Transcription
Every YouTube short I upload, I get millions of views and make hundreds of dollars, and I want the same for you. So, I have transformed all of my YouTube short experience into one viral framework.
And we start with the most important step, which is to select a niche. Selecting a low-performing niche is by far the most common mistake I see beginners make. Do not start creating funny football moments, wholesome shorts with AI voiceovers, would you rather shorts, life-saving hacks, or any niche that is considered popular right now. Now, because if you make shorts in these saturated niches, you will get zero views because there are so many duplicates. Don't get me wrong, though. Sometimes you can get very lucky, but we don't want luck on our side. We want to be calculated and guaranteed to go viral when we press upload.
And to do this, you need to select a niche by using one of the following three options. And the first option is Niche Arbitrage. This is where you pull an existing viral niche from another platform that is currently not on YouTube Shorts. And I use this option for my recent channel, Ultas. I found an existing viral niche on TikTok, and when I started making the content and posted it to YouTube, it went insane.
The second option to find your niche is through Niche Innovation. This is where you find an existing viral niche and change it to make it your own. This worked for me in the past when I found a piece of content that was already viral, and I combined it with the style from another viral short. This niche that I made, where I showed football players competing with a simple scoreboard at the top, did get my channel over 100 million views and made me thousands of dollars.
Now, the third option is Niche Search. What you do is just scroll on YouTube Shorts until you find a niche that is going viral, and there aren't more than five channels posting within the niche. For example, over 4 months ago, I found this channel when it had less than 10,000 subscribers. When I found it, it had no competition, but now there are so many channels trying to join the trend, and it's obviously not working because it's saturated. But there was a period of time when the channel had less than 10,000 subscribers, and a handful of channels joined the niche and rode the wave along with the original channel, and it paid off. So, with this strategy, you need to get lucky and find these channels when they are just starting to go viral.
So now you know how to select a viral niche. It's now so important that you understand the Shorts algorithm. When you first upload a short, the YouTube algorithm shows it to a small audience, typically 100 to 4,000 viewers. Right here is where it gathers the first data of your shorts engagement to see if it is high-performing. Now, when you hear engagement, you are probably thinking likes, comments, and subscribers, but what if I told you that's not what the algorithm actually cares about? Instead, it cares about watch time, and that's it. And don't get me wrong, high amounts of subscribers, likes, and comments do indicate that the short has performed well, but I have noticed no correlation between those metrics and views across the 200 YouTube shorts I have uploaded to YouTube.
And this is because YouTube has one goal in mind, which is keeping viewers on their platform. Because the more time people spend on that platform, the more ads they can run, and the more ads they can run, the more money they can make. Now, back to the 24-hour graph. Based on the watch time performance that the algorithm gathers from the first group, the next stage can go one of two ways. If your short did not perform well in terms of watch time, your short will just be flatlined. But on the other hand, if your short did perform well, it will be pushed to a larger audience, typically 1 to 10,000. And throughout this second push, if your short continues to have high watch time, you will go viral in a matter of days.
And this chart of getting either one or two pushes into the Shorts feed in the first 24 hours is very typical, and it's what I see whenever I start a new short channel. It all comes down to how your short performed during those pushes in the first 24 hours whether or not your short will actually go viral. And if you aren't getting even one push into the Shorts feed, you need to revisit the first step because your niche is likely saturated. As you can see, the algorithm rewards shorts with high watch time. I see so many creators continue to create content with low-performing watch times, and they never go viral, and they sit there and wonder why that is. Why? I'm going to tell you exactly how to create viral content that will guarantee you to go viral.
I have made some of the most viral shorts on YouTube, and I've done this on different accounts in different niches. The truth to going viral as fast as possible is to steal like an artist, and this actually works. For example, remember how I mentioned earlier that I took a niche from TikTok and brought it over to Shorts? Well, my first three video topics were taken straight from that account, and it paid off massively. And really think about this: there is no reason why a viral piece of content won't work for you if it's already working for someone else.
So, when you are creating your first short, I recommend you go to the piece of content that you're taking inspiration from and take notes on these five components:
One, using keywords. What are the clips they are using?
Number two, how are they making the video flow in terms of graphics, video cuts, and visual effects?
