Transcript for:
YouTube Growth and Strategy Insights

I'm about to teach you everything that I know about YouTube and to help me I brought in seven of the top YouTube experts and strategists who have collectively been responsible for billions of views together we' have combined 83 years of YouTube experience and today we're sharing it all with you those are the areas where I see retention problems it is the one thing you need to learn how to do actually really think through what you make and don't just make if you watch this video from start to finish you'll learn everything that you need to know to start grow and scale a YouTube channel and because this is YouTube and I want to make this video as tangible as humanly possible for you I've broken it all into conveniently numbered list we'll cover the fundamentals of what you need to grow on YouTube first and then get into the specifics of exactly what goes into making a killer YouTube video before rounding it off with more advanced topics like analytics algorithm flops and so much more by the end of this video you'll know everything that's taken us collectively 83 years to learn and I promise you you will be changed so let's jump straight into it with part one how to grow on YouTube by far the most common question I get is what's your best advice for growing on YouTube and to help me answer this question I brought in the most sought after YouTube strategist in the world Patty Galloway Patty's worked with clients like Mr Beast Ryan Tran jesser and Noah Kagan but today he's here to help you and because the concept of growing on YouTube is quite Broad and the device changes depending on where you're at in your journey I've broken it into four main stages your first 1,000 subscribers 1K to 10K subscribers 10K to 100K subscribers and 100K to 1 million subscribers and Beyond how do you get your first 1,000 subscribers yeah it'll sound kind of contradictory but I don't really think about growth at that size I just think about getting repetition in and really solidifying the kind of Channel we want to be like the niche we're actually occupying because I think if you get too caught up in like the world of YouTube strategy when you have 100 subscribers you're going to start jumping around on trends like trying to you know study what this outlier video did here and you know you get too caught up in your own head and you're probably not at the level where you can actually produce really good content so at that size like my biggest focus is I call like the it's just like the triple vend diagram of picking a niche so look at what you love what you're good at and what people demand and I know that sounds very simple but quite often like people will just do what they love but maybe that's not something they have like unique advantage in or maybe they'll do something that they're good at but they hate it and then they can't stick with it and often times you know it's it's it's a little rarer but sometimes people love and are good at a thing that nobody cares about um I can't think of any examples off the top of my head but that does happen so in a case like that you don't have that tick you don't have that part of the vent diagram satisfied so I try to just like get people to actually imagine like a triple ven diagram like what is the middle of those three things for you and can you pick that as your Niche to start and then the analogy I always use um someone explained this to me like an actual business Mentor explain this to me but this idea of like imagine you go to a sushi restaurant and then the sushi restaurant is also serving Burgers you're probably going to think okay that's not probably very a very good sushi restaurant because the best sushi restaurants they just do sushi and I think the same is true for a YouTube channel and too early in the journey people try to just experiment with all these different things jump around these different areas and some of it's natural and you know it's not the end of the world if you do do that but I always like to have this like sushi restaurant mentality of we make sushi so whatever our Niche is we're doing that and we're only doing that and we're going to get good at that so in those beginning stages I say get your Niche right really focus down on that Niche and then before getting too caught up in like strategy and like growth hacks and tactics to gain subscribers just think about can we post two or three videos a week which sounds like a lot and anyone that knows me well knows that like a big of my big part of my Approach is always like getting to a place of quality so we don't need quantity but it's a cliche but you need that quantity to get that quality so I like posting sort of two or three videos a week until we have maybe 30 40 videos under our belt and then that just gives us a good foundation um to actually get good at YouTube and it's it's like the same as as anything like you know I'm training for a new sport right now and like my coach he's just drilling the fundamentals really well so like the fundamentals for YouTube are editing like I want to drill editing into someone you need volume to get good good at editing so being able to edit being able to make thumbnails like you can't just like make three videos and your fourth video is a perfect thumbnail it takes time how do you grow from 1K to 10K subscribers I think at that point because we have let's say 50 videos under our belt we've been making content we've making two or three videos a week so probably be making content for like 20 25 weeks right at that point and you like you said the some traction at that point you start to see some Trends emerge on the channel so you can see okay like this video got 1,000 views with this got video got 100 views this video did 2,000 views this video did 300 views you can start to see the emergence of like your top 5 or 10% videos and your bottom 5 or 10% videos and really like the key is just trying to eliminate more and more of those weaker performers over time even if some of them are things you enjoy doing and this is is always like the the kind of internal Battle of YouTube strategy versus creative expression and I think there's this like beautiful this a beautiful analogy which I like and I think I believe I heard it on a podcast a while ago but it's like you have artists and you've got Distributors an artist is someone who just follows their passion and they just do what they want a distributor is just someone who tries to distribute their content to as many people as possible so they don't care if they like it or not they don't care if they find it boring they just want views and I think the best balance is being somewhere in the middle so you're still like an artist you're still a creative but you still have that like distributor mindset I think it's a little bit immature when people are like why should you even have to think about strategy why should you even have to think about this stuff like it's supposed to be fun it's supposed to be just your passion I'm like if you wanted to be just a hobby that's fine but if you want to like take this seriously and grow a channel you do need some balance of strategy so I think looking at what videos are doing better at that stage is is a really good idea starting to actually make more videos like those top 10% of videos and then I think the biggest theme difference between let's say 0 to 1K and 1K to like 10K or to 100K and Beyond is ideation becomes a bigger Factor so in that earlier stage I was just saying it doesn't really matter just make what you want like you know stick to your Niche but like just have fun whatever costs you now things get a bit more seriously serious and we have to look at what's working for us but then also start to study other niches start to study um outlier ideas on other channels that are similar to yours and see how you can adapt and take inspiration from those ideas and I think the biggest thing is if your schedule is 40 hours a week of YouTube which I know isn't realistic because not everyone's full-time but for the sake of the example if your schedule is 40 hours a week maybe in that zero to 1K Mark you're spending just an hour or two a week on ideation at the 1K to 10K and Beyond I want you to spend 5 10 hours a week on ideation and actually really think through what you make and don't don't just make and I think that's a that's a big difference at this point does that quality versus quantity trade-off start to shift when you've posted 50 videos I think that's when you can kind of take a bit of a deeper look at your quantity of like what you're posting and I I think quite often I recommend just one a week at that point um like I always say with the stuff there's always exceptions like I have I have a friend James Janny and he started his channel and posted like a video every month and now he posts like a video every year and he does great and he's probably only he probably hasn't even posted 50 videos he probably posted like 20 videos so like there's exceptions to this but generally I think it's a good idea to just get that frequency and then when you get to 50 that's when you can kind of build your own schedule a bit better I still do like the idea of posting one a week because you're still learning you're still building foundations so I think one a week so going from two or three a week to one a week is a good place where you can start to increase that quality a little bit it is a mistake sometimes I see where people go from posting a lot of videos then suddenly saying oh I want to just focus on quality and they're spending like a month on a video because you probably don't have enough traction to justify that quite yet and I think that's that's important so I would I would probably change it to about one a week after that point for most people how do you grow from 10K to 100K subscribers I think at that point like the biggest difference is like we still want those same fundamentals of like continuing to improve video to video but at that point the biggest thing I would say is different and not Everyone likes to hear me say this but having I don't I can't even tell you how many channels I've either done myself or with other people from from that 10K to 100K Mark it's a lot of different channels what I've seen is quite often just a channel building their strategy around a format sometimes just one format some sometimes two or three formats or people can call them buckets as well so you've posted quite a few videos you've spent more time on ideation in all these different stages we've talked about now you probably have very clear outliers on the channel now an outlier for some people could be a million views for it could be just 10K when everything else gets 500 views so like it doesn't really necessarily matter it's just more about how many times the average is that video so a video that said say five or 10 times your average I would call that an outlier can those videos if you can see a theme of which videos are jumping out can those videos actually become our strategy so can we actually end up making the bulk of our future videos around maybe one to three formats that are working really well and actually just today I broke it down in a tweet thread where I broke down a channel that we've been helping um which was called golden Kobe family it's a Channel about a Golden Retriever and they found this one format that worked really well which was their golden retriever reacting to a puppy and they were like okay well we can't get a new puppy every week you know because that that would be just unethical and ridiculous but we can have a situation where we have our golden retriever react to other people's dogs or we can bring it to the zoo and it can react to animals because it was the format of their dog reacting to other animals that's really cute and like people really like that content in that Niche and now if you look at their Channel like they've posted like 10 or 15 videos in that format about 50% of their uploads are just around that format and that's really growing them from this sort of 10K Mark when we started helping them to like they're at 30k now I think they'll be at 100K by the end of the year so just really focusing on a few formats I think is the key to get into that next Milestone what happens if the formats that are outliers for you are formats or videos that you don't particularly want to become your entire brand or identity moving forward so really good question I think so long as they're still within your Niche so like in that case um the golden retriever reacting to Poppy videos they're still in the niche of like dogs uh you know they're still attracting the Right audience for the channel and I think there is this beautiful thing where you can use that to build some momentum and to sort of tow you along like a slipstream and then when you want to experiment with maybe other things you want to do maybe you want to make content more vloggy or informational about your golden retriever you have a bit of an audience there I think it's a good like it is a good point and it's very situational though that sometimes people feel like they're locked in or trapped into their best performing video and in that case I mean you can always just not do that and then look at what your second best performing booket isn't focus on that um but it's it's the classic dilemma of like the you know the rock band who make underground music and then go viral with one song that's outside their Niche and then everyone wants that one thing it's like it's nothing new it's it's just the kind of the artist's dilemma and it goes back to that that sort of scale of are you an artist or are you a distributor and where you fall on that Spectrum but it is a real concern but I think um if you feel that and you see that early you can always just not double down on that video and just say okay that worked really well but it's just not what I want to do it's a brave decision because it's easier to just double down on that and get those views but if you say hey I just don't want to be that channel like I know let's just say someone makes a video on a controversy they see that does really well and they're like I'm not a controversial person this doesn't feel like my identity so I'm not going to do that but this other video I did did like a third of the views but I really liked it and it still did better than my average maybe I can build around that bucket instead how do you grow from 100K to 1 million subscribers so at that 100K Mark like if you've got there you've probably got there through a few formats working really well through a lot of hard work what gets you to that 1 million Mark I mean the first thing is like do we want that you know 1 million Mark or you know are we happy or just like maintaining it a slightly smaller channels so that's always a good question because you don't have to do anything you can just stay you don't have to grow of course with me I want to grow everything it's just how I work it's how I do things so I would say at that point we're probably looking at one or two formats that got us to 100K if we want to get to a million we probably need four or five different formats that are working so more effort being put on ideation if you're just doing the same format there are some exceptions to this but it's very rare to see a channel doing the same format all the way to a million subscribers you know that can get you that initial traction but over time you're going to end up fatiguing that that bucket or fatiguing that format and that's why you need to put more focus on ideating some different formats that can also get you there like I even think with the golden retriever Channel example like I'm going to wait for them to get to 100K when they do I'm going to say okay now you guys need to start thinking about other buckets that could work other formats as well cuz like you're not going to get to a million doing the same thing again and again and again if a million's the goal um I think that's one thing I think definitely like seeing yourself as a Creator as more of like an entrepreneur and starting to put yourself in the entrepreneurs mindset you have to start to adopt more of an entrepreneurs mentality than just like I'm a little Creator who does this part time I think at that point you're you're going to look at it and say hey how can I start to build build leverage and how can I start to look at the things that myself as a Creator pulls the most leverage and the thing is for most creators that's not editing you know and it's not it's not thumbnail design usually so those are things that I quite often we'll start to Outsource at that point of the journey because we're probably making some money we can start to afford to Outsource and what happens is you unlock more time for yourself where do you put that time you put that time towards ideating you put that time towards the vision and the strategy of of what you're trying to do as a channel and I actually still recommend creators put that time towards thumb Out Concepts as well all too often creators are like they don't want to get really good at thumb Out Concepts cuz thumb Out Concepts are hard so they try to hire someone to help them with them but realistically I you know I still do thumb Out Concepts for channels with 20 million subscribers like it's still something I like doing and it's still something I'm good at I'm always trying to to work on and you know I have plenty of people in my company that could do that for me but it's still something that I think is high leverage cuz you make a good idea you make a good th now like that return on time is huge the editing return on time could take you 10 hours 20 hours to edit a video but someone else could do that for you and you know the Leverage is not the same like it's not going to hit the same so I think getting better at that is really important um adopting that mentality and then just like getting into like nice Rhythm and schedule as well like whatever your posting schedule is trying to like stay consistent with that um trying not to like see it as this war of attrition every week they're trying to enjoy their process as well I think and not I think one thing that I really struggle with is when creators put like an actual like time limit on when they have to hit 1 million subscribers I think that takes the fun out of it like I'm I'm okay with setting goals but I don't like having a subscriber count be the goal because if a subscriber Count's the goal I mean we could just make shorts with like ctas in them every day for like a year and hit the goal but the goal should be like sustainable Channel growth the goal should be average views per video on your long form videos the goal should be monthly Revenue it shouldn't be subscriber count so I think don't have an actual time limit of when you need to hit that goal so often creditor is like my goal is hit a million subscribers by end of the year I'm like like it just puts an it's like not a good thing to optimize her because it doesn't really matter that much it's just like a status signal um so trying trying to enjoy the process I think it's really important Patty is an absolute YouTube genius and if you want to hear more from him I would highly recommend giving him a follow on Twitter now now that we've covered what's required to grow on YouTube overall we can dive into what actually goes into making a killer YouTube video starting with this single most important element of any video part two ideation how do you come up with a good video idea I have an entire video covering this topic in detail but I will give an a bridged version here first you start with the topic if I say I want to make a video about YouTube thumbnails YouTube thumbnails is my topic there are lots of ways to can get inspiration for different topics but for most people topic generation is not the hard part most people usually have more topics than they know what to do with but if you are struggling to come up with topics there are two main ways to get more which is logical ideation and inspired ideation logical ideation is looking at what topics have performed well in the past and what topics have the potential to perform well in the future and you can find those by seeing what others are doing looking at things like Google Trends seeing what kinds of things people are asking for in places like comment subreddits or Twitter looking as what performed well for you in the past and looking at outliers we'll get to outliers a little bit later inspired ideation is coming with a topics based on things like brainstorming sessions mind maps iding under constraints like videos that will take me less than one day to do or videos that will take me zero doar and things like shower thoughts or late night thoughts having a diverse content diet is incredibly important when it comes to inspired ideation so you want to be reading watching and listening to things that fire you up get you energized and get your brain going once you have your list of topics then you can get into your topic validation stage this is when you verify or validate that your topic has the potential to get the views that you want there are two main things that you should look for here first does proof of Prior success exist if you go on YouTube search for your topic and S by popular are there many relevant videos that have gotten views above your view goal whether that's 100K views 1 million views or anything else the second thing to look for is outliers an outlier is a video that has significantly overperformed a Channel's average so if a channel normally brings in 10k views per video but one video brings in 100K views that video is an outlier I personally