that you're researching. You want to make sure that your videos will look
unique next to those, and that if your
video ranks up there, that it looks clean and
that's going to stand out and peoples' eyes are
going to get drawn to it and they're going
to get the click.
9. Audience Retention : We're talking about my
third pillar of success, which is basically
audience retention. Keeping people watching
your content for longer and we've talked about this in
one of the previous modules, where we've spoke about how you can look at
audience retention to see if people are staying through your video and how your
content affects this. Now we're going to dive a
little bit deeper into this, I'm going to show you
some different ways that you can look at
your audience retention and some other
tools that you can use to gauge your
audience retention. Now the second half
of this is all about video optimization so
things that you can do within your video
to keep people longer and to keep
people actively engaged. I've seen my audience
retention go up and more people get to
the end of my video, which is the most
important thing. Like I was talking
about, you want to get people to watch all
of your content. You don't want to have people
just watching two minute of your 10-minute videos and
that's all they're doing. You want people
watching 100 percent so you'd rather have people
watching 100 percent of a five-minute
video rather than two minutes of a
10-minute video. What I want you to do is pull up your YouTube studio
analytics and we're going to look at
audience retention. Now I want you to
pick out one of your videos and we're going
to go look at the graph and I'm going to show you
a few different graphs and what this data
means for a video. When we look at this first one, this is what you want your audience retention to look like. This means that the
majority of the people are staying through to
the end of your video, There's a long flat line, which means that
people are actively engaged and watching
through the video. Now, this next one is a slow, gradual decline from
the beginning to end and this is bad
because people are slowly getting unengaged with your content and
they're getting less interested so you're
slowly losing people throughout the
course of the entire video. You definitely do not
want this to happen. You want a straight line
from beginning to end. Now, another graph
that you might see for your audience retention
are these bumps going upwards and this is a good thing because what this is saying
is that people are coming back to your
content and rewatching portions of it so bumps
are a good thing. That means people are
clicking through and watching things
again and so if you have a solid line with some
bumps in it that are going up then that means that people
are actively engaged with the content because
they want to watch it again. Now let's look at the opposite of this where you have big dips and I've already
spoke about this a little bit in
audience retention, but you do not want huge dips in your videos because that means
there's something going on in your video that's forcing people to
click off and so these are good indications
right here of things that you should look at and see
why people are clicking off. This is something
that you need to make sure that you change about your video moving forward and
the same thing in reverse, if you have spikes going up, these are things that
people keep coming back to so look at why people keep coming back to these moments and then
replicate these moments. Use those moments as a guide
to create your future videos because if people keep coming back and they want to
see these moments, that means you want to
create videos around that same topic
or in that style. Whatever you did at that time, that was something
really good for your channel so repeat
it and do it again. The big thing with
YouTube is repetition. Once you find that
something works, repeat it and do it again and
again and that's what helps your channel growth because
you need to measure success. You can't just bank
on things happening. You have to actually see what works and then repeat
it and then do it again and again and again and that's how you'll
make your channel grow. Now, this last model is what people call the hockey stick model and this is probably the worst thing that you
can see for your video. You never want to see the hockey stick
happen on your video. A lot of times the
hockey stick will happen if you have a
title and a thumbnail, that's not actually a
good representation of what's going to be
found in the video. If someone clicks on your video and they realize that they're
not interested in this, they're going to click
off and that's what causes that huge hockey stick right at the beginning
because those are all people who have clicked on, they're interested in
your thumbnail and your title so you've
done well with that. You've got people
to get the click, but then they're not staying