Number three, does the video have a script? If so, note down their first sentence, how the script flows, and what are the main talking points.
Number four, what sound effects are they using and how often do they occur?
And finally, number five, what style of music are they using?
The answers that you note down to these five different components will become your blueprint to create your first short. I need to be clear, though. With this strategy, I am not telling you to copy a creator's content word for word. You should take these notes to go off on your own and create your own short.
And my most important rule that you need to follow when you're creating your first short is to create the longest short possible, which is 59 seconds. And trust me on this lesson because I learned about this the hard way. Before I went viral with over 69 million views on one short, I uploaded over 117 shorts that were all on average 15 seconds in length. I was doing this because I thought that if I created more shorts, I would have more chances of going viral. But it wasn't until I started to experiment with long short length until I realized that that is actually how you go viral, and it was evident by my view counts. If this does not make sense to you, just remember YouTube's goal to keep viewers on that platform as long as possible. So, on average, if your short keeps viewers watching for 12 and a half seconds or 45 seconds, which one will YouTube show to more viewers? Well, it's so obvious. Do I even need to tell you the answer?
But now, let's rewind back to the five critical components that I told you to take notes on. I am going to give you all the tools and the mindset that you need to turn your notes into a high-performing short.
And we start with component one, which is about your video clips. Use the keywords that you identified in your notes to search YouTube and other platforms to find clips. To download any video on YouTube, use this website, Cobalt. It's free and it won't spam you with ads, and it works flawlessly. And to download any TikTok video, I recommend this Google Chrome extension, which makes the downloading process so fast for TikToks.
Moving on to component two, which is video flow. Based on the notes you took, try to replicate that video style. If it has fast-paced editing with graphics and cuts every 3 seconds, do the same because chances are they're targeting a specific audience that requires that amount of edits to stay engaged. To actually edit your videos, I do recommend using CapCut if you want a free editor, but if you have the money to invest, I do recommend Adobe Premiere Pro.
Component three is the voiceover. To analyze their script in detail, I do recommend going to a script downloader to download their script in text form. Pay careful attention to the first sentence that you noted because that is the hook, and it's very important that we get it right. So, try to take inspiration from exactly how they did it. And just like the hook, use your notes to take their main talking points and try to use the same flow to keep it interesting. Once you have written your script, it's then time to generate your voiceover. I recommend using 11 Labs, and make sure that you don't use a generic AI voice like all the ones you see all over your feed. 11 Labs has so many other options for voices, so you will stand out.
Now, sound effects. Find related sound effects to the ones you noted down by describing them on YouTube and then downloading them.
Finally, component five, music. Match the vibe with the example piece of content that you are following. If it's a fast-paced track, find a fast-paced track. Again, it's important that you try to match every edit to the example piece of content when you create your own short.
Now, let's discuss how you can monetize your shorts channel. And when it comes to monetizing your channel, you have three main methods.
And the first method is by opening a merch store. For example, take my football channel. I could have opened a merch store for football jerseys and displayed my store link across my channel. As you can see, my store link is very concise. It has my channel name, which is my brand, and then is followed by the domain .store, which tells the world that I'm selling something here. It's not some long link that has no value. And .store domains is today's sponsor. This is something that Dude Perfect, Zach King, and so many other creators use to sell their merch. A .store domain helps you sell more by achieving 87% more traffic and two times more search visibility. Get your custom name on a .store domain today for 99 cents using my link listed on screen and linked below, and don't forget to use my code Jack99.
Now, for the second method of monetizing your shorts channel, which is ad revenue. To earn from ads, you need to join the YouTube Partner Program, which requires you to gain 10 million views and 1,000 subscribers in a 90-day period. And then, once you're into the program, you get paid a rate for every 1,000 views you get, which is called your RPM. My RPM across my different channels has been as low as 1 cent all the way up to 5 cents. It really just depends on your audience.
Something that I need to make you aware of is the reused content policy. This policy is there to ensure that any content that does not have value-added editing is not monetizable. This means that you cannot download podcast clips and just add gameplay and subtitles because that is not value-added editing. My football channel in the past did get demonetized because I was not value-added editing, and it was earning quite a lot of money at the time. So, it's important that you do keep this policy in your mind when you are creating content. But if you followed the three methods I mentioned earlier about finding your niche, you should have no issues with this policy. Any questions about this policy, though? I will answer them in the comment section below.