like to use a tool called one of 10 to help me find outliers but if you can find many outliers for your topic that is a great sign that your topic has the potential to get the views that you want by the way I'm going to be mentioning a lot of different tools or resources throughout the course of this video so I will link all of those in the video description to make it easier for you to locate the things that you want at this point if you found proof of Prior success and outliers for your topic then your topic has potential now it's time to turn that topic into a full-fledged idea and when doing so the key thing to consider is a concept called remarkability remarkability is how you stand out and in today's YouTube climate especially if you're in a more saturated Niche you need to stand out in order to be successful a Creator called Doug Doug talked about this concept in this video which I highly recommend watching but I'll share a point that Doug Doug made here imagine you're setting up a new stall in a food court that is just dedicated to Burgers there's a five gu a Smash Burger and just a million other burger joints as far as the eye can see and let's just say that Five Guys is the Burger Joint that's doing the best out of all of them so you might think oh hey Five Guys is doing well so I should make food just like Five Guys the problem is if you make food just like Five Guys no one will ever eat at your burger joint because why would they eat at knockoff Five Guys when original Five Guys is right there but if you take the concept of a burger and add your own twist like for instance taking elements of a burrito and combining it and making a burgerito then you end up with something original no one else is making burgeritos and it may be kind of weird and not everyone will like it but the people who do like it will keep coming back to your food stall every single time because there's nowhere else to get it as you think about your own unique offering though it is important to consider what your goals are and how many people in the world exist that like the same things that you like if your offering is super super super an Niche and a maximum of maybe 100 people like that thing that is a really important factor to consider But ultimately you can be remarkable by either being significantly better than what already exists or by being significantly different from what already exists and most of us can't do better so we need to be different and the best way to be different is by leaning into your strengths that's exactly how gaming Creator Aristotle grew his channel to hundreds of thousands of subscribers and a 100 million views I would say it's really important to think about what your strengths are uh let's say you're like a top 10 player in fortnite you're really great you always win people are going to want to see that so you should lean into tips and tricks or lean into crazy gameplay clips that nobody else can show off and really that is your format that is what you show off to everybody because they can't find it in anywhere else or maybe if you're really good at making people laugh in chat or whatever you do voice chat and you make people laugh there's a channel I've been watching recently um I think his real name is Slater I can't remember the channel name but he basically plays Call of Duty war zone but he has a voice changer on his mic so he sounds like a 10-year-old kid so everything he says is just really funny because it sounds like a 10-year-old kid but you know as the audience it's this guy who's you know an adult who's just really great at the game so there's that contrast there and it's really funny so he leans into being hilarious while he plays and he's also really good um if you're not let's say you're not great at the game you can't make everybody laugh I'm guilty of this I don't have those two skills I lean into my creativity and unique ideas so I try to Showcase parts of Mario games Nintendo games that nobody's ever seen or ever been able to do before and that's how I decided to take my direction to do something that stands out that's hopefully remarkable against everything else your own strengths could be something that you already know about yourself or it could be something that's discovered over time through comments from your viewers like if they say they really like your relatability or your depth of research or your conversational tone or your expertise or anything else identifying your own strengths is definitely not an overnight thing sometimes a results from years of improving on something just take it from Aristotle my most popular video is I made Mario Wonder in Mario Maker 2 where I remade the entire trailer frame by frame within this Mario Maker 2 game and the the only reason I could do that and make it look identical is because of all the skills that I had acquired over years of working with this game so the longer you do it the better ideas you're going to start having because you just know the game inside and out one of the best ways to incorporate your unique strengths into a video idea is by leveraging a format that caters to your specific strength there are six main formats on YouTube and each of them provide a different reason for a viewer to click we click on tutorials to learn how to do something ourselves we click on challenges to discover the outcome of the challenge to experience all the struggle successes and surprises along the way we click on breakdowns to answer questions we don't know the answers to we click on commentaries to hear a specific perspective we click on Vlogs to glimpse into others lives and we click on interviews to hear in-depth personal or exclusive information that we can't get elsewhere once you've decided on one or more formats for your idea you can also use different angles to make your idea more interesting or to twist it in ways that no one has done before I go into much more detail about formats and angles in my ideation video so I will link that in the video description if you're interested so that's how you can come up with topics verify that those topics have potential and build upon them to create a completely new idea how do you decide whether an idea is worth it or not everyone should have their own criteria set up for whether or not an idea is worth making from what I've seen there tends to be six main categories of criteria first is feasibility is this idea feasible is it possible for you to execute on this idea next up is new audience interest if someone saw this idea but had no idea who you are would they still be interested the third is existing audience interest is this idea interesting to at least 80% of your existing audience next up is view potential does this idea have the potential to hit your view goal whether it's 100K views 1 million views or anything else the fifth is brand alignment does this idea fit with the brand of your channel and finally there's package ability can you come up with a strong title and thumbnail for this idea we'll talk about this more in the next sections I also like adding the criteria of personal excitement because in my opinion if you're not enjoying most of the content that you make you're setting yourself up for Burnout and eventual failure your own rating criteria can be different but for me I like to have a personal excitement floor of seven out of 10 if an idea is underneath a seven for personal excitement it doesn't get made and then from there I'll go through the rest of the checks I will say that not every single video idea you make has to follow every single one of these criteria and this goes for literally every single piece of YouTube advice in this video we are sharing the best practices and things that we've learned over our Collective Decades of experience but every single one of us would agree that you should absolutely leave room for experimentation and trying out new things regardless of any rules or best practices part three titles titles are something that can absolutely make or break a YouTube video so to help me cover titles I brought in Jake Thomas who is the maker behind the popular Creator hooks newsletter and is quite possibly the most knowledgeable YouTube title expert in the world and today he's here to share that knowledge with you how do you make clickable titles so the simplest answer is the three click worthy emotions uh curiosity fear and desire like that you know if you just want like the simple answer like is this title clickable it's does it have one or two maybe even three of those emotions some of the worst titles are just boring they're plain they're just like plain statements they don't really make you feel anything they don't you know uh Peak your curiosity or like give you a tinge of fear or like get you super excited and if it doesn't do that it's probably not a good title out of those three click worthy emotions C osity is the one that is by far the most important so I've talked to people like Pat Flynn and Daryl ease I'm like hey what do you think makes a good title and they both said like one word curiosity so if you can get people curious about about your content then they're going to click so that's like the gatekeeper it's the most powerful emotion um it's like it it it is the one thing you need to learn how to do um most people when they think about curiosity they just want to ask a question they're like oh what's the best way to write a YouTube title like question mark I don't love questions because typically on YouTube and this is really any content making a bold statement is more attractive and will get people interested you know if it's polarizing you know people like oh like I I agree with that or I disagree with that just making a bold statement that kind of makes somebody go wait what um so the easiest way to build curiosity is to open up a loop um you might know this as a cliffhanger or a curiosity Gap it's pretty much just like starting a story but not finishing it so like um you know a title might be like this is the best way to write YouTube titles in 2024 okay that's bold statement but it's like okay what is the best way um or like you know if you're not getting enough subscribers on YouTube do this um again it's like it's a cliffhanger it's like oh like do what I've got I have to click um and I've got to uh you I've got to click and see what they're talking about um that that bold statement of like also it's like encouraging that this person will be able to solve my problems it's like I know I'm in the right hands like when they're when they uh they make this bold claim that they can help me you reach my goals that's another reason why I don't love questions so an open loop is the most common way to build curiosity um and you know just pretty much start your story but don't finish it there's a bunch of other ways uh I've I've been kind of loving contrast recently so just like pairing two opposites against each other uh so Mr Beast used this and got like literally a billion views um that was like his one versus like $250 million vacation $1 versus $250 million or yacht or boat whatever it was jobs all that other that whole series and that's just contrast of like you know pairing two opposite things together and they kind of make you you're like wait what like there's there's such a big difference like you do a double take um it's so interesting and uh you know other ways to use it like one of my favorite titles is luxury fashion is for broke people so like luxury fashion broke people like wait that that doesn't make sense uh but really just pairing two things that like don't really go together and like saying hey these these do go together that just builds so much curiosity so you you've got to click you got to see hey what's going on here there are countless different ways to open curiosity gaps in titles and Jake was kind enough to provide us with a list of different methods and title formats that tend to work across different niches and if you want to see more I would highly recommend checking out his free Creator hooks newsletter which I'll link in the video description but Jake also has advice for finding more Niche specific ways to evoke curiosity whenever I start a new channel this is the first thing I do um is I build out um a list it's called like you know the model 10 or like it's just a list of adjacent channels so if uh let's say for example you had a um a channel in like how to take care of your lawn or something like you had a lawn care Channel I would look up other channels like pool care channels um you know like Fitness channels like other kind of like educational channels where like if you're teaching teaching somebody how to take care of their lawn what are some other niches where people are teaching somebody how to do something just like create a list of like 10 channels that you want to be like that are not in your Niche but they have similar content like similar content style and just see what is working for them just looking for outliers and then just model those titles those Frameworks for your Niche some of them will include curiosity not all of them you know some of them might include like desire or fear or um you know other other kind of Click triggers or other interesting things that make people click but that is just the easiest thing that you can do and like when I was first writing titles like I never came up with anything new I would always just look for what work so we had a fishing channel and we were like fishing education so I would look for like what worked for like you know Finance education so 10 best credit cards of 2024 would work for them and I would write a title called 10 best trout lures of 2024 and always modeling never coming up with anything new and then eventually once you get the hang of it once you get really good at writing titles um once you know what makes people click then you can start kind of of coming up with ideas yourself in the last section we talked about different angles that you could take on an idea and one of the best ways for those different angles to manifest is through title variations let's say uh for you like you know if if I have a YouTube education Channel there are only like a handful of things that people want to do right like you know you can only make so many videos where the title is exactly what they're looking for and in reality like okay they want to grow their views or they want they want to they want to grow their channnel and get more views but like how do we say the same thing this you know this one idea how do we say this like 50 times so like okay let's try to have like a curiosity based title it's like you know do this to get more views in 2024 or like let's have a fear-based title as in like okay uh you know this this small mistake is ruining your channel um let's have like a desire based Channel like you know uh here's how this Creator went from uh from zero to a million subscribers in in 12 months or something so you know and those could all be topics for the same essential idea and if that is what works for your channel and that's what um what's get what what gets viewed for you and also is what is converting for for actual business for you then you know find those those topics and most channels have like five to 10 topics and just attack those topics with kind of with different titles of like you know with all these different angles you know like curiosity fear and desire I'll go through all those and I'll be like all right what makes the most sense for my channel like kind of what what goes with um my Channel's Vibe and like what I'm trying to accomplish with this channel so like a fear-based title can often do really well but it might not be what you're looking for some people don't like fear and and I I get it or like you know sometimes you feel like oh my Channel's like just so negative because I've been doing fear fear fear like let me try to switch it up you will definitely you know take that into consider into consideration so maybe you do more curiosity or desire based but it's really just you know I kind of have my central idea and I just attack it from a bunch of different angles um using different kind of different different ideas different click triggers you know things that make people click and then using that to write a bunch of titles and then kind of slowly Whittle that down what are different ways you can Whittle down your list of title variations um a couple ways one gut feel what what do I like best what makes me feel the best what am I most excited about that's like kind of the easiest way um two uh so I have a a group of like uh three other guys where we all have like similar channels and we will bounce off titles and thumbnails um from each other and uh I'll see what they think about it um so if you have that group awesome ask that group if you don't make that group because that was proa will probably be like the best thing you ever do um but also you can just like ask your friends ask people in your Niche um ask people you know who you think who you like their judgment um you know asking friends and then also looking at your Channel's history your competitors and then other um you know that model 10 your adjacent channels looking at all of those and okay I wrote 20 different titles are any of these like is there any proof that this angle will work has worked for for my channel for my competitors or for other channels um you know can we have I seen that to work like if it's totally new then that is like a highrisk high reward title where like you could just be bringing something new into this Niche that no one has ever seen um but it's based on you know a a proven click trigger and you know proven psychology like oh there's there's a pretty good chance that this could do really well because it's it's totally new um but but really good however there's also a big chance that nobody cares about it right like that you know you've never seen it in your Niche because it doesn't work I mean it really depends on how how much experience you have writing titles um for me I do a little bit more high risk High reward if I am confident in everything else like if I right I know this content is good I know the idea is good um you know I know I'm not like you know I don't have to have a win here like if this video flops whatever I don't care um you know if my if my channel is kind of if I'm feeling pretty good about that on the other hand like you know if my Channel's like tanking and like we're just in a rut I probably am not going to do this highrisk High reward title I'm going to go with something more proven so I'll go with one of those titles do capitalization and length matter in titles if you use all caps it'll be harder to read and if it's harder to read people are less likely to click your titles so I'm not a big fan of all caps sometimes I will capitalize one word if I really want to emphasize it but it it really kind of depends on like the vibe of your channel if you're kind of a hype Channel then capitalization kind of fits with that brand if you're like a just a a chill casual Channel like that's like kind of the the vibe and the brand you're going for I I probably wouldn't use capitalization um you know if you are you can also just use it to convey emotion so like if you got fire from your job like you know it's all over you know all undercase you know dot dot dot um just has a a really different vibe and like it's all over like you know all um you know all uh all uppercase uh exclamation mark exclamation mark so uh you know it really depends on your brand and the vibe you're trying to go for as far as capitalization I don't think it matters that much I think if you just capitalize the first letter of every word that's probably like the safest thing to go to but I would definitely recommend not capitalizing everything because it's a little harder to read what about length of title can we get into that YouTube gives you up to a 100 characters for your title should you be using all of them should you be intentionally not using many of them how do you think about title link um big broad answer uh going back to the the titles in Creator expr last time we checked the average title length was 54 and a half characters that's a huge answer uh the more nuanced answer is it depends on your traffic source and your audience so if you are if you have a younger audience you probably want to have shorter titles if you have an older audience you can get away with longer titles uh if depends on your traffic source so if you're trying to rank and search when people are searching they're actively searching so they're more likely to actually like read your whole title so you can have longer titles because they are they're looking for an answer for something so they're they're willing to put in more effort effort versus if they're just like scrolling um you know if you're trying to get views from the homepage people are more passively scrolling um you're not even searching they're just scrolling so you want shorter titles so that they will be able to um more quickly like digest what uh what your video is about if they're like super long titles like no I'm scrolling right on by like this is this is too much work to read and to understand and to comprehend what this video is about how important is SEO in titles if you're not familiar SEO stands for search engine optimization YouTube gets a huge amount of search traffic and you may have even seen YouTube search show up as a traffic Source on one of your videos which means that your video is getting views from showing up in search results now there are ways to optimize your title for ranking in search results this is usually done through something called keyword research which is the