so you need to keep people actively engaged on your content
for the entire duration. It would be better to have less people watch
your video and have a full audience
retention than have a ton of people click on your video but then
have the hockey stick. Audience retention is a huge
factor and watch time so YouTube is going to reward you if you have good
audience retention, and that means that your content keeps people actively engaged. They want people's content to keep viewers actively engaged. That's super important to
tell the YouTube AI to basically serve this video up to more people because
it gets more active, engaged users to watch videos. This is something that I
want you to continue to look at when you're creating
more and more content. When you're digging
into your analytics, really take a look at your audience retention because this is going to be
a clear indication of what is working
in your videos and what is not working
in your videos and it's great because I've done this with my videos
and I showed you this example before where I did this tutorial video
about night film making. Now at the end of my video, I do a wrap-up. I basically summarize
the whole video again in the last minute and
I tell people to subscribe and do all
these different things. Now the issue with
that is I have a massive drop right at that moment so I have
one of those dips. Now in more recent videos, what I'm doing is
I'm cutting my video off when I'm finished
with my thoughts, so I'm not doing any summary. I'm not saying, hey guys, subscribe right at the end. I might do a quick five-second, hey guys, thanks for watching. Make sure you hit
that subscribe button and then I get out of it because the idea is that I don't
want people to click off. I want people to
watch to the end so if I'm delivering information or giving value throughout
the entire video right up until that last moment, then people are going to
stay at that last moment. This is one of my more
recent videos where over 30 percent of the
people are getting to that 100 percent
point of my video rather than clicking off a
minute before that happens. Using this audience
retention graph is super powerful tool in guiding what you should
do with your videos moving forward so keep an
eye on this as you create more content and you're
getting more data going through your
audience retention. First, look at your
10-second mark, if you're having a
steep drop-off here, then what's that saying
is that you don't have a proper hook
with your video, so someone's clicking onto your video and then they're
clicking off within the first 10 seconds that typically means that
when someone clicked on, they're expecting one
thing from the title and thumbnail and they're getting something different when they
actually watch the video. If you see a 10-second mark drop-off then I need you
to review the beginning of your video and see if you have
a hook or see if your hook is not appealing to the title and
thumbnail that you've created for that video. Now another place in the
intro you want to look at is around your title sequences. So if you do an
intro that's long, you'll see a bump up when people are clicking past
your intro so what will happen is there'll
be a slight dip at the beginning of your
video and then there'll be a bump right to the point where you actually
start the content. If you're seeing
this consistently, then what that means
is that you need to shorten that intro a little
bit so if you do this, try to shorten the first half of your video a little bit or the first section of your video to get into the content faster. Now if you're starting to
see a drop-off in your video at the 30 to 60 second range, what that's telling me is
that your video is not satisfying the viewer and
they're just getting bored. If you have people watching through for
the first little bit, they're interested
in your content but if you start seeing that slow decline around
the 30 to 60-second mark, what that's saying is
they just get bored. If you see a decline or a drop-off anywhere
in that range, then I would rethink how you're doing your content
and try to find ways to speed it up a little bit to keep people actively engaged. Now another thing you
want to look for is just any specific momentary dip, so if there's one
spot in your video that you just see a big dip, then look at that spot because when you
look at that spot, you're going to have a good idea of what you're doing that's
causing people to leave. It could be something you're saying. It could be
something you're doing. It could be some way
that the camera moved. It could be some
issue with audio. There's a lot of reasons why people might be dropping
off and you want to look for these dips
because if you see trends over time and you
see dips in your videos, you want to make sure
that you don't repeat that so that you can
consistently get a flat line versus seeing dips and seeing people drop off and disappear
from your videos. Obviously, you want
