Transcription
This is my main YouTube channel. And in this video, I'm going to give you a bunch of tactical things that you can do where if you just implement at least one of them, more people will want to watch your videos. They're not going to be in any particular order.
First one, when you record, boost your enthusiasm by at least 15%. Your microphone steals away 15% of it. So, when you speak, imagine there's like five people all around you in the room, and you want them to clearly hear what you're saying. So, don't like mumble your words like this.
Make videos assuming that most people that will watch that video have never heard about you before. My channel currently gets 4 million views every single month. Out of those views, how many do you think are completely new people that haven't heard of me ever? Keep in mind, I have half a million subscribers. 44% 44% of people that come to my channel have never heard about me ever. 42% are casual viewers and only 12.8% are regular viewers. So if you make videos for people that are completely new, then people that are completely new will want to watch them. That's how you grow your audience.
Also, your returning viewers will not mind when you repeat stuff. They actually appreciate the reminder because think about it, they probably watch like 20 or 100 other videos before they watch your next upload. So they forget a lot of things. If you repeat the same thing over and over again, like give context to new viewers what your video is about. The old viewers might not even notice that it's an old thing that you've already said like 50 videos ago. Your channel is not that important. It's very rare that somebody just sits through every single video that you've ever made and watches them in order in the same day. That pretty much never happens. Most people don't know who you are and don't really care. So, make videos for those types of people and then they will watch your videos because you're making those videos for them.
You can make very very good videos with just a simple cut tool and a few key frames. Most of editing is just removing repetition, especially in entertainment videos. So re-watch your video and cut out the duplicates. You might think duplicates are when you say the exact same thing over and over again and then you just leave one of those takes. But duplicates are like many things. For example, this is a duplicate. If I say I'm going to Google for how to install Linux into my computer, then I show myself googling for that thing. How to install Linux on Windows PC. Boom. And then here I read the sentence to get Linux running on your Windows machine. Choose one of the three main methods. Those were three repetitions. If you think about it, all of this communicated the same thing to the viewer. So if I cut out me Googling and me saying before that I was going to Google and just left in this piece right here of me reading out to get Linux running on Windows machine, it would communicate the exact same thing as showing those other two things.
When you start your video, do not say hello and welcome. Or even worse, hello, like, subscribe, share, and do all of that stuff. When somebody else says it, you just skip past it. So, skip putting that in your own videos.
When you're doing screen recordings, talk like a blind person is sitting next to you. So, describe everything you're doing on the screen. For example, if you're googling, say, "I'm going to Google this." If I'm clicking on something, I usually say, "Okay, let's go here." And then, as I'm saying that, I click there. That way, you won't have key important places in your video where you're doing something important, but there's nobody speaking because you did something important. You want to show that, but there's no audio to go along with it. So, when you do something, just say out loud what you're doing. This is for screen recordings.
When you're doing voiceovers, on the other hand, especially for storytelling videos, I like to do them in past tense. I don't yet know the reason why, but I think they make videos where there's a story much better. And also, you're telling a story that already happened instead of recording it live, so might as well use past tense. For example, if your video is about how you played Minecraft, then instead of saying, "Let's start with cutting down this tree." If it's a voice over, you say, "I started by cutting down this tree. Then this happened and this happened." So, just use past tense when you're making a voice over for a voiceover video.
Don't make decisions based on the retention graphs, especially early on. Let me show you two retention graphs. The first one is this. Ignore this dip here because this is a sponsored segment. So, guess how many views this video has and then guess how many views this video has. This looks like a complete trash retention graph, but this video currently sits at 10 million views and this video here with a kind of flat retention graph sits at 97,000 views. The reason the 10 million view video retention graph looks terrible is because a lot of viewers who have never seen stuff from me in the past saw this video because YouTube pushed it out to them. And the reason this retention graph looks flat is because mostly just my core audience saw this video. So they already know, like, and trust me, so they watch my entire video. So when you see retention like this, it doesn't necessarily mean good. It doesn't necessarily mean bad either. So be careful about judging your video based on the retention graphs.
Make three thumbnails for every single video. Even if you're getting 10 views, and there's no way that YouTube can tell which thumbnail performs better. It's about learning how to visualize your video with a single picture. It's not about data. It's about mastering the skill of making good thumbnails. So, make at least three for every single video. If you want more decisive results, you can run the test with the same title. And then once one of the thumbnails win, you can then tweak the title. Also, make all three thumbnails completely different. Don't just change the background color. That's usually not why people don't click in the beginning. It's not the background color or the font. Make each one of those three thumbnails a completely different concept. That's how you'll learn much faster for what to do and most importantly what not to do for your thumbnails.