process of finding keywords that have a high search volume and a low competition I go through that process in depth in this video of mine now as to whether or not you should optimize your title foring and search that depends on what your goals are the main mechanism for a video going viral on YouTube is through YouTube's recommendation system with your video showing up on people's homepages and the thing is people's behavior is different when they're intentionally searching for something versus when they're more passively browsing looking for something to watch if your goal is to go viral it's better to structure your title with browse based viewing in mind this means creating more of a curiosity Gap in your title or more fear or or Desire with a search optimize video in contrast the title should be more so optimized for clarity the intention to click is already there your goal and your title is to convince them that your video is the right one to watch for the thing that they're searching for if you have something to direct traffic to like an offer then ranking and search can be really great because it tends to rank for a very long time and the people who find your videos from that tend to be higher quality leads having some is optimized for search can also lead to a strong back catalog for example if you have 10 videos which each bring in 100 views per day from search results that's 30,000 views per month from search traffic alone which is not bad at all but if your goal is to go viral then your best bet is to optimize your content for browse part four thumbnails how do you make clickable thumbnails I also have a very detailed breakdown of thumbnails but I'll still give an overview here so the first thing to focus on is giving your viewers a reason to click and just like in titles you can do that by evoking curiosity and while there are countless different ways to evote curiosity there are five main ways that we do so in thumbnails we have moment thumbnails which offer a glimpse into the moment right before a powerful reaction story thumbnails which introduce a point of tension or question that sets up the First Act of a story result thumbnails which feature a desired result transformation thumbnails which feature both desired result and a beginning stage date and Novelty thumbnails which rather power from natural urge to experience something we've never seen before but in order for someone to click on your thumbnail they have to notice it in the first place which can be hard when they're met with countless thumbnails every single time they log on to YouTube but as humans were biologically wired to notice or pay attention to certain things things that I call scroll Stoppers a classic example is the use of faces but other elements like familiarity money large numbers bright colors danger or movement emotions and things that are aesthetically pleasing are also great at stopping the Scroll once you have your curiosity Gap in one or more scroll Stoppers in place you have the foundation for your thumbnail then we can move to actually putting these elements together in thumbnail construction and for that you can follow the three seeds of thumbnail design contents composition and contrast when it comes to contents the main elements of a thumbnail are separated into the main character and the supporting characters the main character is the focal point of the thumbnail while the supporting characters are there to help support the main character in creating the Curiosity Gap and this distinction between main characters and supporting characters is actually quite important because while we tend to think of design as adding things great design is actually about getting the main point across as quickly as possible and one of the best ways to do that is through composition so main characters are usually placed in the center of symmetrical thumbnails or on the right or left third of asymmetrical thumbnails you can also help direct attention to the main character through things like red arrows leading lines and differences in scale blur and depth it's really important to keep composition and hierarchy in mind when it comes to text while thumbnail text can be a main character you shouldn't rely on people reading a whole bunch of text in a thumbnail in order to understand it for the most part text should be a important character and often you don't even need any text at all but if you do choose to include it here are some best practices first try to keep it at five words or less and use a font that is easy to read at a glance and add a size that is easy to read at a glance don't just repeat your title in the thumbnail text any text that you add should add something new and be very careful to not let any supporting character text overshadow your main character there is one final way to make your main character stand out and that is through contrast which is created through color color has three main values Luminosity saturation and Hue and contrast can be created using each of those three values Luminosity contrast comes from mixing lights and darks saturation contrast comes from mixing colors versus gray scale and Hue contrast comes from mixing complimentary colors or colors opposite to each other on the color wheel I'm including Hue contrast for the sake of completion but it is by no means a hard and fast r rule in fact the majority of high performing thumbnails on YouTube do not include perfectly complimentary colors so really don't get too hung up on it after you've put together your thumbnail you can run your finished thumbnail through a series of three tests to see if it's ready the first test is the clarity test which is seeing if you can make out your thumbnail in its smallest view which is on the sidebar because when we're working on our thumbnails they're often very very large blown up on our entire screen but when people see it on YouTube it is much smaller and to see this preview I like to use a tool called click pilot which I will link in the video description the main test is can you clearly make out your thumbnail in its smallest view can you read every single word and can you understand what everything is next up is the contrast test if you put your thumbnail alongside lots of other thumbnails within your Niche does your thumbnail stand out does it draw attention and does it have the power to stop someone's scroll and finally you have the glance test if you pull up your thumbnail on your phone and then show it to someone for 2 seconds will they be able to know what they saw will they be able to tell you what they saw and will they be able to know what your video is about if you can't pass all three tests go back and make changes but if you do pass them then hey you got a thumbnail I also wouldn't just stop there though because YouTube now has thumbnail AB testing which allows you to test multiple thumbnails at once to see which one performs better then YouTube will show these thumbnails to viewers on an impression by impression basis and as it does so it will track each of the thumbnail variations total watch time share essentially out of all of the total watch time on a video how much of it came from each thumbnail this metric takes both CTR or click-through rate and avd or average view duration into account we'll cover these metrics in more detail later on in the analytics section but essentially if each thumbnail yields the exact same average uation so everyone's watching video around the same amount of time which is usually the case then the thumbnail with the highest click-through rate or CTR would drive the most total views and therefore be responsible for the biggest portion of total watchtime share at the same time there could be a thumbnail that has a very high click-through rate but a very low average view duration because that thumbnail could be super click baity and people could see it and click but then end up clicking off of the video really fast because they think hey that's not what I clicked on and I would have a lower total watch share it is definitely worth coming up with a couple of different thumbnails to test because they can yield significantly different results and I've seen even seemingly small changes lead to actual differences in total watchtime share so it's definitely something to do I find it hard to think about thumbnails first should I still do that though so many of the top YouTubers have their packaging so that means their title and their thumbnail done before they start working on the video itself there's a reason why the title and thumbnail sections of this video came right after the ideation video aha everything is intentional but the reasoning behind this really early title and thumbnail creation is that they want to avoid pouring all of his energy and effort and resources into a video only to not have any way to package it later online because if people don't click then people won't watch and then all the effort that's poured into the video would be wasted So to avoid that they make their titles and thumbnails first to verify that they'll be able to have something that is clickable now this is something that is much easier said than done especially if you're really excited to start working on a video right away or if you have very limited time or energy but I do maintain that it is important to start thinking about tyel and thumbnails as early as you can and if you're making a video that features something that you're going to create later on like a craft that's great when I say finalize your titles and thumbnails first it doesn't mean having it 100% done but you should aim to at least have mockups or concepts for your thumbnails even if you do a filler images that are there to stand in until you have the final product later on but the closer that you can get to a finalized thumbnail in the earlier on you can do that the better because you never want to waste a good video on a bad title or thumbnail what software do you use to make your thumbnails I use figma because it feels intuitive to me but I'm definitely an outlier in that case because most people tend to use canva or photoshop part five research how do you conduct research for a video my research process is split between the information collection phase and the information connection phase in the information collection phase I gather as much information as I possibly can on my topic I like to start out with primary sources of information interviews postes online is a great place to get that as well as podcasts I'll also reach out and conduct interviews of my own to get more information after that if I feel like I need it I'll go through secondary sources of information or other videos posted talking about this topic or Twitter threads on the topic other things like that I also like to look at tangential Industries so if I'm researching YouTube thumbnails for instance I'll also look into the theories behind things like book covers or movie posters or Netflix thumbnails because ether information from those Industries might be applicable to YouTube in a way that most people haven't thought about yet whenever I gather these notes I like to add timestamps so I can go back to any specific point and listen to it again or clip it if I need to after information collection is done I will move on to information connection this is when I'll start grouping or connecting different pieces of information from different sources of information and to do that I will start making buckets and pulling each bullet point I have into either an existing bucket or adding a new one if points or insights from different sources are compiled into the same bucket I know that that bucket is probably a good one and then I'll go through that entire process again combining buckets if they are similar enough after I have my buckets in place each with points insights or supporting evidence from multiple sources then my research phase will be complete I'll move on to outlining and script writing part six script writing I get ask about script writing all the time and to help me answer questions about script writing I have brought in George Blackman a remarkable script writer who's worked with clients like Ali abdall Noah Hagen and Mike Shake he's been responsible for over 25 million video views he teaches script writing for a living and now he's here to share that knowledge with you how do you write a great script I think at its core like the way I've tried to distill this um into my I have kind of like a writing system that I use uh and that I try and teach my students and it kind of boils down to first of all knowing who your audience is that's that's really at the heart of all of it is having having a strong awareness of who you're talking to and that is the most boring step and it makes for a very like boring start to a conversation about this because it doesn't feel fun to like create an audience Avatar it feels very marketingyoutube need to be 30 seconds or can I shorten it to to 10 seconds like how how much proof do I need to show in my hook to get the audience interested like what are my audience even interested in um all of that stuff that kind of that second voice that's in your head that disappears once you know who you're talking to and once you get familiar with your your audience so that's the first step the second thing and and this is this is kind of NE nebulous but if we're talking about writing a great script it has to be something that is sustainable for you like the process of physically writing that script needs to be sustainable so when I first started talking about all this stuff publicly I was really really hammering down the door of script everything like that was kind of my thing that's what I wanted to try and you know that was my spiky point of view that I wanted to talk about online and that still kind of works as a vehicle for putting my point of view across But ultimately that's that's not functional for a lot of people and if you are forcing yourself to spend 10 hours 20 hours scripting every single script that you do and it's causing you to get stressed out get tired uh you know maybe it feels like word for word scripting doesn't really just jive with you on the day when you're filming and then the resultant video is no good then that's a problem um and ultimately the process of YouTube as a whole has to be sustainable so maybe it's the case that you go for what I call like level one scripting which is where you basically break down your script into the fundamental points that need to be addressed so you do like a a kind of wild brainstorm where you talk about uh or where you're you're just thinking okay what could go into this video like if I'm not like settling on anything yet but Blue Sky Thinking what ideas do I think probably need to be in here what pieces of uh like you know flashes of b-roll have I got in my mind what visual moments do I have what could go in here and basically then once you've done that taken a little time away from it you basically just trim it down to let's say the five or the 10 whatever it is key components of that video so educational it might be like the Five Points that are necessary to understand the ultimate point of the video If It's Entertainment it will be like you know so you what whatever it might be the five things that are going to happen in the buildup to you doing big explosion thing at the end whatever whatever that thing is um and for a level one script that's enough you have those five key moments that kind of the payoff for each of those segments in your head that's all you need um and then again like you can kind of level that up level two is where you basically break those Five Points up into as I think of it like setup tension and resolution uh or or payoff I suppose set up tension payoff so again you're still each of those segments ends with a very clear payoff but you're thinking about okay so I know what the payoff is for that segment how am I going to set that up really effectively and get my viewer excited about that little payoff at the end of the segment and then drive tension as I move towards it again in terms of sustainability it's a little less sustainable because you're you're having to put a lot more time and thought into that process but it's still not fully scripted and ultimately you still have hopefully a great script at the end of it which you might have to do a bit of riffing to get from set up through the tension through to the payoff uh you know for for the whole script But ultimately that's still a great script because you've spent time thinking about it and the process is sustainable um then ultimately level three is the kind of the final step where rather than just having those bullet points you expand them into into full points but for a lot of people a great script lives at level two I think if you've thought about the payoff for each segment and you thought about how you set it up really really nicely then then that's a great script in my opinion George uses a setup tension and payoff framework which is remarkably similar to a framework I like to use that I've taken from novel writer Brandon Sanderson three PS of plot which is promise progress and payoff this structure is the key to writing any engaging script so let's dive deeper into it starting with setup the setup this comes back to what what I spoke about just before about knowing who your audience is so for them it's like what is it about this segment of the video say you've got a video that has four main segments and uh you need to get your audience excited for each of those segments you need to know basically what they care about so let's imagine I always got I don't know why my default is is always like a gardening example CU I do not have a garden and I'm not a gardener I would like to have a garden uh but I don't um and so let's say like we're we're doing a a tutorial that is about how to grow amazing pumpkins or something and uh bizarre choice of vegetable but um let's go with that and so the ultimate point of the video the reason they're watching is because they want to know how to grow how to grow a pumpkin is pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable this is irrelevant um it it's a fruit it's a fruit okay cool um that's hopefully we cut that out uh no we don't have to um uh so that's the ultimate point of the video right they've clicked on the video because they want to know how to grow the biggest pumpkins possible um but then I'm breaking down I'm doing my brainstorm and I'm thinking okay what are the things that could go into this video well I would probably need to know about the types of seed I'm going to need obviously pumpkin seeds but like are there any particular types of pumpkin seeds are there any vendors that I should buy them from specifically uh what type of soil am I going to need how much space am I going to need uh how much sunlight what time of year like all of that stuff that's kind of been my initial brainstorm then I'm narrowing it down and I'm thinking okay so like in terms of the order we need to think about this stuff the first thing I'm going to want to know is probably like how much space do I need because ultimately if I don't have enough space for it then it's kind of irrelevant what types of seed I need what type of you know blah blah blah so that would be my segment one we'll be talking about what kind of what kind of space do you need so now we come down to the like breaking up the setup tension and payoff for that segment and for me I'm thinking like okay how do I this is kind of maybe not the most interesting one to start with uh but in terms of a setup for that um your audience for example the worry I would have if I'm an audience member going into that video is I'm expecting that I don't have enough space perhaps for for this video because I feel like a pumpkins are huge if I want to grow a big pump pumpkin patch am I going to have enough space and so the setup is in my case uh you you're aware that that is the fear your audience has and so you want to basically evoke that and draw that out of them so like you might say that uh something like the majority of people assume they don't have enough space for growing pumpkins but as long as you have you know X specific thing in your garden I'm going to show you how you can turn any size Garden into a viable pumpkin patch or something like that so that's that's that's kind of like they're almost like mini hooks these setups but essentially at the start of that segment where we're showing that we're aware of that fear and that expectation that the audience member has coming in that oh my Garden's probably not big enough or you know whatever it is um and you're basically you're giving them that little setup that promise like I I assure you that you pretty much regard regardless of the size of your garden as long as you can you you have this one thing we can make a big enough space for you to grow pumpkins and that one thing could be anything it could be who I don't know I'm going to stop trying to guess things about how gardening Works uh me without a garden but that's essentially what we're doing and we're promising them that like just stick with me I understand your problem I've called it out but I'm going to guide you through the process of of making sure that um that I address that problem essentially how does the setup change for an entertainment video and I know that entertainment isn't exactly like your wheelhouse but do you have like any pointers or people who don't have a go strictly educational type of video yeah sure yeah so I'm I'm I'm less less experience in the entertainment side of things but I have done I work with um Mike shake for a while um and I've done