to make sure that your audience retention is high. Then one other thing
I want you to look at is towards your end screens, so if you have that drop-off
the last 20 seconds, what that's telling me is that you've put up an end
screen or you've done some wrap up the last 20 seconds and then people
are clicking away. If you keep your content going all the way through
those end screens, all the way to the end part, then people will stay longer. If you are finishing a thought, make sure you don't finish
a thought and then throw up an end screen and then have some videos that
they can click on. It's better to
finish your thought, maybe shrink the video and
put it into the corner, and then have some videos
pop up that you want people to click through to
in your Subscribe button, whatever you want to do
for your end screen but make sure that the
content is still going so that people are still
sitting there and watching because if you throw up just
an end screen and say like, hey, we're done, here's the two videos that
you should watch next, people will click one of
those and leave and so you're losing that last bit
of audience retention. Let's go through some optimization tricks
that you can do within your video to keep
people watching longer and also get
people to subscribe. The first thing you have
to do is create a hook. What a hook is, is basically something engaging
right at the front of your video that tells the viewer what they're getting
throughout the entire video, gives a little preview, and gets people interested. Your hook should be
like 10 to 15 seconds, it's not a long piece, but it's something that's super engaging and super telling
about what's coming. This is key because people
are clicking on your video, they see that title and
they see that thumbnail, and then as soon as
they click that, they need to get exactly
what's going on. For me when I'm doing stuff
because I do tutorials, I just say exactly what
is going to happen in the tutorial and I give people a reason why they
should keep watching. Now right after the hook, you need to encourage people
to subscribe to your channel and I like to do this upfront because if you've
already hook them, they are interested
to watch your content so take a second and do a couple of lines about why somebody should be
subscribed to your channel. Give them a reason why. Tell them what they're
going to find on the channel and tell them
that they should subscribe, like, and comment if they want to see more
content like this. I really encourage
you to do this upfront because it's
just going to remind people to subscribe if they do like this content and
you're giving them a reason why and so I put
this right after my title sequence
just to give people a reason why they should
subscribe and give them a little information of what my channel is all about. Now from there, you
go into the content and the content obviously
is the most important. That's what I've been
talking about through this whole video series so
you need to make sure that your content is good
and engaging and that's what's going to keep
your audience retention high. Now at the end of your video, don't summarize your video. Don't do a big wrap up
or anything like that. You want your video to build to that ending and when your
video ends in the video, don't let it linger
for a long time after your conclusions. Whether it's the end of the tutorial or it's the
wrap up of the story, whatever ends your video, don't do a bunch of
stuff after that. You don't want to have this big long in sequence because
then you're going to have a massive drop-off and if you're going to create
an incurred sequence, that's where you put a
graphic on screen and you can say checkout more here for
this video or this video, make sure that that part is
still part of the videos. You can figure out a
creative way to keep the video going through that
sequence so people could see videos they can click to next but they're actively engaged with what
you're doing still. Whether it's something funny
right at the end or you're still finishing up your thought and you make it half screen, this is a great
opportunity to put some other videos for
someone to watch, but you want to make
sure that you still have good valuable content
going through the end of the video so
someone doesn't click off. Hook them, tell them why
they should subscribe, give them awesome content, and don't give them
a chance to go away. That's how you're going to get more people to watch more of your video and get to
the end of your video. Now let's talk about
editing for a minute. As you can tell, I like to cut my videos and make
them move faster. You need to focus on cutting out the things that don't really
matter for your video. Now it obviously all depends on your niche and whether
you're doing vlogs or not, but still, keep in mind, move things forward, keep
moving the story forward, keep moving the video forward. You don't want to get
stuck and have things dry out too long because
then people will get bored.
