Transcription
Six years ago, I thought I was pretty good at YouTube. I'd edited for big creators. I understood retention. I understood pacing. I understood storytelling. I could break down a viral video frame by frame. And well, still my own channel didn't grow the way I expected it to. So, I guess I guess I didn't know as much as I thought I did.
But that's actually when things started to click because then I realized that knowing YouTube and growing on YouTube, well, those are two different skills completely. And and the gap between them wasn't talent like a lot of people think. It wasn't effort. It wasn't even the algorithm. It was habits. It was small habits, unsexy habits, the ones that nobody really talks about because they don't sound impressive or fun to talk about.
By the way, guys, before we jump into what these habits are, I wanted to let you guys know that I created a custom web app that if you fill out step by step will actually output a perfectly optimized YouTube strategy for you in 2026. So, if you guys want that completely for free and if you guys want access to my 4+ hour long YouTube growth course, you can get all of that for free, no strings attached in the first link in the description below. So, make sure you guys go check that out. All right, let's jump into it.
The first habit, I'm going to get straight to the point, is automating AI to brief you daily on the most current YouTube trends and updates that uh have happened in the last 24 hours. And don't worry, it is so easy to do. I'll show you guys exactly how step by step in just a second. But first, I want to explain why we should do this in the first place.
Well, I bet you've done this before. I bet you've woken up. You opened YouTube. You scrolled through your homepage. You see a video doing well and subconsciously think, "Oh, I should make something like that." But that's actually a big mistake. Now, this is like a knockoff version of basically finding outliers and then reverse engineering them to be applicable to your niche. And this works if you're brand new and just trying to move fast. But if your goal is to lead, not to follow, you're already behind, right? When you copy what's working, you're not copying the leader. You're copying the person copying the leader, right? You're like five steps behind. And the leader, they're 10 steps ahead.
See, YouTube doesn't always announce changes. They kind of test quietly behind the scenes. They shift priorities very subtly. Sometimes they'll start rewarding certain channels or certain behaviors before creators even notice what those behaviors are that they're rewarding. So, if you're reacting to what you see on your homepage, well, you're late. You're that person who's 5 steps behind. If you're copying what's just worked, well, you're even further behind. See, the advantage isn't obsessing over YouTube. It's obsessing over awareness. So, the first habit that you need to do is set up a daily AI brief that summarizes what's changing on YouTube every single morning and have it notify you.
All you need to do is open Chat GPT. It's so easy. Go and type into the prompt, please send me a daily reminder every single day at 8:00 a.m. with a deep research analysis as to what the newest updates and algorithm shifts are in terms of YouTube. Now, literally with that one prompt that you just put into chat GPT, you'll now get a notification every morning at 8:00 a.m. with a full brief, a full analysis on what's happening trend-wise and update-wise on YouTube. And that's habit number one. And that habit will keep you 10 steps ahead. It will keep you as the leader inside of this space.
All right. Now this next tip honestly I genuinely think one of is one of the most impactful daily habits that I have started doing when it comes to building in uh in like an internal intuition for viral growth. Basically what that means is like when I see a video when I'm scrolling through YouTube I can instantly know if it's going to like on a probability level of 1 to 10 how well it'll probably do in terms of performance. I've built up that intuition. Now, every single day, I guarantee you guys could find at least 10, 20, even 30 minutes to do what I'm about to tell you. So, you should take however long you have, whether it's, as I said, 5 minutes or even an hour. And I want you to take any extra free time that you have, and just do something called scheduled scrolling on YouTube with the goal or the objective to only try and scroll through YouTube and find videos that stand out to you while you're scrolling. Try to scroll through YouTube and anything that grabs your attention and makes you stop scrolling, that's what I want you to search for. That's what I want you to schedule into your calendar as scheduled scrolling. That's what I want you to pay attention to.
Then what I want you to do is actually save those videos into a playlist on YouTube. To do this, all you need to do is click the three dots next to the video and click save to playlist and then choose the playlist you want to save it to. Make sure you create a custom playlist and call it ideation or something, whatever you want to name it. And you could even set it to private so only you can have access and see it. So this third habit basically is scheduled scrolling.