like little bits and pieces here and there for people and yeah it's kind of simpler really for for entertainment stuff because a lot of the time you're you don't know what's going to happen and you don't really you can't really script everything before it's like you'll kind of write the bullet points you'll go do whatever the thing is and then you might come back to the script after afterwards in right voice over to help tie it together uh but but usually the setup is pretty simple it's like normally you're going to be doing something where uh I don't know I I'm trying to think of an example of something something that's not like generic Mr Beast blow something up at the end um but there's going to be something that you're ultimately building up to at the end like you say Max fosch uh hatching a fish from caviar or something or Michelle car having a boxing match with with somebody uh you know a professional boxer at the end and it's like what are what are the steps necessary to achieve that thing so in Michelle's case it's like Step One is I actually can't remember the order of how that stuff goes in the video but it might be to find a trainer uh in this case I think she goes with Tony Tony Jeff um and and so like for me that that would be the setup is like first I needed to find a trainer like simple as that you don't need to over complicate it it's just we know what the ultimate goal is you've helped give an idea hopefully in the hook of like what the structure is going to be to build up to that thing step one I needed to find a trainer and then off you go so that's the setup and after the setup we move into tension yeah so I mean maybe maybe we can return to the the pumpkin example again um so in this case like we've established the idea that um that regardless of how big your garden is we're going to have something in this segment that's going to tell you like you know show you how you can still have enough space to grow a a massive pumpkin so the key thing to avoid and the thing that a lot of people do is fairly immediately kind of answer what the uh what the issue is and give the payoff too soon so they confuse almost like the tension bit with what the payoff bit should be at the end so they might might say very very quickly hey don't worry as long as your garden is X Dimensions big you're sorted you're going to have enough space for for growing this pumpkin patch uh and now let's talk about some ways that you can I don't know prepare the prepare your garden to make sure that uh you know your pumpkins can grow really fertile but the problem is for me the tension of that first segment the the thing that's been set up is the idea of oh actually I don't know if I am going to have enough space and being told out the gate that no you definitely have enough space as long as do I hit those Dimensions y my Garden's that big cool I know I have enough space for this I'm going to skip onto segment two and learn about picking the right type of seeds or picking the right type of soil or whatever it is so the the key really in the tension segment is making sure you're not revealing that bit too early essentially we don't want to be testing the audience's patience and making it feel like you're trying to retention hack them all the time um so maybe in this case where where the tension is like we don't want to give away straight away whether or not they have enough space we might just get them excited about the prospect of what they're going to uh going to be able to grow by showing like a bunch of different examples where you know without context maybe not giving measurements but it's like here are like snapshot snapshot snapshot four different you know three different Gardens four different Gardens with amazing pumpkins that have grown in them that clearly look like they are uh like really small like a tiny Courtyard out the back of someone's house or uh it might even be like a window box or something outside somebody's window and it's like we're saying these are you know three example these are you know three past clients of mine who've all grown prize winning pumpkins uh with minimal minimal space and now we're going to talk about the the way that they did that or something like that and so that way it's like it's showing it's getting people excited again about the idea that like visually showing them okay that looks pretty small oh that looks pretty small that looks smaller than my garden it looks like they're doing it pretty well and then that's a way of like again getting continuing to keep people excited about the idea showing Visual Evidence of what they're going to uh you know find out shortly and then at the end of that segment we can then you know deliver the payoff explain whatever it is so even if you've got a garden that's uh smaller than x y Dimensions the one thing you need to you know set up is this whatever whatever that thing might be in a gardening context um but we draw out just a little bit of tension by keeping people excited by showing them what they're going to you know what's possible but without directly saying these are the dimensions of garden that you need uh I really could have picked a more interesting example than growing pumpkins but we are where we are so we've covered set up we've covered tension now let's get into payoff can you talk a little bit about the payoff CU I think when I think about payoff or when I first heard the term payoff I'm like yeah payoff has to be and someone wins a million dollars um so kind of like what what is payoff to you um so I it's it's kind of the simplest of of the three a lot of the time I think um especially if like I was talking about before if you're writing a level one script as I call it that's the payoff is B basically the only thing you think about so like a really a simp and actually to your point cuz I I know what you mean the tendency is for people because the phrase sounds quite evocative and quite emotive it feels like it will always need to be this huge thing but actually it can just be a a step towards whatever the grand payoff is and so in example of this like if I I think of a video that I worked on with Mike Shake which is one where he's he's learning to to hold his breath for four minutes basically and quite simply and and this is why I want to give this example is that you don't need to overthink it is like the payoffs throughout that video are basically he gets a a better score so he holds his breath for like 30 seconds longer than the time before and then he's like okay so I got pretty close this time but it wasn't enough so now we're transitioning from one payoff like he cool he gets the record uh that's a that's a payoff then we pivot into the next segment but I still had you know another minute and 30 seconds that I was going to have to learn to hold my breath for and so uh I discovered these um like Advanced Techniques for learning to hold your breath for longer that I was going to practice over the next two days and so that's like the setup for the next segment then the tension for that next segment is him practicing those breathing techniques uh you know constantly with the goal in mind of at the end of this segment I'm going to try and hold my breath again and I'm going to hopefully do it for longer the tension is driven by the fact that the breathing exercises don't necessarily seem to be helping that much and then he'll see like a glimmer of progress and then like not you know and it kind of it progresses along in that way to the point where he then is ready to try and hold his breath again and then he beats his record again gets another 30 seconds and that's another payoff and so that's that's a kind of entertainment example um but that's that's how I think about the uh the payoff really it's just it's just the thing you've been building towards happens and then you very quickly move into the next setup um and that's really the key just why we are talking about payoffs is those those moments between when you've paid off the last segment and when you set up the next one those are the areas where I see retention problems uh apart from the hook they are like the the most problematic area for people dipping out because essentially it's like you reach the end of a segment and your head comes above water for a second to to use well not to use a recent pun um but as a viewer your head comes above water because it's like okay I've been kind of involved in that segment I've been emotionally invested in it but I've come up for a like you've got a second or two seconds to capture their attention again and let them know why the next segment is important to remind them of the overall importance of the video and if they feel outside the loop of what that structure is it's all too easy to think the YouTube homepage is just one click away I don't really know why I should care about this next segment yet I've kind of Forgotten why I clicked on the video in the first place and I'm out of there so making sure that that gap between paying off one segment and setting up the next one is minimized is is critical yeah George has an absolute wealth of knowledge when it comes to script writing and he actually has a free 5day email course about it which I will link in the video description if you're interested how can you make your scripts sound more human and less robotic I often find myself sounding like chat GPT sometimes and I have no idea how to fix it honestly I think it comes back to kind of a mixture of what we've spoken about already um in terms of uh these like levels of scripting so a level two script is probably the point that I'd want to aim at initially which is again where we we've got the kind of key payoffs figured out and then we break those up into setup tension and payoff like we've been talking about that leaves you enough room to kind of Riff your way through the rest of it so I would always encourage you to write word for word the setup and the payoff because those are like the most where you can right if it's an entertainment video that doesn't allow you to do that then fine but particularly with education stuff um you the setup is so important for every single segment of your video write that word for word if you have the time and inclination to do so the payoff is super important making sure that that's like it's delivered in the right way write that word for word but the tension bit at a level two script tends to be more bullet pointy and that's totally fine it's like okay I know where I'm starting I know where I'm finishing I've heard songwriters give this advice as well it's like the start and the end of the song are the most important bits and then you can kind of figure out the way to get there um in between it's fine to leave that midle section as kind of more bullet pointy start riffing it see how it feels on the day if it feels like a complete uphill battle and you find that you're really not as good at riffing as you thought you were which is probably most people it's it's not as easy as um as people I think think it is when they get into YouTube but then it's about fine-tuning the amount that you script and kind of leveling you thinking okay last time I tried to record with just like three bullet points between the setup and the payoff I just felt stressed and I rambled and the editing was a nightmare uh next time I'm going to write maybe 10 bullet points and just see how that affects the riffing now this is kind of cheating because this isn't teaching you how to actually write a script in a way that doesn't sound like a robot but it is just basically I think as much as possible if you can just give yourself the guard rails to get from A to B and then you know bullet point it up to the point where you feel comfortable riffing it that's a nicer way to just still sound human but with the benefit of having thought out a really robust structure and I think what what you see over time um is is that once you've done that enough times like we were talking over the course of two three four years maybe you start to figure out like after listening to yourself time and time again seeing which riffs come out quite naturally it just becomes easier to to kind of find your voice George's advice here is great if you're someone who doesn't like scripting word for word I am definitely a word for word scripture myself so for any other word for word scriptures out there I have three pieces of a device first write more the more you write the better you'll get and I don't just mean YouTube scripts for me journaling helps a lot whenever I Journal I stream of Consciousness write and that writing sounds exactly like I talk so the more conversational tone that I develop there carries directly into my YouTube scripts second you can try dictating your video out loud and then using the transcript for that as the basis for your more human sounding script and the third piece of advice is more so for a later pass of scripting when you're into the script editing process I'll read my script over out loud and then any sentence or phrase that I trip over doesn't feel natural for me to say I will rewrite in a way that does feel more natural or is easier to say part seven production what's your video production process from ideation to publish so I always start out with the topic of the video that I want to make then I'll think about different formats or angles that I want to incorporate into the idea I will go through my ideation criteria process as well but usually that's something that's more so happens within my own head as opposed to written down in the spreadsheet once I've picked an idea to work on I'll try to get a couple of different title and thumbnail variations in my mind first before I start working on it if I'm being 100% honest with you I am not as good at that as I should be but I do try to have at least one promising Direction in mind before I move forward then I'll start video prep the level of prep looks different for different types of videos for my deep Dives I will launch straight into the research process for other types of videos I might start by writing down all the bullet points of everything that I might possibly want to include in the video and for this video that prep was asking people about what questions they had about YouTube and then compiling all of those into a gigantic Google doc after I have some sort of organized prep whether that's my finalized research buckets or some groups of things to include in the video I will start outlining my video video also I do get feedback from my group of YouTube friends at every step of that process starting with ideation and then going into their thoughts on the title and thumbnail I'll get their thoughts on my research I'll get their thoughts on my outline every single part of the process I'm getting their feedback on so I can iterate and make changes as I go along which has been so incredibly useful after my outline I head into scripting and depending on the script that I'm writing and how hard it is my script can go through anywhere from from 3 to 22 different rewrites once my script is finalized I will annotate my script and this is a super important part of my process that I added last year that has been an absolute GameChanger for me in The annotation stage I will go back through my script and comment out what is happening on screen during every sentence or phrase and that will be broken into talking head full screen text animations and visuals screen shares and Boll then I'll turn all of my required b-roll for the video into a shot list this becomes super helpful for me during my filming stage because then I know what lines I need to deliver directly into the camera as a roll versus what lines I can just read as voice over because I know it'll be covered up by b-roll or screen shares or something else in the finalized version of the video it also takes a lot of the mental burden out of the editing process so for me editing is is more so about execution versus about the decision- making in the moment after I have my annotations and my shot list done then I will film both my talking head a roll and any b roll that I'm filming as well then comes the edit which I'll talk about more in the editing section for now I'll just say that I do my rough cut first so that's kind of cleaning up my main talking head footage then I'll add my b-roll then I'll add my music then I'll go through and do the visual edit from start to finish and then I will add any sound effects after my edit is done I will send it off for feedback with friends and then make adjustments as needed at that point I will finalize my title and thumbnail I'll usually try to have a couple of different variations to AB test and then it's time for upload I don't really do anything special for uploading besides just making sure that all my time stamps are all in place and that any credits or links that I want to add to the description are all good to go how do you get more comfortable speaking in front of the camera and developing your own speaking voice is it all reps or is there more Nuance to it so I'm a lot more comfortable on camera now than I used to be but that has not always been the case when I was just starting out I did not like being on camera at all I didn't even like taking pictures of myself and the editing process felt like torture because I hated the sound of my own voice and all editing was was listening to my own voice over and over again for hours the hearing my own voice thing was something that unfortunately only got better with time but when it comes to getting more comfortable speaking on camera I do have some more concrete pieces of advice oh also I do have a full video just dedicated to this very topic tip number one would be that after pressing record but before going into the content of the video I would kind of stream of Consciousness talk to my camera for a while just to warm me up and this would be things like as random as hello I am here and I'm ready to film and I'm staring into a Glass Lens completely alone in this room and that feels awkward but that's okay cuz we're doing it anyway and then I'll just keep talking like that for a while until I get more used to it and my voice kind of returns back to normal speaking Cadence the second thing that I did was use my camera as my webcam for taking video calls which I could do using a software called Sony Imaging Edge because I have a Sony camera and that made me get a lot more comfortable talking to my camera during video calls because I was talking to actual people on the other side as opposed to just talking by myself myself in an empty room and the third main thing that I did was practice so I would speak through my entire video at least once or twice either the day before filming or right before filming so I'm more used to everything that I am saying I also discover that I was more comfortable when I scripted out my video word for word now not everybody works that way some people are much more comfortable with just bullet points and scripting everything out word for word throws them off it's really just something that you have to try out both options and see which one works best for you but for me that was scripting word for word so I had my script all right next to me on my laptop just out of frame of the camera and I'd go and I'd read one or two lines and then deliver those one or two lines into the camera and then go back and forth and put everything together in post- production and because it might be helpful for someone out there I'm going to include some of the raw footage of what this video looks like so you maybe feel less alone because I am definitely by no means perfect at my camera delivery everyone should have their own criteria set up for whether or not IDE is worth making everyone should have their own criteria set up for whether or not everyone should have their own criteria set up for whether or not an idea is worth making from what I've seen there tends to be six overall main criteria from what I've seen there tends to be six Cate ories of from what I've seen there tends to be six main categories of criteria part eight editing what's the process or order for editing a YouTube video what are the main ingredients of an edit you should focus on my own personal process starts with script annotation and then the rough cut of the a-roll or talking head footage then placing in any filmed b-roll then the music edit then the visual edit from start to finish and then rounding It Off off with any sound effects script annotation front loads all of the decision- making of the edit so going into the edit for me I already have an idea of what's going on on screen at any one time then I do my rough cut of my talking head footage and my voiceover where I cut out any silences mistakes or bad takes I usually prefer tighter edits with my more higher produced stuff so I will also cut out any breaths in between sentences as well for this rough cut I really like using a tool called gling which automatically removes any silences for for you it seriously saves so much time I'll link it in the video description I'd recommend using gling mostly for fully scripted out content or talking head content I don't think it's as useful for other different forms of content or formats mostly because the edit tends to come together in a different way so my rough cut gives me an estimated video link then at that point I'll come in and put in any Boll that I filmed there's no real reason why I do b-roll at this point for me it's mostly because I usually don't have not that much b-roll so just getting it all out there in the timeline feels like I can just give myself a check mark on something and have a sense of progress early on which I like once my