10. Connecting Videos: We're going over the
fourth pillar of success, which is keeping people
on your channel. The four things that I think are the most important
when it comes to your YouTube channel
is first your content. You have to get the click
and you have to get people to stay on your
video and then last, you need to get those
people to stay on your channel and
watch other content. YouTube wants people to
binge-watch content. YouTube wants people to stay within the YouTube ecosystem. The more that you
can encourage people to stay within this ecosystem, the more that YouTube's
going to reward your videos and your
videos are going to become suggested videos, which will get more
views and will grow your channel and get more
subscribers and all of that. The first thing that I
want to talk about is basically just pitching
your videos in your videos. Now, you don't
want to overdo it, you don't want to
always be like, guys go watch this video
or go watch this video. But if it relates to something that's going
on within the video, you can mention that you have another video on this topic or you have another video that builds on this topic or you
have another video that would also be something
that you would want to watch after
watching this video. It's a great way just
to remind people that they should go watch
your other content. Just like I said in
a previous video, you want to tell
people that they should subscribe
to your channel, you need to tell people they
need to put the thumbs up, and you need to tell
people to comment. Because when you verbally
put that out there, people are going to be more encouraged to do it because now it's in their head and now
they're thinking about it. If it makes sense, pitch some of your videos. Now, people do get annoyed with this if you do this
again and again, so don't be pitching 10 of
your videos in a video, but if it makes sense
and you're like, I got this other video
that's all about this, if you really like this video, throw them to it. Now, beyond just a verbal throw, there are two ways that you can encourage people to go
watch your other videos. The first is cards and that's that little eye icon
that you see up in the upper right-hand
corner and what you can do is put a video in there. You could also do
other things like put links to other places. However, the whole idea
is that you're trying to keep people within the
YouTube ecosystem. If you're going to use a card, I would either send
someone to a video or a playlist and like I said
in the previous video, you want to send
people to a playlist. If you mention a video, then you could send them to
that video in a playlist and it's a great way to get people to watch more of your content. You'll see some creators really utilize in this
feature and saying, by the way, if you want
to know more about this, I have a video about it
and so they point right to that icon and it pops up and
it's like there's a video. Now a word of caution
when it comes to cards, you don't necessarily want to be throwing cards
at the beginning of your video because what happens is if somebody
clicks that card, they're going to
leave this video. Remember when we talked
about watch time, well, you want people to watch
to the end of your video. If you pop up a card right in the first 30 or 40 seconds of your video and they
click off, well, now your audience retention
starts going down right at that moment and this might be something to test
for your channel. If you want to put
a card up early, put it up early and then look at your audience
retention and see if there's a dip right
when you add that card. My new school of thought when it comes to cards is I put it at the end of the video and I put it at the 30-second
mark to the end. About 30 seconds before
the video finished, that's when I'll
put a card because people have already watched
the majority of my video, so if they click off, it's not going to kill my
audience retention. I don't need them
to get to the end, I obviously want
them to get the end, but if I can get them to watch
another one of my videos, that's almost more
important than getting them to watch the end
and then leave YouTube. The idea is that you want to
get people binge-watching. If you could get
them to binge-watch and watch most of your video, then that's going to
help your channel grow more than if they just watched
that one video and leave. The other part of this
is end-screens and end-screens are those boxes that you see at the
end of a video. You could put a
few actions here, you could have your icon button, that's a Subscribe button, and then you could
put videos and you could put up to four videos. Now YouTube has some
cool features here. You could either send
them to a specific video, you can let YouTube decide
which video to send them to based on that viewer's
previous watch history, or you could send them to
your most recent video. Wherever you want to
drive your traffic, you could choose and YouTube will continually update
these end-screens. Now, like I said, you could
throw people to a playlist. If you're planning on sending
people to a single video, you could consider setting
them to a playlist here. Now if you want
YouTube to decide what the best video is
for that person, which might result
in the better chance of them clicking,
you can do that. I'd play around
with this and see what works with your audience. Now, don't give too many
options on this end-screen. I've heard from a few people, two options is good, I've
heard from some people, one option is good, I think
you have to test it and play with this and see what
works best for your channel. What I'm doing right
now is two things, either I'm leaving
just one video and that one video is being sent to a playlist or