Now, the third method of monetizing your shorts channel is by opening a long-form channel. And I don't mean start uploading long-form videos on your shorts channel because I can tell you right now, the results will be terrible. What I mean is that you open a YouTube channel and share your journey about going viral on shorts. And this is obviously what I have done with Jack Craig. I'm going to release a dedicated video in the future explaining exactly how I blew up my channel from just speaking about YouTube Shorts. So, if you want to see that video, make sure to subscribe.
YouTube analytics. Using the data in your YouTube Studio is key to understanding how you can get more views or why you aren't going viral. I understand, though, at the same time, you can get lost within all the data. But what you must focus on is swipe-through rate and average view duration or watch time.
And here is how you should interpret both of these stats. If your short has a swipe rate of under 70%, it's not grabbing viewers' attention, so you need to go back and improve the hook of your video. You do this by making sure your video topic and video context is immediately identifiable in the first 5 seconds.
Now, for average view duration or watch time. If it's under 40 seconds for a 59-second short, you need to work on your pacing and editing throughout your entire short. To look further on how you can improve your editing and pacing, refer to your audience retention graphs. If you notice any steep drops, make sure to review what you did with your editing. Was there a gap where you could have cut it because it was boring? These are the types of questions that you need to ask yourself.
If you look over your short and you are confident that you are nailing your hook, editing, and pacing throughout your short, you should check your title and description for keywords because you must be using these to ensure that YouTube knows who to push your content to. This is especially important if your channel is new because YouTube does not know what audience to serve your content to.
And on the topic of having a new channel, you need to make sure that you have been active on it for at least 1 week before you start uploading. As I have noticed that if you open a brand new account and immediately upload a short, you will get no views, and sometimes your channel gets removed because it's considered as spam. So, consider having an aged account as essential to get views.
Something that is never spoken about is when to give up on your niche. You want to maximize your time by only working on content that is going to generate you an income and actually get you views. So, with this mindset, I recommend that you post five different shorts over a 5-day period with at least 12 hours in between each upload. After these 5 days of uploading has passed, if you have consistent views across your five different shorts, then continue to upload. But if your views look something like this, then stop uploading.
At the end of the day, you need to realize that YouTube is a fair game. If you upload engaging content in an unsaturated niche, you will go viral. It's only when you start entering these saturated niches when YouTube starts giving you inconsistent views. That is why I really cannot stress enough that you go back to the start of this video and really master how to select a viral niche.
The truth behind this framework: it took me 24 shorts before I got my first viral short, and I uploaded another 200 shorts before I learned about the framework I thought in this video. And yes, this video does give you the exact viral framework that I follow when I start a new channel, but it will take you time to learn how to apply it successfully, just like it did with me. It took me over 200 shorts. If you haven't created shorts before, don't expect your first upload to get millions of views. It actually takes time to learn how to create good content, and this is a hard mindset to overcome. Like, I remember when I first uploaded my first short, I thought it was the best short ever, and it was going to go viral. But looking back, I can see exactly why that short didn't go viral.
I can assure you that if you re-watch this video and actually study what I've told you, the number of shorts you upload before you master how to go viral will be significantly less than what it took me. And the best part is, is that once you learn how to actually go viral, you can apply it to any niche on any platform. And this is a valuable skill that you can pick up and take to any business to start getting attention through short-form content. Because at the end of the day, we are in the attention economy, where the more views you get, the more attention you get, and attention sells.
I do have my private coaching link below if you want to skip this learning phase and go viral as fast as possible. I have helped countless people across the world achieve results through my YouTube videos, and my coaching is here to make anyone who wants results get them. What you get in my coaching that you cannot get anywhere else is unreleased niches that I have created myself that will make you go viral literally on your second upload. You also get weekly calls and messages with me to ensure that you understand what you need to do if you aren't going viral. I do limit the number of students in the coaching to ensure that everyone gets dedicated attention from myself, and all the information that I'm giving you doesn't become saturated.
I will see you in my next video where I put this framework to the test by giving it to a beginner that has never tried YouTube Shorts before, so make sure to subscribe so you don't miss it.