Transcription
There are 28 YouTube Shorts hacks that feel illegal to know.
Hack number one: One of the best ways to get more views on your Shorts is to increase the amount of watch time each of your Shorts gets. A sneaky way to do that is to try and loop your Shorts. In other words, try to record the end of your Short and the beginning of your Short in a way that they transition seamlessly. So instead of swiping down after watching your Short, your viewer might accidentally watch another half of your Short, which can result in audience retention graphs that are actually over 100%. And that's really, really good.
For example, "Do not touch! Want to lose all of your fingers? Possible thumbs. And keep your thumb on the Suva. It'd be smart to tell your friends, 'Do not touch a katana until you watch this video.'"
Hack number three: You might notice a lot of the big Shorts out there all have captions or subtitles baked in. The reason they do this is it tends to increase watch time, which, as we talked about, is a very, very good thing. Promise, adding captions takes time. And that's where this legendary little app comes into play. Not only is this a super powerful editor that will actually let you edit your Shorts on your phone, but it's got a super neat and very accurate feature that'll allow you to add these subtitles automatically.
The next tip: If you have a Short that you're sure is extremely good quality and that you think should be getting a lot more views than it is, something you can do to re-kickstart it is actually delete it and then repost it a few weeks or months later. Often, YouTube will then retest the video and assuming you were just unlucky the first time around, on the second upload, you might go viral.
Next tip: Try and leverage successful formats. For example, check out this channel. Look at the titles of all these different Shorts: "Three useful Torbjorn techs," "Three useful Cassidy texts," "Three useful Reinhardts," "Three useful Soldier attacks." See the pattern? And when you've found something that works, this is so much easier than trying to brainstorm and come up with new, fresh Shorts every single time you create one.
This next one is super ninja. So, we all know that on platforms like TikTok, having trending music in your video can actually help you get more views. But did you know the same can apply on YouTube? And let me show you how. Basically, on your YouTube homepage, you can just click on the little compass icon and go to Trending. In Trending, you want to then click on Music. And you'll see all the latest trending music. And music videos tend to get more views than any other type of video on the platform.
Now, why should you, as a Short creator, care about this? Well, if you click into a music video, say this one, and you click on "More" to the description, if you scroll down, you can actually see that in the descriptions of music videos, you can often see Shorts that are remixing that video. In other words, if you use this music as background music in your Short, there's a chance you'll show up in the description of that official music video. And that can lead to a crap ton of views, especially if you're early.
All you have to do is navigate to the music video on your phone, then click on this remix button, and then you want to click on "Use sound." Here, follow the prompts. That music will be in your background. And again, if you're early enough, you'll show up in the description of the official music video and get a crap ton of views.
The next tip: If you have a highly successful Short, use the SQL strategy. You can literally reuse the exact same title and create a new Short that is different from the original one, but that would be accurately represented by that title. Now, you've got to be careful repeating this too frequently because your audience might get bored or YouTube might see you as spamming. But as you can see with this channel, for example, it can work really well.
This next one's really interesting. So, when me and my students did a bunch of testing across a bunch of different Shorts, we found that Shorts that make people angry actually perform better than those that don't. Which makes sense because, as we know, evoking emotion from your viewers generally helps your video to perform, and anger is a pretty strong form of emotion. However, going out there and just blatantly doing things that make people hate you might get you a bunch of views, at least based on our testing, but it's probably not a good thing to do.
However, what you can do is, if you have unpopular opinions that you think a lot of people might disagree with, but that you truly believe in, and that other people, if you share your perspective, might genuinely respect. Those types of videos, for some reason, in our testing, do really well.
Next tip: Respond to every single comment you get. There are two reasons for this. One, when you add a response, that actually adds an additional comment to that Short. AKA, if you get 10 comments and you respond to all 10 of them, all of a sudden, your Short now has 20 comments, which is more engagement, which is a good thing. And secondly, if you respond to a comment, sometimes that commenter will come back to that video and respond to your response, which is even more commenting engagement.
Next tip: For a Short to do really well, we've found that the topic that Short is going to be created around needs to be trending. An easy way to get a rough idea of what's trending is to type in Google Trends and go to this website. Then enter a search term broadly related to your niche. Let's say gaming. Change this dropdown from your country to worldwide. Change from the past 12 months to the past seven days. And then change "Web Search" to "YouTube Search." And then if you scroll down here in "Related queries" and "Related topics," you'll see different breakout topics that are currently trending within this particular sphere.
Now, if you find something related to your niche that you think you could create a Short about, go for it.
Next tip: Don't spoil your Shorts in your title, unless your Short is about something so outrageous that even if people knew what it was, they would have to kind of see it to believe it. Try not to spoil your Short in your title because then there's no reason for your viewers to actually watch your Short. Instead, you could change this title to something more like this, that is highly related, promises or value proposition of why they should watch this Short, but doesn't fully give away exactly what it is and still requires them to actually watch the Short.