rough cut is done and my b-roll is in place then I will move into music I used to save music as the very last thing that I did but I realized that two negative things happened if I did so one because the music step was the very last thing I processed in between me and uploading my video I tended to rush through the process because I wanted to get the video done done and published as fast as I could second doing music last made it harder to edit to the music which I normally like doing because it helps make the video feel better music is honestly such a huge part of any video and yes even educational videos because music really helps set the tone style and energy of a video so for me I would listen to the entire video with just the rough cut any filmed b-roll and just the music and if it felt boring or repetitive in places is I would go back and change the music first because when the music is good the visual edit is better and then I can also edit any sort of visuals to go with the music which helps the entire video feel more cohesive and put together for this particular video because it is so unreasonably long I didn't treat music as intentionally but I really pay lots of attention to it with my more highly edited stuff after the music edit I will start on the visual edit starting with the intro in which I will frontload a lot of the higher quality edits to give viewers a sense of what they can expect moving forward and kind of hopefully blow them away with the quality right out of the bat the visual edit for me is mostly just a combination of talking head footage b-roll any screen shares Motion Graphics or visuals and full screen text and because I've already planned everything out in the script annotation all this really is is just about execution and then once the visual edit is all done I'll go back and add certain sound effects to line up with certain visuals like Mouse clicks pops swooshes and keyboard typing and that's my process and just to be clear I am not a great editor I do not do everything the most efficient way and there are tons of different features in my editing software that I have no idea how to use but I just do what makes the most sense for my brain and for me I think that's what's most important your editing is topnotch what advice would you give on editing a video my biggest piece of advice is probably just to try stuff it took me a long time to find my editing style and even now it's still evolving look for cool things that you see other creators do and instead of thinking wow that looks so cool but I'm sure I could never do anything like that just try look up tutorials experiment you may not be able to perfectly replicate it but you might be able to come a lot closer than you think my own editing style for motion Graphics came because I started with a more simpler editing software that didn't have a lot of fancy features so I just did what I could with the slide transition cropping and the zoom position and opacity key frames that's literally it so just try everything I think that's the biggest piece of advice that I could give you in the long run it may take you forever to edit one 10-second sequence but you'll learn so much in the process and the next time you do it you'll be much quicker what advice would you give to someone who's editing their first video keep it as simple as possible and I know that I just laid out this huge complicated process but for your first edit I would really just focus on making Cuts adding text adding visuals like screen recordings pictures or clips and maybe trying to add some light background music that's it and then with each subsequent videos that you make try adding something new like a transition or key frames to make something move or color grading over time your skills will add up until you're editing like a pro but in the beginning keep things as simple as possible is it possible to succeed on YouTube if you don't have fast editing or animations absolutely and there are plenty of examples of that happening as Wells Jenny Nicholson and Sam suck are great examples of this among many more and as with most things It ultimately comes down to audience if your audience is a bunch of for 1-year-olds then yes they may want faster edits but not every audience wants that it also depends on what the goal of your content is if it's strictly to entertain and you want to serve a younger audience then yes faster editing is in fashion now but a lot of people are getting fatigued with super fast edits and a zillion things happening on screen all at the same time sometimes you just want to feel like you're hanging out with a Creator and slower more minimal editing can be preferred because then you get to see more more of their quirks and personality and if you're trying to teach things edit should be optimized for the best transfer of information this often means including visuals to help reiterate points but not putting so much on screen that it distracts the viewer from the information that they're trying to learn basically it's all a giant it depends and my best advice would be to try out different styles and see which ones work best for both you and for your audience as a beginner YouTuber do you think I should invest in an editor rather than editing myself no I'll explain I am very much so on team learn how to edit yourself and for a few reasons for one you'll learn what kind of editing you do and don't like for two you'll learn the basics and fundamentals to help you better communicate with your editor and know what to look for in an editor whenever the time to Outsource comes and the third reason is the most important which is that you'll be able to develop your own style if you start Outsourcing right away you won't know what your Unique Style is you might know that you like the style of certain other creators and your editors might be able to emulate that but it will always only be a shadow of The Originals plus anything extra will always be based on the editor's own style which will be the same across different projects that they're working on let me tell you a story back when I started my first channel in 2021 I taught myself how to edit I wasn't very good but I learned quickly and I grew once my channel got monetized and I started bringing in some sponsorship money I hired an editor at first it was great it freed up a ton of my time and the quality of my videos shot way up but the thing is the quality of my videos then stayed at that level even As I Grew as a Creator and my own style evolved and even with me requesting changes to my editors they just couldn't see my vision and so the quality stagnated when I eventually took back my own editing the quality of my videos first dropped because I am not a professional editor but over time my videos got better and better until they eventually surpassed the quality of my old outsourced videos and it's not because I'm a better editor than the editor that I used to hire they are much more skilled than I am but it's because as I evolved my editing style evolved too my feedback loops were tighter I could make a change and immediately see how it impacted the video and over time my style became my own one day I will hire an editor again the difference is it'll be after I know what my own style and creative voice is so I can teach that to the editor they'll still make more changes and the style will evolve but the foundation of that style will be my own creative voice not that of another what software do you use to edit your videos it doesn't matter I currently use Da Vinci resolve and for most people it does not matter up until recently so for the first 2 and a half years of YouTube I use an editing software that no one has ever heard of called Hit film Express I made my most viewed video ever in an editing software that no one has ever heard of I only started using it because back when I started my first YouTube channel I Googled best free editing software for beginners and a random SEO article popped up that recommended using hitfilm I will say I am definitely happier now with da Vinci though most YouTubers and editors now use either Final Cut Pro Premiere Pro or Da Vinci resolve and while there are minute differences that professional editors will be able to notice for 99% of of us any one of them is fine I personally like using DCI resolve because they have a free plan that absolutely rocks and then I also use figma to make all my visuals and I use epidemic sound for all my music and sound effects I'll link all those in the video description at this point we've covered all of the individual elements that go into creating a killer YouTube video now we're going to transition into more advanced overall YouTube Concepts starting with everyone's favorite part nine analytics analytics is a topic that can get pretty deep and pretty complex so to help me cover it I've brought in Chris galletta an incredible strategist who's worked with Patty Galloway and who knows more about YouTube analytics than nearly anyone in the world getting Chris's input on anything is an absolute treat so enjoy what analytics do you find the most helpful and what steps would you recommend based on those numbers so with YouTube Studio I think if I could just look at two things um in its entirety I would get 80% if not more of the value that um I would need if I was a Creator I could look at just these two things and be totally fine the other stuff is like you know little hidden gems and Nuggets here there but um if you basically have the views graph the homepage views graph that shows the blue line and the gray bar and if you have your retention curve that should serve 80% of anything you would possibly need out of YouTube um the reason for that is the retention curve probably most obvious um granted sometimes it's hard to interpret and so there's a question of putting in reps to understand how to read these things but that's going to give you the most actionable feedback and understanding of your audience of what they end up liking don't liking where did you lose people where did you hold people really well and yeah what is overall resonating with them um and then the views graph uh itself will basically just tell you was this video successful or not um as well as it's also aligning with the expectations that you go in with such as if I publish a video that is very specifically for a smaller pocket of audience you know I don't expect to see that shooting offer going crazy but I'm seeing it benchmarked against you know how do videos typically do on my channel should be able to give me most everything that I would need to know in terms of diagnosing a problem with a video the way that I generally approach it and where basically you can end up using these two things is that the YouTube algorithm very simply could be broken down into sort of three aspects is satisfaction CTR or the click and avd the watch time and Aggregate and so satisfaction is probably the thing that we have the least visibility into but but um is something that for the most part shouldn't usually be a problem and what's going to if it is a problem what you'll probably end up seeing is that your attention just plummets you know at the beginning people are just like clicking off of it and like it's just not a very good video so people didn't even have time to like be satisfied by it or that maybe there is a higher amount of dislikes or or something along that way but satisfaction in general usually is kind of just like okay it's fine as is unless we see something egregious next I look into the avd OR watch time um as a whole and judging is this video basically does the avd have more or less watch time than typical on my channels and if it's less than um normal that is something that is important for the algorithm in some way because it does wait watch time um a bit heavier than you know some of these attributes where if you have a video like taking a step back when it comes to AV and AP percentage avd is the more important thing barring that your attention isn't dog if you have a video that is maybe only like four minutes long comparing that to a video that's 30 minutes long the 30 minute long one will generally probably have much more watch time and overall probably on average if everything else is held the same will end up performing better but if your avd looks fine and your retention looks fine then that usually ends up meaning you have a CTR problem or a click problem meaning it's a title title thumbnail or topic the reason that I don't start with CTR or even look at CTR is because CTR is a very muddled and muffled metric overall the thing about CTR is that it's the thing in some ways which YouTube can control the most because it can control who it sends an impression to and you can kind of see this in an interesting way when you look um across niches where if you take for instance a gaming Niche gaming niches will tend to have very high CTR and one of the things about that is that within gaming um let's take a game like OverWatch for example you either are into OverWatch or you're not into OverWatch there's very gray area if we look at your YouTube watch History I'm banking 99% sure that like you don't have an OverWatch video in the last 365 days orever right but if we think about art right art is something that across the board will tend to have a very low CTR shown in YouTube Studio that doesn't again it's not a representation that like oh OverWatch thumbnails are more clickable than art thumbnails what it is is that if we look at both of our watch History chances are you and I have at least one art video in our watch history in the last 365 5 days so there's a lot more people out there that are maybe potentially interested in art and so somebody saying like oh yeah I have a video with 12% CTR on like a very hyper Niche game doesn't mean really much anything to me as like an our channel that maybe has like an average of 4% CTR across the channel because art itself is going to behave fundamentally differently than other niches but basically the best way to do it is like rule out everything else that we sort of know with more confidence and if those things are good or sounded in place then you can probably say like okay this is the click problem in which case I evaluate the title of the topic or the thumbnail how do you read a retention graph I ask this question just as much for me as for all of you because those things can be really tricky to interpret and I volunteered a video of my own to use as an example what's interesting when looking at videos especially ones that have chapters one of the first things that I look at aside from the intro and you know um would want to look at your other retention graphs to Benchmark how do we feel like this did overall um you know this here says that it's typical which is uh good but you you know we're always going to be hypercritical of intros and figureing out how to do those better um because that will usually indicate again what is possible for the rest of the curve um but then looking at the chapter so each of these little dotted lines here represents chapters that you have in your videos um it can sometimes indicate where is their Peak Interest for people and what are segments that people really didn't um find too much interest in uh and you can think of your chapters as many titles um giving that away so like if we look here we have like a large slage that happens there and then there as well and then like drop off but what these little bumps usually repres represent when you have chapters is people skipping ahead to these areas to want to know like what this is about and the fact that this section doesn't end up having any um skips and if anything there is a slight U shape to it um shows that people actually maybe didn't care that much about this section um as compared to some of these other ones so that's like a quick thought so if we just look at like what these were so this is 10 so the remarkability segment verse part two and part three right killer angle killer format and intuitively it feels like that makes sense right like these two naming it part one and part three um feel like okay yeah these are like the essential bits of your formula of how to come up with it the remarkability just in the fact that it's absent of a part feels like it's a bit more of a footnote um and maybe doesn't have as much of a purpose versus also like killer format and killer angle gives you like the Direct Value position um so that's like one interesting thing of just like looking at this quickly um especially with chapters I like to look at um the other bits is that we're looking for um one of the first things is we're looking for holds so what are the sections that seem to be as flat as possible um not even really with spikes you can you know look at spikes and they're definitely good to revisit but like the first thing I'm seeing is like where do we have very nice hold so um from 11:22 to looks like 12:21 looks like it's probably one of the flattest Parts um of this video so wanting to understand what were we talking about here in this section of remarkability so like again maybe it was something that as advertised wasn't getting people to click because these are basically like mini titles but of the people that were there watching it maybe they ended up you know really liking that segment um and so maybe there's something to take away from that um and then yeah I would just like kind of come through and see like what of their flat Parts like this looks like again like a little bit of a flat hold here after some drop offs so like maybe something interesting happened there but then we can see these consistent patterns of like towards the end of segments these drop offs so there's a drop off there's one another one another one so like understanding how are we ending segments and tying it into the other thing does this mean that we sort of like made our point maybe 10 to 15 seconds earlier than the transition to the next segment is coming and that we could have done like a smoother transition from the end of one into the next one um smoother or quicker um to yeah help retain those those people are are keep them interested um and then the last bit would just be the the fall off at the end which I think knowing your content video and having watching this like I think is expected but also is fine because I think these end points end up resonating really well with the people who end up like staying to the end and watching and like a lot of people are always saying you know cut off the end if you see this giant dip off and stuff but it's like again it's about what is the the purpose of that thing sometimes like we can be a little bit soulless I think in saying to cut out certain dipss things because if we feel so say for instance right we went from 15% to 12% here so a 3% retention loss but we had a total of 12% people you know by the end if for 12% of people this last 30 seconds um or minute was very impactful and meaning and like you know moving for them and inspiring why in the world would I want to cut that out to just plate you know 3% here that was like dipping down um so I'm always trying to evaluate when we have dips can we understand why they happened and are we okay with them because sometimes it's you know uh something that is core to you and your content that you want to keep in there that does cause a bit of a dip and you just at least want to be aware of it and then actively be making a decision of like but am I cool with this because I know that like my core viewer based on who I'm talking to really loves this aspect um yeah yeah that retention breakdown absolutely blew my mind Chris is great if you're interested in this sort of thing I would highly recommend following him on Twitter which I'll link in the video description part 10 audience connection and engagement what are some ways to gain engaged fans rather than passive viewers I want a high quality audience rather than a high quantity audience I love this question I came across some writing about this from a strategist called wano and I wanted to share his framework because I found it very helpful essentially not all viewers are the same there are blue viewers which are viewers that have never seen your videos before there are yellow viewers which are viewers that have seen your content Maybe once or twice before there are orange viewers which are viewers that will watch a video of yours if it's one that they're particularly interested in and then there are red viewers your ride or dies your true fans the problem with most standard YouTube advice is that they just focus on the blue viewers there is this big focus on getting as many views as possible on your videos blowing up and bringing in lots of viewers who have never seen your videos before getting views is obviously very important on YouTube but not all views and not viers are the same if you focus on making videos with the broadest appeal and getting the highest number of views every single time all you're focusing on is bringing in blue viewers and those blue viewers may never evolve into red viewers because you're not treating them properly but different types of content can evolve a blue viewer into a red viewer over time I'll give you a concrete example I could make a video about how to make a killer YouTube intro and any one who wants to grow on YouTube would click because anyone who wants to grow on YouTube would know that intros are important great I'm getting lots of blue viewers then I can make a video about how to make a killer YouTube thumbnail it will also bring in blue viewers because anyone who wants to grow on YouTube will also want to learn how to make good thumbnails even if they have no idea