I'm doing a two video, where one is YouTube decides the video and
then the second one, I send them to another
video or a playlist, whatever relates to this video that they're currently watching. Use your cards and your
end-screens to help drive traffic to get people to
watch more of your content. Like everything in YouTube, you could see the analytics for almost every action that
someone takes on your channel. Cards and end-screens are
something that you're super interested in and you're getting a lot of traction out of them. Then make sure you're
checking your analytics to see where people
are going and why people are clicking them and see which cards and
which end-screens that they're actually clicking. But the big idea here
is you want to get people to continually
watch your content. Use your cards to send
to other videos or playlists and the same
thing with the end-screens. You also just want to mention your other videos in
your videos once in awhile and at that moment
that's when you either pop up a card or if you do
it in the last 20 seconds, then that's when you
can use an end-screen because end-screens only work on the last 20
seconds of your video, whereas cards will work at any point throughout
your entire video. The idea is pretty simple, you want to keep people
on your channel, you want them not only
watching this video that they found after they watched
a cat video or something, but then they want to go on to watch another one
of your videos. This is why your
niche is important. Once you have your clear idea of your niche and you start producing content
for that niche, then people will be more
encouraged to watch more of your content because if they're interested in
one of your videos, then there's a good chance that they're going
to be interested in the other videos
that you're producing. When it comes to
creating content, I like to say never do more than four buckets of content and I
haven't brought this up until now because I really
wanted you to focus on one idea and one concept
that you wanted to go after. Now the idea of four buckets basically means that
your channel can have four different streams that
you could go down and each of these streams will
all tie back to the original niche
that you're in, but it gives you some variety
in which that you can shoot and you don't have
to do four streams. I'm just saying you
never want to do more, you don't want to have eight different things
that your channel does because then people will get lost in all of that content. Four is enough where you can
rotate these videos through and you'll be able to
get people that are not only interested in
everything that you produce, but interested in
maybe just one tract of what you produce. For example, let's talk about
my channel for a minute. I have four streams, one of them is
film-making tutorials. These are how-to's,,
this is how you do x, y, and z in the
film-making space. It's just typically film-making. I've walked away from doing photography just
because I really want to niche down into video creators instead
of photography as well. Because there is
a difference and there's people that
do photography very well and there's people that
do video very well and I'm trying to position my channel
more on the video tract. I do tutorials around
film-making concepts. Now my second stream
that I go down is product reviews and that's just whatever is
new and coming out, I'll do a review about
it because those are highly searchable at the
time of the release. Now the third stream that I go down is my creator training, so my YouTube videos or how to grow your following,
things like that, things that are positioned more towards people who
are interested in growing their
channels and building their brand and obviously
these all tied together because people who
are interested in growing their YouTube
channel will also be interested in film-making
tutorials and will also be interested
in the products. Now, my fourth stream is more of my creative stream
and this is where I create the behind the
scenes or the travel vlogs or different things that go on behind the scenes
of this channel. Now I've really shied away from doing straight
travel vlogs. When I started my channel, I was doing more videos, like 20 things to
do in Thailand. Now that video just wouldn't not sit well on my
channel anymore. If I went to Thailand and did 20 things to do in Thailand,
as you could tell, my channel would not
fit with that doing film-making reviews and then
YouTube training videos. When I do my vlogs and when I
do my more adventure films, I have to position them as either one-off
individual creations, something cinematic, something that has a story, something that's
very interesting to watch and something unique, or it has to be more of a day in the life behind the scenes
of what it is I'm doing. I can't really go down that
travel vlog or niche anymore. I think everyone can
have an element of this vlog behind the scene
to their channel no matter what it is that
you're creating and that's because you're going
to have a small group of super active and engaged followers that
are going to watch everything that you produce and they want to see
behind the scenes. That's where the vlog
style content comes in. Now if you're not
a vlog channel and you're not doing
vlogs all the time, this is more of something
for that specific group, it's for those really actively
engage people and it's also just a place to
experiment and explore. This is a great
way to demonstrate the film-making techniques
and the products that I'm using in the actual
films that I'm creating and just create something different
for my channel. Once in awhile, I