I make my intros and thumbnails last. Not sure about the title. I usually come up with it beforehand. A lot of people inside of my YouTube community are surprised that I make intros at the end, but it's very hard to make the intro at the start, which essentially sets up the story for the video if I don't know what will happen in that story. If I record a video live, then I don't really know how it's going to turn out. So, in order to set it up well, I have to know what happened and then I can do my intro where I set up the video, open the first story loop for the video without overpromising and then at the end disappointing the viewer. Also, when you have the video made, you have a bunch of like cool clips that happened during it that you could show or talk about in the intro, which is why I make it last.
If you're editing a screen recording, try putting everything in the center of the frame so that the viewer's eyes don't have to constantly work and try to find where to look on the screen as stuff is happening. When you're watching a video, your eyes will just naturally come back to the center. So, it makes sense to have the main subject in the center. Before I used to do this in a slightly different way where I matched like exact cursor positions, but I think just trying to put stuff in the exact center of the screen is good enough. So if I'm reading a sentence, I'm going to make sure that it's like centered. If I'm pointing at something with my mouse cursor, I'm going to make sure that it's centered. You can do that with guides and video editing software.
Imagine every single viewer is grade three reading level. You want to talk in simple sentences and explain very complicated words because that makes your video accessible to a very large group of people. The more people can understand your video, the more people can potentially watch it. So don't close it off. For example, if you say touch typing in your video, explain what that means. Most people aren't advanced typists. They don't know what it is. So the way I would do it is I say it's when you type on your keyboard without looking at the keyboard and only looking at your screen. After every single phrase or complicated word, explain what it means.
The effort that you put into every single video isn't correlated with how the video performs. This is a very difficult thing to grasp because we like to measure how good something is based on how much effort was put into that thing. And this is not at all the case with YouTube. For example, this video. I put in so much work into this video compared to something like this. This was just a one-day recording and it got one and a half million views. And this video that I spent like 4 weeks on, I think it was even more, got 188,000 views. There are many more examples. Like this video I was thinking of not even uploading. Somebody emailed me a Trojan virus. I thought this video would completely bomb. I remember I was sitting in my room contemplating how could I upload such a bad video to my channel. it ended up getting 3 million views. And there are other videos where I've spent weeks on thinking this is the best video I've ever made. It ends up being a 10 out of 10 video, which means worst performing out of your last 10 videos.
The idea of your video drives like 80% of the performance. Once your execution is good enough at first, nothing will do well because your execution sucks. But once you get good enough, decent enough at making YouTube videos, then ideas start to matter a lot. So effort as your main strategy of determining whether a video is going to be good or not is not a good indicator. Instead, doing research, looking at what topics do well for other people, actually thinking whether you would watch a video like this or looking at the videos that did well in the past for you, those are probably much better indicators.
When you don't want to work on a video or you don't want to edit, you know, you have like 6 hours of footage, start by just doing it for 5 minutes because your brain wants to keep doing whatever it's already doing. And instead of saying I'll edit for an hour, just say I'll edit for 5 minutes. If you're not feeling it after those 5 minutes, then you can do something else. It's okay. But do it for at least 5 minutes. What you'll most likely find is that your brain will want to continue the momentum and you'll just keep working on that video. Other things that help is moving your work on YouTube videos first thing in the morning if you can do that and also setting a timer while you work. I always set a timer. I'm recording with a timer right now. I currently have 30 minutes left and I work on YouTube videos. This is everything. Uh recording, editing, titles, thumbnails, and sponsorships as well for 3 hours every single day. So, I just wake up, set a timer, and until the timer runs out, I work on YouTube videos. My only rule is if I start procrastinating or doing something else, I have to stop the timer. So, it usually takes me much longer than 3 hours to do 3 hours of actual work. If I do it in 4 hours, that's pretty good. I usually do it for like five or six, but it's three hours of actual work. Also, when you set a timer, you'll see how long you actually work and how long you think you work, but you're not actually working. So, if you don't want to do something, just do it for 5 minutes anyway.
This is a little bit related to a previous point. Your returning viewers don't exist yet. So, stop titling your videos for those viewers. If you have less than, I don't know, if you have less than 2 million subscribers, don't title your videos for people who have already seen your previous videos. This goes for episodes. If you're making episodic content, don't title it Rocket League let's play episode 3. What this communicates to the viewer is that, oh, I haven't seen the first two episodes, so I'm going to have to do that in order to understand this one. I'd rather not watch. Instead, title every single video for people who have never seen or heard about you before. I see this mistake with so many people inside of my YouTube community. That's why I really want to drive it home. Make and package every video assuming that the people that are going to watch have never watched you before. Just do that for every single video.
Okay, I kind of have to go, so I'll probably just make another video with a bunch more tips like this. Let me know if this was useful. And also, if you want more tactical advice, I made a free email course where I just send you a bunch of emails with things that I've learned about YouTube by growing my channel to over 500,000 subscribers. So, that sounds interesting. I'll leave it in the description. Okay, bye. I have to go.