who I am but it also gives the opportunity for the blue viewers from the intro video to turn into yellow viewers because they would already know that they like the intro video and the thumbnail video is similar so they can click on the thumbnail video and thus become a returning viewer after that I can make a video covering the top tips or strategies I followed to grow from zero to 50K subscribers on YouTube now that video might draw some blue viewers if there are people out there who wanted to learn how to grow from zero to 50K subscribers but because the packaging is more me oriented how I grew from 0 to 50K it'll appeal more so to people who are already familiar with me at that point a yellow viewer who watched both my intro and thumbnail video might see that video already be familiar with me already know that they like the way that I convey information and decide to click on that video and that video would be a bit more personal give me an opportunity to share more of my own personality at that point the yellow viewer will evolve they've already watched three of my videos and they're already quite familiar with me and maybe they realize that they only like watching my deep DIY videos and they don't really like my me Centric videos and so they become an orange viewer and only watch one type of the content that I make and that's completely fine I am okay with that not every single video has to be for every single viewer because some other people watch that video and think hey this girl is awesome I love her content and I can see a lot of myself in her or hey I can really learn a lot from this person and I really like the way that she thinks and breaks down information and they go on a binge and watch a lot more of my content and for those types of people I can make content like q&as where I answer their questions or behind the scenes where I share much more of my own YouTube Journey if someone doesn't know who I am they probably would never click on a Q&A or a behind the scenes video but for the people who already know me and like me those videos have the opportunity to deepen my relationship with them evolving them into red viewers my true fans by the way if you're a red viewer of mine out there and you've made it this far in the video leave a red square Emoji in your comment so I I can give you some love I really appreciate you and I'm so happy that you're here and obviously these progression of specific videos is very specific to me in my own Niche the blue viewer yellow viewer orange viewer and red viewer videos are going to look different for everyone depending on their channels but the concept of making sure that you're not ignoring your returning viewers in favor of just appealing to new viewers is something that pretty much everyone can apply how would you work on improving viewer engagement often times you can just ask people to like subscribe and comment for example right now would be a great time to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and leave a thumbs up if you've been finding this video helpful we'll talk a little bit more about how these actions affect a video algorithmically in the next section and one of the best things that you can do for viewer engagement is also just ask for comments for example I could ask everyone right now to comment with the tip that's been most helpful to them thus far seriously do it or if you don't want to think I will also accept a comment just saying apriline is the best but don't just stop with asking for comments then go on and actually engage with the comments that you get I'll be the first to admit that the YouTube comment system is not the most conducive for having long discussions or forming a super engaged Community but that doesn't mean that you should absolutely ignore it instead reply to comments try to reply to every single comment that you get especially at the early stages and and if that's too much for you you can have a window like you'll reply to every comment you receive within the first 3 hours of a video going live or you can ask people to include a certain Emoji or phrase in your comment and then do your best to reply to every comment with that certain Emoji or phrase your viewers will love hearing from you it's already incredible that they're taking the time out of their day to not only watch your video but also comment on it and one of the best ways to evolve a viewer into the next stage whether that's yellow to orange or orange to Red is by replying to their comment oh also YouTube Community posts are great seriously they are so underused I also have a Twitter account that I've grown and the engagement on the YouTube Community posts is so much better than on Twitter I will say too that I think I just have the best viewers in the world I mean seriously I feel like I locked out so much in that department everyone is just so thoughtful and kind and smart and I just think that I won the viewer Lottery part 11 algorithm the YouTube algorithm can seem like this big black box of mysteries and sometimes it feels like all you can do is just pray to the algorithm Gods to shine favorably down upon you so to help clear things up I've brought in Renee Richie who is the official of YouTube liaison and who works at YouTube to serve as an advocate for creators and help creators better understand how YouTube works if there's anyone who can crack the YouTube algorithm for us it's Renee how does the YouTube algorithm work yeah I love that question because I I've been a Creator since 2008 and I've had all of these questions and it's nice to be inside YouTube and able to sort of poke people to get the answers and I think the first big thing that creators have to realize is that YouTube doesn't push videos for creators we always think we make a video we post it and then YouTube takes it and pushes it in front of a bunch of people and that's not at all how it works that's the opposite of how it works I mean except for notifications notifications do go out to people who have subscribed and and hit the Bell but uh what YouTube does is pull videos for viewers so if you imagine you open up YouTube on your browser or you open up the YouTube app and what it does is in that instant it tries to figure out the most satisfying videos for you videos that you would love to like click on and watch hopefully to completion and then maybe watch another video so it's viewer Centric the algorithm not Creator Centric and the way it works my favorite current explanation it's very cons it's from Todd bopr our senior director of growth and Discovery is that it's almost like automated word of mouth so if I go to see a movie and I love it and I know that you love similar movies to me and I tell you and two other friends who also like those kinds of movies to go watch it and then you watch it and enjoy it and you tell three or four other friends and it just grows and grows from there that's how the YouTube algorithm works it puts the video like when people pull the video if they see that video if they click on it if they watch it it says oh I know who who enjoys this video and then it tries to find other people with similar watch histories who haven't seen that video and it tries it with them and the more people that like it the better YouTube understands the audience and the more people it knows could enjoy that and it just keeps going until people stop responding because at a at a certain point almost everyone who's been offered the video multiple times will have either watched it or just decided to ignore it until it goes away and then that sort of audience pocket is exhausted but the algorithm doesn't give up it'll keep sort of offering those videos if someone some searches for it someone links to it from social if a new story comes that gets people interested in it if another Creator posts a video that's similar and it shows up and suggested and people like it that helps it find these new pockets of audience to explore so that's sometimes while you see videos like pop off once but then like a while later pop off again and then maybe a while later pop off again how can I optimize my video if at all to make it easier for the algorithm to find the Right audience for my video people will worry about like keywords or hashtag tags or stuffing the description there there are things that can get pulled from like just like like writing a good description having a good thumbnail and a good title are like most of it like have like just in terms of getting people to click on and watch the videos but the videos have to be good and there's no amount of like keywording or description hacking that you can do to make a video better and I think like sometimes people will spend a day or two days like carefully researching keywords when that time would be so much better spent just like working on the content itself because that's what's most important the thumbnail the title and that the video delivers on the promise made by both of those things and I think if you focus on that if you just pick one thing you want to improve every video and work on improving that get 1% better a day like you'll get stratospherically better results than if you worry about like optimizations it's audience psychology at the end of the day so there are titles like especially some channels have like title formulas that have been successful that they use over and over again like real engineering will do like the insane engineering of the Sr 71 Blackbird the insane engineering of the you know stealth fighter and people love those titles they do it over and over again uh Mr Beast will do I survived you know 50 hours or or seven days or something on a raft in a cave like there are things that are successful and you can do over and over again so like finding those things that really resonate with an audience it's not so much that they're tricks or hacks or optimizations it's just they compelling they they Peak Interest they promise like a a great experience great entertainment so those sort of things are really worthwhile but it's not what I would consider like a trick it's just like good audience psychology what should you do if the algorithm isn't serving your videos to the Right audience so I think there's two things I think sometimes people look at suggested traffic and they see that the topics don't relate to what they're making and then they panic and think that for some reason YouTube doesn't understand their audience but again YouTube for those systems is thinking about the viewer not the Creator and if you go and click on you know one of my videos you'll probably see my video in the main window and then maybe two other videos of mine and then maybe two videos on a similar topic to mine and then maybe a few videos on topics that you watched before my video or a couple days ago because humans like multiple things no one just watch well very few people watch just one thing over and over again most people like a variety of formats so when you see suggested traffic that doesn't represent at all Who YouTube thinks your audience is that represents the viewers interest and I might watch like two basketball videos and then a carpentry video and it doesn't mean that you know basketball people are watching your video it just means people with multiple interests one of their interests happens to be the topics that you make for the other question for demographics Again YouTube follows the audience it's very hard to say no no don't don't watch those videos we're going to exclude you from watching those videos it just means the videos you're making are appealing to that audience now your idea of your ideal audience might be different than that but the content you're making is appealing to those to that audience otherwise they wouldn't be watching they wouldn't be retaining they wouldn't be coming back so I think that's an opportunity to look at the analytics and see hey why am I skewing this direction instead of the direction I want and then maybe find some creators or like watch some YouTube people who do appeal to that see what they're doing differently maybe it's language presentation areas of focus and talk to your creator friends especially people who are hitting that demographic because maybe they'll tell you hey yeah you like if you're a tech Creator and you want to appeal to women it's very different like you can't just be a woman talking about tech the same way Amanda is because that's the same audience you have to talk talk about things that in general like not to be overly generic but in general that appeals to women and Tech creators who do that you know they get much bigger women audiences so I would just say it's an opportunity to sort of troubleshoot what's going on there why does YouTube stop giving me Impressions even when the video is performing well with a good CTR and a high avd yeah I think one of the issues here is that statistics are really really hard and like I I went through all the same anxiety before I joined YouTube and started to really not just better understand YouTube but better understand statistics for example like is a h CTR and a high avd good yes but as a video goes viral those numbers go down not up and people might see them and say hey why did my low per like my low metrics video do so much better and it's just that you know like 3% of a million is so much more than 10% of a thousand that the the views are going up even if percentage of people like the absolute number versus the percentage I think is a little bit hard to understand so uh when a video is performs really well especially when it goes viral clickthrough rate and VI duration actually go down because like there's just so many people getting eyes on that thumbnail that the quality of the match gets lower basically like 90% of the first group of people are a match 80% of then the second group of people uh 70% 50% and I gets to a certain point where there's massive amounts of Impressions but the percentage is lower but still that means massive amount of views so conversely if your numbers are staying high that typically means like your most engaged audience your super fans are loving it they're insta clicking on it but when YouTube tries to go to a broader audience they're just not interested it may be too Niche a topic it may not have be relevant to them and so they stop clicking really fast and that means that you don't really see a slow deceleration you just see that sort of drop so it's like super fans highly engaged keeping that CTR and and avd real high and then the much bigger more massive mainstream audience is like pass uh and so the Impressions just sto because there's nowhere to go once you've gotten through that that Super Fan audience and sometimes you'll see a video that's like flat the opposite it's totally flat and then it takes off and you'll see like oh my core audience didn't like this at all but YouTube found a massive mainstream audience that loves it and both those those numbers are going to be really low but the video is going to perform super super well so that's again just a paradox of how statistics work how important are likes subscribes and comments really so it's it's difficult to say like how important something is because the systems measure so many signals like billions of signals and the exact weighting of each signal can depend on a lot of things like how important is a is a subscribe well if it was recent then it's probably pretty important because someone liked your video enough to hit that subscribe button if they subscrib 10 years ago and haven't watched the channel in years that their subscribed is probably less important because you know they're they're way older and they're proba they might have different interests likes are a good single of satisfaction the algorithm doesn't really focus on Raw watch time because you can have regrettable watch time like you can watch something that you don't like and it bums you out so we really try to focus on satisfaction and people liking the video is a good sign of satisfaction we do try to figure out if someone would comment on a video like YouTube basically tries to predict how people will uh engage with a video when it makes those recommendations and whether they'll comment or not is is one of the factors that's considered same way whether they'd like it whether they might subscribe to it whether they might watch all of the the video but for example whether you moderate comments or not like whether you want to have every comment stay up whether you want to remove comments that you think are toxic that kind of stuff YouTube doesn't consider because we would never want to sort of make a Creator leave up comments or take away comments that you know that that it's not good it's not what they want for themselves or their community so we're careful on how we balance all these things as well so would you say it's still worth it for a Creator in their video to maybe have like a call to action saying if you like this make sure to put a thumbs up or like leave a comment saying this is that something that is helpful to them in the performance of their video I think like you can do anything you want and it depends on what your goal is like maybe you want to get subscribers because you want to get a feature unlocked or you want to get a play button or you want like you need a certain amount of subscribers to get a certain brand deal like there's always going to be different reasons for people but I think in general you don't want to give people too many jobs because if it feels like you're giving them a lot of jobs they might just choose to do none of them like it's a lot of work at the end of the day so if you were to say like like subscribe go to my newsletter go to my website download my Audi book like it just starts feeling like a job and people like no no no I just came here to be entertained if you want to grow your channel I think one one of the best calls to action is just when you get to the end of the video give them another thing to do like another video to watch because they're going to be bored at that point they're going to want something else to do and if you say hey if you love this video here's a deeper dive here's like a bigger picture here's like part two like if you can give them that they're going to maybe watch that other video and when people start watching multiple videos that's a really strong sign of satisfaction if you get them binging and coming back to your channel that's a really strong sign so if growth is is what you're after I think less like subscribe comment and more like hey watch this next video Part 12 flops it's happened to us all we pour a lot of work and effort into a video we get really excited to release it and when we do it flops what should you do next and is there any way to save it let's talk about it when do you consider a video of failure and what factors do you consider when coming to that decision first in order to consider a video of failure you have to first Define what success is and the thing is a video doesn't need to get a million views in order to be successful I like to establish three different categories of videos each with their own definitions of success there are Banger videos where the goal is to get as many views from new viewers as possible there are also connection videos with the goal is to connect with my audience on a deeper level and perhaps convert some of the Casual orange viewers into loyal red viewers and then there are soul videos where the goal is to purely give myself the opportunity to say something I want to say or to stir up that that creative spark and even within those categories there can be sub goals as well there can be the goal to learn and Implement something new if a video is sponsored or if you have an offer of your own the goal might be a certain number of conversions your goal might even be to get a certain type of comment and I really do believe that establishing goals for certain videos is very important and not driving yourself insane because if we make a video with the intent of trying out something new and then the video doesn't perform as well and we View that as a failure it's very easy to get discouraged and stop experimenting or even just stop uploading on YouTube all together so first I would get realistic into what your goals actually are on a video by video basis but if your goal for a successful video is to get a certain number of views and when you release it it's a bit of a flop it may not be completely over and to talk more about this I brought in Chris galletta again because if there's anyone who can do a datadriven postmortem of a video it's Chris when do you consider a video a failure and what factors do you consider when coming to that decision good question um depends again on the context of the channel um for instance a channel that is large enough usually has an easier time for YouTube knowing where Their audience is and so that video should be distributed pretty quickly um to the audience and YouTube shouldn't have trouble you know finding the audience for a smaller Channel um say someone that only gets like a couple hundred to a couple thousand views um in the first few hours that process can take uh quite a while um especially if there may be pivoting so I'm going in originally with a mindset of understanding what is the Channel's content what is their normal 24-hour distribution um or onee distribution and then is this a piece of content that fits very cleanly and nicely into the channel or is this something that is deviating a little bit into you know something that we would classify maybe as like a different Niche um where I think like Ali abdal is actually an interesting example this of a channel that is pretty large but