think it's okay, but I'm not going to flood my
channel with this content. My core content is the
other three streams. It's the film-making
tutorials, the camera reviews, and the YouTube training, that's where I'm
getting the majority of my followers and
that's where I'm getting the majority
of my views. The other stream is just to have fun and
be more creative. When it comes to your channel, what you can do is start branching off and think of
different ways that you can create content on your
channel that still relate to your niche and still make
sense within your niche, but they might be a little
bit of an offshoot, a little bit of a different
path and you're going to find that you'll get
different followers based on these
different streams. I would say once you've figured out exactly what you're good at producing and you're
starting to see results and you're starting
to see your channel grow, start trying some different
things on your channel. Rotate in a video here and
there that's going down a different stream and when you find the things that
work for your channel, you just rotate
through the videos. If you had a channel like mine, you would do a film-making
tutorial one week, you would do a camera
review the next week, you'd do a YouTube
training the next week, and then you might go back to
the filming tutorial and do a vlog once a month
or twice a month, just randomly when
you feel like you want to put a vlog
on the channel. The idea is that you're creating a bunch of different
styles of content that all center around your core idea and what it is that
you're producing. You're still going to keep your idea of what you're
doing on your channel, but you can go down
these different paths. If you have a channel
where you're going to have episodic series, then that's the
same type of thing. Just think of each
of these streams as a series and series and
playlists are a big part of keeping people actively engaged on your
channel and watching more content and that's
what this section is about is keeping people watching
your channel longer, so it's watching more videos. If you are someone who can
have a series on your channel, then I would say make a series. Series are very good ways to get people to
binge-watch content. For example, let's talk about
the channel First We Feast. Now you might not have heard
about this specific channel, but if you watched
the show Hot Ones, then that is a show
on First We Feast. That's because Hot
Ones has become such a popular series
here on YouTube, but the channel is not Hot Ones. Hot Ones is just one of
the shows that they have on the channel First We
Feast and I think this is a great example of how a
series is so powerful. This one series has done so well and so many people are
interested in this show because it's an interview show where they sit around and eat hot wings and slowly gets
hotter through the video. Now this formula just
worked very well for them and the show has
gained a ton of notoriety. Now people seek out
the show Hot Ones. For your channel,
what you can do is come up with
different series. Now you don't have to
do big show series, but if you have a
five-part series that you can make
around one concept, then definitely do
that because what happens is people
might enter on Video 2 and then you could tell
them that this is Part 2 of a five-part series and they're going to
want to go back to one and then watch all the way
through the entire series, especially if all the
videos build on each other. A series is a great
way to keep people on your channel because once
they watch one video, they're going to want to
watch the rest of the videos. If it's a series that
keeps happening over time, so maybe it's something that
you come back to and you put a couple of videos
in every month, well, people will come back to that series over and
over and they'll be expecting it because
they really like the other videos in that series.
11. Building Community: Let's talk about
YouTube and community, and this is one reason why
this social media platform stands out among all the
social media platforms. The idea is that when
you start creating for a specific niche and you
become a voice in that niche, you're going to start
developing a community around the people that like the
content that you're producing. These are real people. If you have a 1,000 subscribers, think about a 1,000
people sitting in a room watching one of your
videos on the big screen. You have to keep that in
mind when you're creating content no matter what
size your channel gets, there are still real
people on the other side of the computer that are
watching your content. You really need to
keep that in mind when you're working
on the platform. The first thing
that you need to do no matter what size
creator you are, is just be active in
the comments section. As a smaller creator,
this is much easier. You can go through
and respond to every comment that
comes your way, and if your channel starts
getting bigger and bigger, there are tools that will help you get through some
of these comments. You might have to
set up boundaries where you're only
going to respond to comments within the
first few hours of having the video live, or you do like a premiere. A premiere on YouTube
is a newer feature, but it allows you
to basically watch your video at the time of
a release and it's live. There's a live chat window and you can have conversations with people back and forth. Now I found this is a great way to talk to my audience because my highly engaged
followers are going to be the ones that have their bell
notifications turned on. When a video goes live, they're all going to get notified and they're
going to jump in and want to watch the video