Next tip: A bunch of YouTubers, including MrBeast, did a huge amount of experimenting. Something they found is having a bright video intro performs better than having a dark one. And this is especially important in Shorts where someone can move on to a new video with a simple flick of a finger. So, if the footage you're using at the beginning of your Shorts is very dark and there's really no way around that, very least, try to make it brighter or add brighter elements to it, maybe like text. Or if you do have full control over this, just make sure your scene is realistic yet still light and bright.
Next tip: If you don't like the idea of using trending music in your videos from earlier, you can find a ton of copyright-free music to use in your videos using the YouTube Audio Library. So, in YouTube Studio, go to YouTube Audio Library. You'll find a crap ton of songs in here. You can play them by clicking on this little icon to find out which ones you like. When you find one you like, you can hover over it, click on this download button. That will give you the track, which you can then use in an editing program on your desktop and add that music to your Short. Or you can send it to your mobile device and use an editing app like CapCut to add it to your Short.
Next hack: So, you can actually optimize your Shorts far more than you might expect based on the Short upload process on mobile. So, once you create a Short, you can actually see, go to your YouTube channel on desktop, find your Short in the list of videos. Then, if you hover over and click on this pencil icon, it'll take you to the Short and you can actually edit a bunch of things here. Firstly, you can add a description. And this is important because the algorithm actually looks at your description to help get an idea of what your Short might be about.
If you scroll down here to "More advanced settings," and for some of you, there might be a button here that you have to click to access the advanced settings. But if you scroll down here, there are a bunch of other things you can do as well. For example, you can add your Short to a playlist. You can add tags to your Short. For your long-form videos, adding tags doesn't really do much. But I don't think there's been much testing on Shorts as to whether or not it does much. So, I mean, given it's here, I'd recommend you add your tags in. There's no harm that could come of it.
If you scroll down here further to "Category," you can actually click on this dropdown here and select what category your Short fits into, which again, is going to give YouTube more information about your Short, so hopefully it can push it to the right people. Another thing is you can also add hashtags to Shorts. Which means if someone goes to that hashtag and clicks on it, they'll actually see a list of all the Shorts that have been tagged with that. So, if someone has that hashtag in their Short and one of their viewers clicks on it, and you also have that same hashtag in the description of your Short, your Short might show up here and have the chance to get more views.
It's a bit of a double-edged sword, though. And that leads to our next tip, which is you want the benefit of being seen in the hashtag shelf. So when viewers from other Shorts or videos click on that hashtag, your content shows up. But you don't want your viewers clicking away from your videos and going to that shelf because then they might go and find other people's videos, and you don't want that. You want them on your videos. So when you're adding hashtags, add them to the very bottom of your description, so it's as unlikely as possible that your viewers will actually click on those hashtags.
Speaking of adding hashtags, I've seen a lot of people throw out these random numbers like, "Oh, you can only add three hashtags to your Shorts," or "Oh, you can only add 15 hashtags." If we actually look at what YouTube has to say about this, they say, "If a video or playlist has more than 60 hashtags, they'll ignore each hashtag on that content. And over-tagging may result in the removal of the video from uploads or search."
Now, I've been testing adding 59 hashtags to a bunch of Shorts and videos, and as long as those hashtags are very related to the video topic, it doesn't seem to be classified as over-tagging because I haven't had any issues with content being removed or not showing up in search. So, at least at this stage, in my mind, there's no reason why not to do that.
Next: You can actually schedule your Shorts instead of posting them right away. So when you're creating a Short on your phone, instead of uploading it as public, upload it as unlisted. Then you can come to YouTube Studio, go to the "Content" tab again, and in this little dropdown, you can change it from unlisted to scheduled, and then you can pick the time and date that you want your Short to actually go live.
What time and date should you be uploading your Shorts? Well, that's the next hack. In YouTube Studio, come down to this tab, go to "Analytics," then go to "Audience," then scroll down until you see this little bar here. And basically, the lighter purple these bars are, the more of your viewers are online. So for me, for example, in this case, I can see that Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are quite good times for me because at all these times, I have one, two, three, four, five bars at the lightest color purple. And I can also see the times my viewers are most active are usually between 2 AM and 6 AM my time. And so, if I'm uploading Shorts, I'm probably going to want to schedule them to go live at about 1 AM, so by the time the majority of my viewers come online, my Short is up there and there's a chance it'll be served to them.
Next tip: Another really useful thing you can do here in YouTube Studio is again, if you go to your Short and then hover over it and click on this "Analytics" icon, and then come across to "Reach" and scroll down, you'll see this little graph here. And this will actually show you where it is your Shorts are getting their views from. So ironically, this Short is actually not getting the majority of its views from the YouTube Shorts feed. It's getting the majority of its views from browse features. You can see here, 45%. And something you might find is your Shorts might not be getting views from the Shorts feed either. They might be getting views from channel pages, browse, or even search.