because he I feel like touches on like three big demographics of audiences his videos actually can sometimes take a bit of a time to really pick up or take off in certain spheres because he has a bit of a mix of content um so when you have a channel that pivots content constantly um that stuff can end up taking a little bit of time so usually I'm a bit more patient I'll usually never write something off until I see the retention curve because that will also be an indicator to me of like you know was this a failure because of the clickability or was this a failure because of the watchability of it um and saying like Okay cool I got the topic right I got the thumbnail and title packaging right like I felt that that was good I just did not follow up on the content that well um and that's something that I could learn from or is this something that um the retention looks really good um and the AV looks good but it's just not getting the views in which case it's like cool that was a swing in the Miss possibly on the idea topic itself or the title and thumbnail which might mean it's salvageable you know sometimes you can just just like repackage something and it'll take off as long as the avd and retention are still good on it um usually means that it has gas left in the tank one thing I do want to add on here is that look everybody gets flops if your goal is to avoid ever getting a flop you're also going to avoid experimentation which can dramatically decrease your pace of learning and Improvement yes we always try to make good videos but if you make a video and it gets fewer views than expected just know that it's normal it happens to everyone you're not alone and the best thing you can do is just diagnose where things went wrong to learn for next time How can you revive a dead video one of my favorite things to do is if there especially a video that's maybe old in the catalog um if you all of a sudden you know sometime down the line you just have an aha moment of like a type of thumbnail or title that would really work well for that and you make the change sometimes I like to throw it in end screen from a video that is still getting traffic to try to give it a bit of a boost or sometimes there's a way to um create a short uh either from that content or related to that content that you can direct traffic to but anything to like give it a little bit of a jump start can end up being a a good way but um yeah I think end screens are really valuable and useful tools for when you're making those catalog changes seeing what can happen to it it doesn't even have to be much it could just be a few days even a few hours depending again on the size of your channel um but yeah so that was for like older catalog of video what about like you know when you first release it and maybe being on the first day and didn't get the views that you wanted to should you go into like starting to mic title and thumbnail changes immediately yeah I mean especially now with thumbnail AB testing I think there's always a lot that can be learned from that of what concepts are working in like is this like fundamentally changing the The Click pattern in any way so like always having some Concepts prepared for that for the title um I would always have some backups especially once that can really try a unique or differentiated angle so maybe use a title that is like a proven title or format that like a lot of other um channels and nichas have done but what you're not realizing is that this topic has been touched on so many times that there's now actually a bit of exhaustion and like if anything maybe aversion to that title but coming at it from a new angle could be something that um is really unique or you know like just Peaks people curiosity one of the newest formats um that I saw recently that I really liked is you don't understand XYZ so you can think of like um I saw for a Dragon Ball Z video something like you don't understand Gohan but then um after I saw that it like struck me it's like wow I really like that title and then looking into other niches and stuff saw that this title has had outlier success quite a few times of like you don't understand EQ you don't understand GTA 5 story and all of these things are fundamentally just a rewording and re smithing of the entire GTA story you know from beginning to end you know um let me tell you about EQ or something like that but they're just using a different angle for same exact topic how long would you wait to change the title and thumbnail of a video if it doesn't have a good CTR I'd usually start out with a thumbnail AB test right off the bat typically I'd wait around 2 to 3 days before making any title changes it's also worth considering what your typical view patterns are for some channels your videos might all take off around the one week Mark so I wouldn't make any changes until after that window has passed the exceptional say is if right off the bat the video flops if as soon as you had access to your analytics right after upload the views and click-through rate are much lower than they normally are something about your video isn't resonating with your core audience and I'd make a packaging change as soon as possible at what point do you stop trying to save a video by changing the title and thumbnail I'd usually try for a couple of weeks afterwards I'll either keep running it until I run out of variation ideas or I'll set a limit for myself like one change per week it's prettyy easy to drive yourself crazy constantly moning the analytics and making aund tiny changes hoping that one of them will make a difference so it can be quite effective to set a cool down period for yourself after making each change to help you not go completely insane if a video does not go well is there any problem deleting it I really wouldn't delete it unless it's a video that you really don't want other people seeing for one even if a video doesn't have a broad appeal and doesn't perform well it doesn't mean that the people who do see it it don't appreciate it some of the best comments I ever received came from videos that performed the worst for me because even though the video didn't blow up the people who did see it loved it and it had an impact on them additionally even if a video doesn't do well at first there's always the chance that it might get picked up later either out of the blue or because a future video of yours taking off could affect it that's what happened to these two videos of mine when I first published them they flattened out at around 1,000 views but then later on after my intro video started getting some traction they took off and now have over 200,000 views each I really wouldn't ever delete a video unless your video is getting a ton of negative feedback and you just don't want anyone to ever see it in the Future Part 13 business and sponsorships how do YouTubers make money I often get asked how I make money or how YouTubers in general make money so let's break it down there are four main ways YouTubers make money AdSense affiliate links personal offerings or products and sponsorships starting with AdSense once your channel hits 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours you can qualify to start earning money off of the ads that YouTube places on your videos the money that you make is measured in something called RPM or Revenue per Mill which is the revenue that you make per 1,000 views of your videos RPM also takes into account things like Channel memberships and super things but for the large majority of you your RPM will be primarily driven by ads this RPM is dependent on a lot of factors including Niche geography time of year and much more different niches have different RPMs and even different individual videos within those niches can have different RPMs in general RPMs are driven by how valuable an impression is to an Advertiser the more money and Advertiser can make from an impression the higher the RPM as a result niches like personal finance or business tend to have higher RPMs while niches like personal vlogging tend to have lower RPMs RPM is also driven by geography videos with primary audiences based in the US will have a higher RPM than videos of primary audiences based in India for example an RPM can also fluctuate with the overall ad Market in general advertisers tend to have more money to spend at the end of the year when they're using the remainder of their budget versus at the beginning of the year when they're a bit more frugal as a result we tend to see higher RPMs in the last quar of the year and lower RPMs in the first quarter of the year so that's AdSense there's also affiliate links when I mention a product and put the link in the video description those links are often affiliate links this means that if anyone buys the product through my link I will get a small commission the viewer will pay the exact same whether they use my affiliate link or not but I will get a small reward if they do use my link for instance I mentioned a tool called gling in this video it's a tool that I regularly use and I also have an affiliate link link a subscription to gling is $10 a month and if someone purchase it through my link I get $2 a month I know it doesn't sound like much but over time can really start to add up and as a hot tip affiliate links from software products with a recurring membership can be better in the long term than affiliate links from oneoff products because then you get that monthly recurring affiliate revenue for as long as that person is subscribed to that software product and in a world where income fluctuates a lot from month to month as a Creator having that monthly recurring Revenue can be huge next up we have personal products and offerings there are a lot of different types of products or offerings that a Creator can offer to their viewer a classic example is courses if you a YouTuber with a personal finance Channel you can make a course about personal finance and offer that to your viewers YouTubers also tend to offer things like Consulting memberships like patreon books digital downloads and even physical products when offering products of your own the biggest thing to keep in mind is trust the most valuable asset you have on YouTube is not views not Revenue but trust if the trust is broken everything else fails I've seen some YouTubers lean so far into their paid offerings that it feels like every video they make is just a long infomercial for their course and it ends up leaving a poor taste in your mouth no one likes to be sold or shied to I'm not saying that you shouldn't offer products in fact it's one of the absolute best things that you can do for your YouTube business as it helps create Revenue that's a bit separate from the views that you get which can lead to a much healthier relationship with YouTube but if you do make a product it's very important to consider who the product is for why they would buy it and how you can talk about it in a way that does not erode trust and finally we have sponsorships besides personal products and offerings sponsorships are usually one of the biggest sources of income for creators in its most basic form sponsor involved working with their brand to Market or advertise their product or service usually through the form of talking about their product or service in a video of yours I get a lot of questions about sponsorships so to help answer them I figured I would bring in Justin Moore who is an absolute wizard when it comes to everything related to Brand deals Justin has help creators land a total of over $5 million worth of sponsorships and today is here to make sure that you're not leaving money on the table when should you start looking for or accepting sponsorships a lot of creators ask me when is the right time to start looking for or accepting sponsorships right is it 10,000 subscribers it is 100k maybe more than that and the real answer is that there is no threshold uh maybe one brand one time told you like oh we only work with creators who have 10,000 subscribers and so you thought oh I guess every brand is that way but that's not the case at all especially if you have a very specific Niche that might be valuable to certain brands so the way that I think about this is that in the beginning when you were just starting out and let's say you have a thousand subscribers right if you were to reach out to a brand and say hey let me talk about you on you know in integration on my YouTube channel and you get let's say hundreds of views on average that's likely not going to move the needle for them let's just be real here right and so instead let's say that you did a an audit of their overall social presence right you look at their social media and they're not posting super regularly or they don't have a YouTube channel or they don't have a podcast or they don't have a Tik Tok page or their blog is really is dormant right and you can reach out to them and say hey look I can actually create some content some videos for you on autopilot that you can use and repurpose on your social media brand or your website or used for paid advertising and oh by the way go take a look at my YouTube channel because that is my portfolio right and so the beautiful thing about this uh this reframing is that the amount of money that you can charge is completely detached from how many views or subscribers you have right and so what you pitch has to change in the beginning so that's at at the very beginning when you don't have a ton of influence or a ton of experience or or anything like that right and let's say you grow now let's say that you're getting thousands of views on average now right okay well maybe what you pitch is a combination of content for the brand to use uh maybe there's some Consulting in there and maybe yeah syndicating or amplifying that content on your platform starts becoming meaningful right so it's it's a hybrid pitch now let's say you achieve some serious scale right you're getting tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views on your videos yeah the thrust of your pitch can now become hey I'm going to do an integration on my YouTube channel in in a video that's going to become very very meaningful you meaningful for you right um and so this is what I call the sponsorship Continuum and it it's very liberating for a lot of creators because they realize wow it's not about how many views I'm getting or or how many minimum subscribers I have it's about how can I serve the brand at different stages of my journey how much money should you charge for a sponsorship probably the number one question that I get from creators is how much should I charge for one YouTube integration or a dedicated video I've Got a Brand asking me right I don't know what to charge um and so the first thing I'll say it is very much an art and science but I do have some Frameworks for you uh that I teach in my brand deal wizard course um and so the first one is called The Arc framework um and the second one is called the do rule due okay and so the first cautionary uh like piece of advice that I want to give is that I know that there's a lot of calculators that exist out there on the internet uh but they're all trash and the the main reason is that they are only evaluating your rate based on your metrics on YouTube or on social media right so they ingest your channel they do some calculations and they say Okay based on how many views you get and how many subscribers and your engagement rate and all that stuff and then they spit out a number um and in my opinion those calculators are are not accurate because you are missing the other 50% of the equation which is the Brand's objectives and so this is where the arc framework comes uh into play and so when when a brand uh decides that they want to run a campaign with a Creator they will 100% of the time always have one of these three objectives in mind or two of them or all three a is awareness right so the primary reason the brand wants to hire you is to spread the word right maybe they've got a new product launch or they're launching in a new territory they were available only in the UK and now they're in the US right so they want to spread the word about that the r is repurposing so the primary reason the brand wants to hire you is to take the content that you generate and publish on your YouTube Channel and use it in other ways maybe on their YouTube channel on their social media on their blog for paid advertising and so on and the C in the arc framework is conversion yeah so the M the main reason the brand wants to hire you is Drive sales right drive you know trial signups for their software program app downloads something like that so something very attributable and measurable and the reason that you need to ascertain what the Brand's objectives are is that your pricing has to change let me explain by working backwards so in a conversion Focus campaign the the contact that you're negotiating with um you know they have this math this napkin math uh for what's called CPA what's called cost per acquisition metrics right so they know that okay if we're going to pay you know Justin you know let's say 5K here's how the math has to work out for us so we know let's say he gets 10,000 views on average okay and we know that we're you know conservatively assuming that let's say 10% of the people who watch this video are going to click on the link in the YouTube description box right right that's a th000 people okay of the a th000 people that click on that link uh let's say that 25% of the people sign up for a free trial so that's 250 people right of the 250 people that sign up for a free trial uh let's say 20% of those are going to convert into a paying plan so that's 50 people right okay so we've got 50 people that converted from that right and we know that our let's say our software program is $10 a month and we know on average that people stick around for our the retention rate before they churn is 10 months right so the lifetime value the average lifetime value of our customers is $100 okay and if we're able to acquire 50 customers from that partnership with Justin that's 50 time 100 that's the max they're going to pay me is that $5,000 right and by the way they don't just want to break even that's the break even point they want to turn a profit that's the entire reason that they're doing influencer marketing right and so in reality they're going to want to pay you a fraction of that 50% 25% of that maybe lower it depends on their risk tolerance right and so this is the reason in these scenarios where a brand is Con has a conversion Focus metric or or success metric um that's why it's so hard to negotiate with them because they have this math that you know they've got their boss breathing down their neck and saying okay hey we can't exceed this number okay contrast that with an awareness focused campaign what are the success metrics in that in that scenario right it's eyeballs Impressions comments engagement right did we spread the word hopefully right and so what I like to say is that the metrics are squish here right that person doesn't have their boss breathing down their neck and saying hey how many sales did we drive with that campaign with Justin right and so you're negotiating leverage in an awareness focused campaign is stratospherically higher than a conversion one and so um this is the The Arc framework and why it's so critical that you understand that the second part is the do rule right due and so this is where you have to scope the deal the deliverables right that's what the D is is hey how many videos do they want you to make is it integrated is it dedicated right that that's a very critical critical piece of this do they want you to amplify this on social media Instagram Tik Tok Etc do they want you to do a sponsored Community post on your on your on YouTube um the U in the do rule is usage rights so does the brand want to take your content and use it in other ways right maybe for paid advertising that's something you should charge them for and for how long do they want to do that and the E and the Dual rule is exclusivity okay and this is hey are they saying that that you cannot work with their competitors uh in a certain category for a certain duration that represents actual money out of your pocket we're one of their competitors to come to you three four six months down the line and say hey we'd love to you know here's a giant bag with a money symbol on it you say can't do it I I agreed to exclusivity a year ago or something like that quick anecdote I know a creator that agreed to five years of exclusivity for a free mattress a free mattress okay so don't be that person so at the end of the day like I mentioned it's an art and a science but you really need to learn this this stuff because it can have a profound impact on your pricing how can you tell if you're dealing with a real brand or a scammer one fear that a lot of creators have is when they get an email inquiry from a brand is this a legit brand or is it a scammer because this is a it's actually a real uh concern creators have had their channels hacked uh through you know kind of these fake brand deals and so there's a couple simple steps that you can take to to protect yourself so the first is is looking at the domain of the sender right and so often times if it's coming from a Gmail or op. you know PL or some of these random domains that don't really look legitimate that's a real quick and easy way to determine that hey this is probably not a legitimate brand deal um you know the the the challenge is is that sometimes the domain might look legitimate so it says like Nike DPR dte.com or something like that so you know some some scammers will actually go out of their way to buy domains