right when it comes alive. It's a great way to
really engage with your highly active
and engaged followers by doing one of these premieres, and just having conversations
in the live chat window. I actually really
like this method and especially as my
channel gets bigger, it is harder to keep up with all the comments
that are coming through. However, like I was saying, if you set yourself
up some boundaries, so sometimes what
I'll do is post a video and then the next
day I'll sit down for about an hour and respond
to as many comments as I can on the new video
in that hour or two. You have to keep in mind
that your time does matter, and you can't be spending all your time
responding to comments and still be able
to produce content and do everything else
that you're doing. At first it's important that
you respond to everything. If you have a couple of
a 100 comments at most, respond to every
comment out there. But if you're getting a few
100 comments per video, that's going to start stacking up over time and
it's going to be harder and harder to keep up
with all of the comments. Another tactic is to go through and just respond
to all the questions. A lot of people will just
give a few word answers, and you don't necessarily
need to respond to all those if you have
a ton of comments. But people with questions
are expecting an answer, so you could filter
the results and just look for the
questions and then have conversations
around questions that people have on the video
that you released. There's a couple of
ways that you can go through and respond
to all the comments. First is just going
to the video page and then scrolling down and
responding to the comments here. I also suggest you do a
thumbs up or give the heart just to show some
extra appreciation to the people that
are commenting. Now, the other place that
you can respond to comments is by going into
your YouTube Studio. Click on the comments
tab on the far left, and this is going to display all the comments for
your channel at once. Then if you have a
single video selected, it's going to show just the
comments from that one video. You can go through and look at all the comments across
all your videos at once, or go to each video independently through your
backend on YouTube Studio. Now let's talk about negative
comments for a minute. I personally try to avoid
all negative comment. There is constructive criticism and I'm not saying
those are bad. What I'm talking
about are the trolls or the people who are just super negative and they just want to hate on whatever it is
that you're creating. You'll start finding
these people, and once in awhile you'll get someone who just wants to say something awful
about every one of your videos and they're
going to downvote you, and they're going to say, "You're awful,
You're the worst." You can't let that get to
you because people are anonymous on the web and people will say whatever
they want to say. If you put that
person in a room, a guarantee that they're not going to say that to your face. They just have that ability
to sit behind the screen and just say awful things and
they just don't care. When it comes to negativity
in the comments section, there's a few things that I do. If someone is super awful and they're just
saying terrible things, I'll block that person. You can block people from
commenting on your videos, and I highly suggest
that you do this if you do have trolls
on your channel. Now another thing
that you can do is block specific words or phrases. To add block words and phrases, what we're going to do is go
into YouTube Studio Beta. Now you're going to click
the little gear icon in the lower left-hand
corner and this is going to bring up some
additional settings. Now when you click
the Community tab, you can see a few options here. There's going to be all
you're blocked people, and this is also
where you can unblock people if you accidentally
block someone. Then underneath that is
all of your bad words, and also at the bottom
here you can block links. I highly suggest this because
people always tend to use the comments section
to either promote themselves or they use it
to promote affiliate links. You don't want people promoting other products in your
comments section, or you don't want
people promoting their own channels in
your comments section. You want to keep your
comments section around the content that
you're creating and make it a positive and engaging
place for people to have conversations and
not be a place that they're afraid to
post a comment. If there are comments
that are coming through on your page that are negative and you don't want them in your
comment section, then just go through
and delete them. Now the last thing I
want to show you is another tactic to just get more of the conversation going. When you post a video, you can pin a comment
and one comment can be pinned where it always at the top of the comments section. This is a great opportunity for you to pin one of your comments and either ask questions or add some value beyond the video. For example, in this video, I talked about the Autel Evo, and it's the first video that
I've done on this drone. What I wanted to do
is see what kind of questions people had
around this drone. I used the real estate of the first pin comment
to ask the question, what features and what
would people want to see me test in a future
video using this drone? I've been getting a lot of
comments on that one post. It's a great way to basically
get the conversation going. Ask people questions and
they'll start responding, and you can also
get more insight into the content that
you're creating. You can ask questions
that will help you generate new ideas for
videos down the road, or just give you a