However, this next habit is one that has probably been one of easily one of the biggest differentiators between people who consistently blow up on YouTube and those who completely fail at it every single time. When we look at YouTube, the most important thing is ideation. Like if we look at it from like a hierarchy perspective, it is unarguable that ideation, coming up with your idea is the most important thing, number one level importance. The second most important thing is your title and your thumbnail, your packaging.
Now, with that being said, probably one of the most powerful habits that I've done this year, and honestly last year as well, is literally spending a minimum of 20 to 30 minutes a day doing ideation for my YouTube channel. Now, most of those videos I idiate will never see the light of day. But when I come up with so many video ideas every single day, it forces me to go in and look in the nooks and crannies of the the research tools that I use like Velo or even on YouTube the platform itself, right? But also, when I come up with so many ideas, and this is key here, guys, it allows me to basically filter through all of them, all of the bad ones, and and cut straight into the good ones. So tip number three here is to do daily ideation.
Okay, cool. Next tip is, and I've already hinted towards it a little bit, but in one of my last points, but what you're going to want to do is create a another YouTube playlist for research, but not for ideas. Remember, I said that the most important thing in terms of hierarchy is is ideation. And then the next most important as a close runner up is your packaging, your titles, and your thumbnails, right? So, what you should do is you should go and create another separate playlist on your YouTube channel, make it private, and you should name it thumbnail inspiration. And then what you're going to do after that is when you're going through and scrolling on YouTube or whether you're just scrolling on YouTube and and watching something for fun, if you at any point in time see a thumbnail that stands out to you or you see a video that's a big outlier and you love that thumbnail that that that creator used, I want you to click the three dots next to that video, hit save to playlist, and save it to your thumbnail inspiration playlist. And then I want you to use that playlist as a study project. So you can actually go into that playlist and you can study those thumbnails. Try to figure out why why did this thumbnail stand out to me? Why did it perform well? What's the psychology that they implemented within it? Did they trigger any pain points? Hit on any desires? Did they trigger curiosity? Right? This right here, guys, will build what I call your thumbnail intuition. And the more you do this, you will be able to spot viral thumbnails easier and better every single day, every time. And also, you can now use this playlist as ideation when you're trying to think up of some thumbnail concepts for your own videos. It's a win-win. So, basically, habit number four is to create your own almost like YouTube built-in YouTube database of high performing thumbnails within, as I said, YouTube, but using their built-in playlist feature.
Now, the next habit is stemmed from something that drives me absolutely nuts. Most people when creating YouTube videos will just think up of an idea uh off the top of their heads. They probably won't really write much of any script at all. They'll hit record. They'll film it. Then they'll edit it. And then right as they're uploading, they'll say, "Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I have to come up with a thumbnail and title." Right? They'll decide that last minute. Guys, this is one of the biggest mistakes you could make. Again, if we look at it from a hierarchy perspective, level of importance, ideas first, thumbnail and title are second. Right behind that is a super close runner up. So, the next and fifth habit that you need to have in terms of habits when it comes to blowing up on YouTube is always, always, always coming up with the thumbnail and the title, i.e. packaging, the concepts of it before even scripting, before even greenlighting a video idea. Because if you cannot come up with a good packaging, good title and and thumbnail concept, the video will not work. If they do not click, they will not watch. You're just wasting your time and resources on it.
Now, this next habit's probably the reason that I find that my titles for my channel and my client's channels are so good like every single time. In fact, the the skill of writing titles, man, it makes such a huge impact on performance. I mean, it is a part of packaging, right? So, what I do is I'll literally like write down my main title for a video idea and then I'll try writing it down into different concepts or variations. And I do that 30 times. Okay? You would be so shocked with how good the results get when you do this. Before you just take your your idea of your thumbnail concept and then you rewrite it 30 different ways, you need to approach this with some strategy. So, the key here is to first write down who your target audience is with the video, right? Who are you targeting with this video? Then what I want you to do is write down what are their most common pain points and what are their deepest desires. Then once you have that written down, I want you to try writing titles that hit a nerve when it comes to their their pain or their their desires, i.e. exploiting the psychology of the the click, right?