that seem like they're from a legitimate brand but when in reality if you do a little bit of digging you'll actually see that oh the brand actually doesn't control that domain they would never have a domain like that um in reality uh it would it would be coming from nike.com or something like that um the thing that makes this a bit murkier is that you know oftentimes larger Brands will hire outside advertising agencies to facilitate these types of influencer marketing campaigns on their behalf so you may sometimes have emails that come from an agency uh that you know is like like Edelman or Ketchum or some of these smaller influencer marketing agencies or something like that and so it can be a little tricky uh but looking at the Domain should be the first thing that you do the second tip I have is looking at the email signatory um and so if they are signing it off like Nike marketing team and there's actually there's no one's name there like first and last name and you know their phone number and their email address things like that a brand will almost never reach out to you without identifying thems like it's an actual you know influencer marketing manager or maybe account coordinator at the agency or something like that uh so that's another red flag and the third red flag is that if they're asking you to download an attachment that is like an executable file and download something onto your computer to view the contract that is almost always a sign that they're trying to gain access to your passwords your social media accounts your YouTube channel and things like that so never ever ever do something like that what advice would you give to someone looking for and executing on their first sponsorship if you're a Creator working on your first sponsorship I have a quick piece of advice that's going to be a GameChanger be responsive be communicative I ran an influencer marketing agency for about seven years and this was the number one challenge for us is we would execute a deal with a Creator and then we would follow up with them and say hey we need a clarification on on something small or hey can you make a quick edit or or you know very small voiceover change to this integration that you did and it would take us two three four five days to hear back from them following up over and over what you have to remember is that the brand is likely not just working with you on this campaign they're working with 5 10 15 20 other creators and so if you're the person that is a huge pain in the butt to hear back from on these very simple clarifying points um do you think the brand or that agency is going to want to hire you again likely not because it's like pulling teeth to get every piece every aspect of the campaign from you and so if you can be the person that's on it and you're responding within just a few hours the brand is going to notice that and probably want to renew with you what are the biggest sponsorship mistakes you see people make the biggest sponsorship mistake that I see creators making is working with the brand once and then literally never talking to them again I made this mistake early on you know 15 years ago when we started out as creators as well because I get it it's scary actually reaching out to the brand and saying hey how did the campaign go because what if the brand says uh it went really poorly we hate you never talk to us again that that's what we think in our head uh the brand is going to say when in reality do you realize how much easier it is to convince a brand that you just worked with to hire you again especially if you just did good work for them in reality the brand is probably not going to say they hated you the brand is either going to say hey it went great and then perfect now is your chance to pitch them on on the next you know campaign idea or they're going to say well you know what it was was okay it went average and so now is your opportunity to say to them hey uh well I'm so GL so useful to have that feedback from you let me think about this and do some analysis on my own to think about why that might be and then you can come back to them and say here here's the four reasons uh that I think that this campaign you know uh performed you know suboptimally uh and here is what I think we can do to address that in the next campaign this is something that I call the Post campaign report and this is something I teach in my brand deal wizard courses so it's an absolute GameChanger when you can go back to the brand with this type of feedback because no creators do this I feel so lucky that Justin was able to come on this video and share his advice and if you want to hear more Brandel advice from him he has a free Weekly Newsletter and an incredible course both of which I will link in the video description is YouTube your full-time job I'd love insight into the business side of things for you yes I am lucky enough to call YouTube my full-time job for me the exact Revenue breakdown varies significantly from month to month but on average it looks like this 10% AdSense 5% affiliate links 20% course sales 30% Consulting 10% speaking and 25% sponsorships my next video will be a full breakdown detailing exactly how much money I've made so far on YouTube complete with all the numbers so if that's something you're interested in seeing now would be great time to well you know the rest but I will say that for me everything including sponsorship ships Consulting speaker requests everything so far has been inbound meaning that they reach out to me first as opposed to me reaching out to them part of that reason is that for me making money has not been my number one priority right now I'm more so focused on making enough money to pay the bills and then pouring all my energy into making the best videos I can for you guys as opposed to optimizing everything for making as much money as possible that being said I could definitely be doing a better job for instance I can guarantee that probably 99.9% of you had no idea that I have a course because I don't talk about it you may have seen the link to it in my video description and if you follow me on Twitter you may have seen it in my bio but that's about it and the reason for that is mostly because I don't want to annoy you and I would never want to pressure someone into buying something that they didn't need or want to buy but I have received emails from people saying that they've had to literally Google me in order to find my course so maybe I could be doing a better job at that we see I am also launching the pilot of a brand new offer which is something that I'm simultaneously incredibly nervous about and also very excited for because it's something I've been thinking about for a very long time I'll talk more about that in the next section but that's my own breakdown of income part 14 finding your YouTube friends and Community how do you find really good YouTube friends or Creator community so something that has come up again and again in my conversations with other YouTubers and strategists is the concept of YouTube friends I think something that really helped me accelerate my channel is when I created a group of other YouTubers who are in the same Niche and we just have these weekly calls we review thumbnails we talk about titles we watch each other's intros give feedback on what we think could be better could be changed sometimes we take the feedback we get sometimes we don't but the whole idea is getting other eyes on it not only do you get the feedback from them but you giving feedback also helps you become a better Creator so we're all getting better four times as fast because we're looking at four times the amount of videos it's something that everyone seems to have in common a community or group of friends that they're able to jam on titles and thumbnails with get video feedback from and overall just learn and grow with over the last year I have been lucky enough to build up my own circle of YouTube friends and I can honestly tell you that has been one of if not the single most impactful part of my YouTube Journey but I remember what it was like when I knew literally not a single other Soul who did YouTube and how incredibly hard that was so I want to break down how I found my YouTube friends and how I structure my YouTube group so that you can do the same when it came to finding YouTube friends there were four main ways that happened to me introductions cold Outreach communities and conferences one of my now closest YouTube Friends was introduced to me by a me ual friend she knew that I did YouTube and she had a friend of hers who had just quit her job to go full-time onto YouTube so she introduced us we hopped on a phone call and instantly hit it off we both have backgrounds in Tech we're both incredibly type A and most importantly we both shared the same attitude and level of commitment around YouTube what we did not have and this is important is a shared Niche I make educational YouTube content while she makes entertaining Japanese culture adjacent Vlogs and chall Alles and I highlight this because I see so many creators out there who think that they have to find YouTube friends who do the exact same thing that they do and at least for me that was not true at all what's most important in a YouTube friend is a shared level of commitment and attitude around YouTube if one person treats YouTube solely as a business while the other person treats YouTube solely as a hobby it can lead to frustration and feeling like the other person just isn't getting it the closer to your own Niche you get the more relatable your specific Niche related problemss are but there also is a huge benefit in talking to people outside of your Niche because they do bring in an outside perspective and skills so my first serious YouTube friend was through an introduction convenient for me but not easily replicable for others which brings us to cold Outreach another YouTube friend of mine just reached out to me via Twitter DMS one day she had been following my journey both on Twitter and on YouTube and she also had a YouTube channel so we chatted and we hit it off cold Outreach is also how Aristotle met one of his closest YouTube friends like I I cold emailed a guy I watched his video and I was like hey this is awesome so I sent him a cold email saying like hey I'd either love to do a collab with you or just hop on call and talk to you and now he's one of my closest YouTube friends and I've met him in real life twice and we talk every week and it's like you never know unless you try the downside of cold Outreach is that the hit rate or success rate tends to be pretty low which is why I highly recommend online community ities I met a good number of my YouTube friends in online communities for YouTube specifically for me it was in an old cohort based version of the part-time YouTuber Academy from Ali AB doll and from something called Creator now online communities can be a great place to find YouTube friends because they are large Gatherings of YouTubers who have all shown some significant level of commitment to improving on YouTube and many of which are actively looking for more friendships and finally I've met a lot of YouTube friends at inperson conferences like vidsummit and vid conon usually these friendships Bloom because we're already in each other's orbits on Twitter and then we see each other in person and get into talking but I've also met plenty of friends that I did not know at the time of the conference so that's how I found most of my YouTube friends and while most of them I just have open message threads with my closest YouTube friends meet weekly and something called a mastermind essentially a small group of us meet weekly for two hours and we each bring something to the meeting that we want feedback on it can be things like a title and a thumbnail or an intro or an edit or even larger scale things like a new content strategy or a new storytelling framework and each week in our Mastermind we give each other our thoughts and feedback the first half of the calls are dedicated to items that are more tangible like specific pieces of feedback while the second half is more open for bigger conversations like quality versus quantity or a mindset shift our masterminds often will involve some element of Creator therapy because let's face it this YouTube can get pretty hard sometimes and when I tell you that this group has accelerated my rate of growth and Improvement like nothing else I am not exaggerating in the slightest the quality of my videos have significantly improved and when I'm hit with things that normally would have brought me down for a long time or even may have made me quit YouTube altogether the group helps pick me back up if there's anything that you get out of this Mega video it is to find YouTube friends and to start a small group speaking speaking of YouTube friends and small groups I am launching a more community- based and personal offering of my own it's something that I'm quite a bit nervous for but also very excited about because it's something I've been thinking about for a very long time so if that sounds like something that you'd be into I'm going to leave a link in the video description where you can go to learn more and be notified of the launch I really hope that I can create something for you that is just as impactful as what I've experienced in my own YouTube Journey because man oh man this whole YouTube thing is so so much harder to do Alone part 15 mindset how do you not give up and stay motivated even when you invest so much effort and see no results this is a question that I get very often my biggest piece of advice is to focus on process and input instead of outcome and results and I know that that's something that's much easier said than done but ultimately not everything is within our control you can make a great video and maybe no one will see it or maybe you'll make what you think is a great video and then a year later look back on it and realize that it was actually not a great video but you just didn't know enough to know it yet video flops are a part of the process every single person that I know myself included has had videos where they've poured so much energy in effort into only to release it and not get the result that they wanted but if you enjoy the process it makes everything a lot easier if you can get into a place where you can look at a video and say man I am proud of this video and have that be enough of a motivator for you to continue that's the place that you want to be the motivation to keep going should be something that's mostly internal not external and I know that that's really hard because as creators one of the greatest Joys that we experience is when other people View and appreciate our work but if you base too much of your motivation on something that's outside of your control like views that's not going to be sustainable in the long term I do think it's still important to set goals though because without goals you can have no sense of progress you can feel like nothing is happening which in and of itself is very demotivating so instead I would focus on setting goals on things that you can control goals like implementing a new storytelling framework or trying out a new editing technique or coming up with a 10 thumbnail variations or spending one hour per week on ideation when you do that you'll feel yourself progressing you'll feel some sort of momentum and that will keep you motivated I would also focus on the comments and positive feedback that you do get on YouTube we deal with these crazy large numbers we see other people getting hundreds of thousands or millions of views and that is ridiculous to contextualize I don't know what millions or hundreds of thousands of people look like I know what 50 people look like look at your comments and screenshot the positive ones to look back on on days when things get rough and on days when you question whether or not it's all worth it and as I mentioned the last section I would highly recommend getting together a small group of YouTube friends to help each other and support each other and to pull each other through those hard moments I would also try to celebrate your wins when they do come those wins could be a specific subscriber or view count but the wins could also be sticking to your upload schedule for three months or getting a comment that you really wanted to get or uploading your best video yet another thing that you can try if you can is to always have a cue of a few videos ideas that you are really excited about that way if a video underperforms you already have the next idea that you really look forward to making and finally do your best to keep the process fun which is much easier said than done so let's talk about it how can you make and keep YouTube fun it's really really easy for YouTube to become not fun and for me YouTube becomes not fun when there's a layer of pressure or worry over it all this pressure or worry can happen in a variety of ways for one if I place too much pressure on a single video to succeed in those cases making that single video becomes really really hard or if I give myself far too much work to complete in a short period of time that period of time then becomes very very stressful YouTube also gets not fun for me when I'm far too concerned about what the audience might think and when it get so scared of potentially having lower number of views or Worse feedback that I stop myself from making the types of videos that I actually want to make so to keep YouTube fun I try my best to do the opposite of those things instead of putting everything that I have into one video which puts a lot of pressure onto that one video we're going to start making a higher number of slightly lower lift videos on second thought this particular video might not be the best example of that instead of assigning myself too much work I'm going to be reasonable and learn how much I'm actually able to do and adjust my workload from there and instead of obsessing over potentially getting few reviews I'm going to focus on making videos that I'm excited about and that I know that other people will also be excited about even if it's not the most broadly appealing idea in the world Dr K the Creator therapist has said that Creator burnout comes from making decisions based on trying to avoid potential negative outcomes as opposed to making decisions based off of what actually lights you up so for me sometimes keeping YouTube fun is about turning off that logical part of the brain instead following the feeling that spark and that creativity which I know was a strange thing to say after an hours long video about the most logical things that you can do to grow on YouTube but everything is about balance right I am ridiculously type A so a big part of keeping YouTube fun for me is battling my perfectionism my urge to optimize everything to death which I haven't exactly figured out yet the original intent for this video was to be a chill 30 minute Q&A and we we all know how that went but also when I look at my favorite creators I don't love their videos because they're perfect I love their videos because they're unique because I can get a sense of their quirks and personality I'm going to keep experimenting and I encourage all of you to do so too and I will say that a big part of giving yourself the freedom to experiment is establishing income sources that are not solely dependent on views that's the reason why you see creators offering things like patreon or courses or Consulting because it gives them a way to bring in money that's a bit separate from video views because yes if every single scent you make is purely depend on how many views you get of course it's going to be harder to let go a little bit and keep YouTube fun that goes back to pressure the more pressure you can take off of every individual video that you make the healthier relationship you're going to have with YouTube how do I stop the fear that I'll never succeed on YouTube look if you've made it this far in this gigantic video if you've watched and paid attention to this entire thing you are going to succeed on YouTube because what you've demonstrated is commitment commitment to learning and growing and improving and commitment to take your YouTube Journey seriously enough to watch an hours long video on YouTube growth because ultimately that's all success on YouTube boils down into it's not about being the best editor or the best story teller or the funniest person it's about a willingness to learn even if it's easier to not the tenacity to keep going even if it's easier to give up and the desire to keep getting better even when it's easier to stay still as long as you have those traits which you've already demonstrated by watching this video it is impossible to fail you're going to succeed on YouTube it's just a matter of time we've covered a lot in this video and I just want to take a second to leave you with some final tips first this video is a resource to you feel free to come back to it as needed but don't feel the need to apply everything all at once this whole YouTube thing is a marathon not a Sprint don't let it overwhelm you instead Embrace what you've learned today and try to apply just one thing to every new video that you make don't be discouraged by initial setbacks because it literally happens to everyone remember that every successful YouTuber started where you are now keep refining your skills stay consistent and focus on providing value to your audience while following your own excitement if you you do this growth will follow check out the video description for any of the resources or links that I mentioned in this video keep creating and I will see you in the next video