jumping off point for your next video
around this topic. Whenever you upload a video, always make sure that
you pin a comment and keep it at the top of
the comments section. Let's talk about a little bit of strategy when it
comes to comments. This is a little bit
different than the rest of the things that we've
been talking about. What I want to
discuss is how you can use comments to
help you develop videos on different topics
that your community or the people in your
community want to see created. When it comes to your
comments specifically, look for questions
and look for ideas. People might ask for
a specific feature or a specific thing that they
want to see on your channel, and when you make videos to those specific
questions or topics, your community gets very
excited and they're super appreciative when you
make those styles of videos. For example, on
one of my videos, on how to vlog video, I talked about B-roll lot. There's a few other videos
where I talk about B-roll, and the comment that I kept
getting is what is B-roll? I never really fully
explained it in a specific, this is what B-roll is. I made a video on
what is B-roll, and basically answered
all of the questions that I was getting in
my comments section. Now once I've
finished that video, I also went through and responded to all of these
comments with a link to the new video and all of them were super
excited that I made a video that specifically answered the question
that they were asking. Use your comment section as
a place where you can find new ideas and new topics
to cover on your channel. Let's talk about
another strategy when it comes to comments. Outside of your community, outside of your videos, you should start looking at
other creators in your niche. Now, go to their videos and see what their followers
are asking for. Whether it's specific
video ideas or a specific responses to the video that that
person created, and then create videos
out of those ideas. It's a great way to find different and unique ideas
for your channel that, that creator might
not be creating for. For example, if
you wanted to make a gimbal video around
smartphone gimbals. Well, you could go one of my
smartphone gimbal videos, and start browsing through the
comments and see if people are asking questions that
weren't answered by this video. Now, that will give you a jumping off point and a new
idea for a video that you might create for
your channel that directly responds
to those questions. That's going to give you a video that people are going to be interested in because people are asking questions on
these other videos. You can use other
creators videos as places for inspiration or ideas
for future videos. Just like you could do
this on your videos, look for those topics that your community is asking for and create new video ideas out
of all of these comments.
12. Biggest Takeaway: Whenever I get too
much in my head, I always go back to these fundamentals that we
discussed in this course. This is all you need to know to have success on the platform. It's going through these
four pillars of success, finding the videos
that your audience likes to watch and
then rinse and repeat, and just make more
videos and try different ideas and just take
some risks once in a while. On YouTube, there is a ton
of people teaching how to do YouTube and
things that are working for different channels. The one thing I want
you to walk away with is just don't get wrapped
up in all of that noise. It's great to see what
other people are doing and see different tactics and strategies that different
creators are using. However, what works
for one channel might not work for
another channel, and so the best way that I approach all of this is look at these strategies
and test things on your channel and do it with
some data points in mind. Come up with some different ways that you can judge whether something is working
for your channel or not and then do a test, and if it works
for your channel, then keep using that strategy. But if it's not working
for your channel, then try something else. There's so much content on
this platform and there's so many different
types of audiences that some things will
work for your channel, but others won't, and I know on my
journey personally, I've gotten wrapped
up in watching too much YouTube
education in the past, and it's actually hurt
my channel because I've been so focused on the growth
and just the strategies. Whereas the reality is all you really need to
focus on is making better videos and making videos for the audience
that you're building. If you're making videos
that they want to watch, then that's success. Those viewers will
continue to watch your content and the
YouTube algorithm will use that data to find more people that want
to watch your videos. That's the magic of YouTube and something
that you shouldn't be too worried about because
it will work if you're making videos that your
audience does enjoy. Now if you want to dive into the fundamentals of how
you shoot and edit, I do have some more courses
here on Skillshare. I have one all about vlogging, and I have one all
about editing that's really going to help you
on your YouTube journey. The biggest piece of
advice that I can give you on this journey is
just stay consistent, make a lot of videos and
overtime you're going to figure out what works for you and what works for
your audience. Most importantly, have fun
because this is awesome. It's a lot of fun that we
can create these videos, build an audience and
potentially build a career out of this if
that's what you want to do. If you have any questions after watching all these videos, please make sure to ask
them in the discussion, and I'll see you
on the next one.