For example, there was a video I was working on for a client a few months back. He wanted to make a video called seven ways to make money online in 2025. Now, this is way too broad and creators way bigger than him are probably already making videos like this. So, no one's going to click on his video. They'll just go to the big creator instead. So, what we did is we implemented this 30 title exercise. We wrote down the main title and then we wrote 30 different variations or concepts of this title. And what happened was we came up with this really well performing title called seven hard but simple profitable businesses to start today if you need money ASAP. Now, the funny and ironic part is this was actually the 29th title out of the 30 that we did and it ended up being the best one. Why? Well, because the point of this the 30 title exercise is when you do this, what we're doing is we're filtering through all of the bad ideas, all of the bad variations of titles that suck. So, once we write down about like 15 versions or variations of the title, it starts to force us to get really creative with how we approach the titles going forward. And then that paired with with focusing these titles on the psychology of the click, you're going to crush it. You're going to have a high performing title and we can create a masterpiece like the title that I did. In fact, just to prove this to you, let's break it down from a psychological perspective. So this title that we named this video or that we called this video, when we break it down right away, we have a unique number, right? Seven. Then we have a contrarian hook, hard but simple. And then we have a common desire, which is people want to start a profitable business and they want to do it fast. So ideally today and then we end it on a painful relatable situation which is that of people needing money as soon as possible, right?
All right guys, so just to recap this sixth habit that you should be getting into for every single video basically if you have the time. It's doing it for every video or just weekly for some of your videos. It's getting into the the habit of of writing down 30 different variations of your main title for every single video. And it will blow your mind how good the results are.
Now moving on to the seventh habit which is one that has probably made a one of the biggest impacts on my retention meaning the amount of time people watch my videos for. Now if we look at YouTube from a bird's eye perspective we realize that guys YouTube's a business and their main priority or their main incentive is to keep people on the platform watching for longer. That's their main goal. That's how they that's how they make money. So if we as a creator can keep people watching our videos for longer, i.e. keeping them on YouTube for longer, you bet you that YouTube's going to continue to push you, definitely promote that video of yours more and more. And this right here, average viewer duration or our retention, is the metric that we should optimize the most for outside of view count in my opinion.
Now, with that being said, one of the key habits that I started implementing that allowed me to increase my retention was actually going through some of my top performing outlier videos that I had on my channel and then just watching their hook, right? Just the hook. than basically trying to find commonalities between hooks from different viral videos. It's actually really shocking. A lot of them do follow common patterns that you'll find when you do this. And when you do this exercise, you can take those learnings and you can now apply them to your hooks into future videos. In fact, it's exactly what I did for the hook of this video here. And if you're still watching this video, well, it means that the hook hooked you enough to keep watching. It worked. Now, just to recap this habit, it's basically to watch hooks of outliers or high performing viral videos. Study them and try to see if you could find a pattern between all of the hooks.
Now, moving on to the eighth and final habit. Honestly, guys, this is one of the most important ones. I feel like I keep saying that, but they're all important because by doing this habit, this very quick habit, it could allow you to quite literally have a significantly higher performing video because it will increase your retention. It will increase the amount of time people engage and watch your videos. And remember, as I just mentioned, YouTube prioritizes videos that keep people watching on YouTube for longer. It's their main incentive. And here's the thing, guys. We don't need to guess. We can literally actually go into our our YouTube analytical dashboard. And all we need to do is go up to our profile, click on YouTube Studio, go over to the video that we want to reference, whether it's a brand new video or past videos in order to gather as much data as possible. Then what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to go and click on the analytics button and then go over to engagement and then scroll all the way down to see the average viewer duration percentage, right? You could also see the minute count of which the average viewer stays. But most importantly, you can press play on the video down here and you can watch your video back with a graph. You could see on the graph where people are actually starting to tune out, where they're starting to click off, and where there's more engagement. What you guys can do is study this. Literally spend 10 minutes a day studying this. Watch your videos alongside your your retention graph and find out what moments are people dropping off or clicking off at. Ask yourself, what did I say here that probably made them drop off? And then figure out what you can implement differently into your future videos to keep people watching for longer.
All right, guys. Now, those are the eight habits that if you guys start to take on yourself and implement, it is only a matter of time before you blow up on YouTube. Now, if you guys want to just skip ahead of the line completely and grow on YouTube predictably with the full A To Z blueprint, I just released a completely free YouTube course, it's in the first link in the description below. You can join it right now, as I said, for free. No strings attached. Start taking the course and start getting results. Alternatively, if you guys don't want to leave the YouTube platform, well, I have that course here that you can go and click and watch that next. But if you guys want all the resources to that course, well, you're going to have to join it in the link below. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope these eight tips were helpful and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.