And if you see a lot of your Shorts getting views from a search, another interesting thing you can do is come down even further on the right-hand side here. You can actually see what search terms your viewers are entering into YouTube before they click on your Short. So, for example, in this case, I might want to create a "Drinking the M&M potion at 3 AM" Short because 2.2% of my viewers search that in before clicking on my Short. But if you are getting the majority of your views from your Shorts from YouTube search, and you find any interesting search terms in here, you might want to create individual Shorts for those search terms.
Now, in the case of this particular Short I'm viewing, you can see that it got 45% of its views from browse, meaning that people actually had to click on this Short before they viewed it, unlike it on your YouTube Short showing up in the Short shelf where they just scroll straight directly to it. And so, it can be beneficial to add a custom thumbnail to your Short to maximize your click-through rate as much as possible. And the way you can do that is again by going to your Studio, clicking on the pencil icon, and scroll down here. And normally, in this section here, you'll see a little option that'll allow you to click on and upload a thumbnail to your Short. Unfortunately, I can't do this for this particular Short because I've already uploaded a thumbnail, apparently. But you guys probably won't have that issue.
The next Shorts hack requires us to go back to the analytics of an individual Short. You're going to stay on "Overview," scroll all the way down to the bottom. And here you'll see a graph that represents how long your viewers are watching for and when they click off. Come in here, figure out what points in the video your viewers are clicking off the Short. Try to work out why it is that point triggering them to click off the Short, and then just don't do that thing for future Shorts. The way you see where viewers are clicking off your Short by using this graph is to look for dips and declines in the graph. For example, if I had a graph that looked like this, I'd probably want to figure out what happened at this point and not do that again because, as you can see, it caused me to lose a bunch of viewers.
Next tip, though, is you might not want to do all of this stuff we just talked about from your desktop. Maybe you create, edit, and upload everything directly on your phone. And the cool thing is, now you can actually access a lot of these more advanced features I just talked about on your phone. All you have to do is click over here and go to your library, assuming you're signed in. Then click on "Your videos." That'll take you to your videos. And then to get a lot of the options we've just been over, you can click on these three dots and you can click on "Edit." You can see that, let's just open up our description, add things to playlists, add tags, and a bunch of that good stuff.
The next tip: Because Shorts are so easy to upload, there are a crap ton of people creating them. And because they're a crap ton of people creating them, staying standing out and being unique is an even bigger factor if you want your Shorts to go viral. And so, having some sort of X-factor, something specific that people can recognize and remember you by, can be of great importance.
Next tip: You should research other short-form content platforms to get ideas for what styles and formats are working. Scroll through TikTok, scroll through Instagram Reels. Figure out what kinds of videos, what styles of titles, what types of intros are working for those guys. And then you can often take those principles, apply them to your own Shorts with your own kind of spin, and that often does way better than trying to guess at what your audience might want.
Next, next hack: Earlier, we talked about how important retaining your viewers and maximizing your watch time is if you want your Short to be promoted by YouTube. And one of the most simple things you can do to improve your attention is to make your Short more stimulating by adding more pattern interrupts. In other words, changing up the scene or introducing new elements or cutting to a new piece of footage frequently. Now, many of the best Shorts on the platforms introduce some sort of pattern interrupt every two to three seconds, assuming, of course, you haven't just got one piece of footage that is incredibly engaging on its own. But as a rough rule of thumb, if nothing new has kind of happened visually in your Short for at least seven seconds, that's a problem.
Next hack: So, a lot of you guys want to repurpose your existing videos into YouTube Shorts. The problem with this is that having an engaging intro and hook is incredibly important for a Short. And if you're just taking a segment out of the middle of your video and repurposing it as a Short, chances are the intro to that segment doesn't really grab people like a hook Short. So, a sneaky way to get around that is to just record a very short hook, kind of summarizing your Short and kind of grabbing viewers, and then just add it on to the beginning of your repurposed clip. If you're really lazy, I've even seen creators use an AI voice to intro the beginning of their repurposed clip. For example, "My first wall bang lineup on the new Valorant map."
Lastly, some of you guys are creating YouTube Shorts content not because you want to become Shorts creators, but because you want to promote your long-form content. So, if we don't take into account the amount of time it would take to create this content, and we just look objectively at what is the best type of content to create to promote your long-form content, and how do you do it? Basically, what you want to do is, whatever your long-form content is, condense it down into a video that is less than 60 seconds. And that might sound hard, but basically, you're just creating a mini version or a highlights reel of your video and posting it as a Short. And then at the end of that Short, you can have a little call to action telling people to check out the link in the comments if they want to see the full video. Then you want to add a comment with a link to the full video to your Short and pin it, so it's the first thing people see when they click on the comments section.
But if you want to learn more ways to convert Shorts viewers into long-form viewers, check out the video on screen. I talked to a guy who's done a ton of experimenting with this and has a Shorts promotion method that has allowed him to turn long-form pieces of content that were 10 out of 10s into one out of tens in just a few days. Check it out.