- The YouTube algorithm is a mysterious beast we all chase
yet never seem able to catch.
Just when we think we have it, it eludes us once more.
But not today, because we've developed and replicated
a view-busting strategy
that wins every time we use it, including today.
And the key to that secret is, YouTube search is dead.
Well, doesn't that all sound a little too good to be true
and a touch clickbaity?
Let me convince you otherwise.
Why are you on YouTube right now?
Pop your answer in the comments below,
because if you understand this,
you can start to understand your audience.
Are you here to watch your favorite creator?
Or did you open up YouTube
not really knowing what you were going to watch
and you ended up here?
Or did you come onto YouTube to get a specific answer
to a specific question?
Whatever the answer is, it can be defined by viewer intent.
And traditionally, when it comes to YouTube search,
the viewer is very intentional,
so much so, that they type their intent into YouTube
to get the desired outcome.
And as you can see, we have been very successful in the past
at catering to the exact needs of our audience.
In fact, YouTube search traffic
has contributed over 40 million views to our YouTube channel
over the last 10 years.
So naturally, you would think
as a how-to education-based channel,
our number one priority
is to make search-based how-to content, right?
Wrong, dead wrong.
In the last year,
less than a fifth of vidIQ's views came from search,
but almost twice as many came from browse.
Yeah, we don't want your click from a search page,
now we want it from the homepage.
Now, at this point, you might be asking, and quite rightly,
why would you do this?
Why would you abandon your biggest traffic source of views?
Well, there's a simple answer to that.
YouTube analytics told us to.
From an obvious peak at the start of the COVID lockdown,
search traffic on our channel has been in decline
and we haven't been able to reverse that trend
in the three years since.
So around about a year ago, I decided to hell
with the traditional how-to style of video content.
We're gonna do something different.
We're gonna target browse.
And the results were quite frankly astonishing.
Like everything on YouTube,
it took us a little while to figure out this new strategy,
but once we did, we doubled down on it
to the point that from this time last year,
we're doing twice as many monthly views.
And so what is the secret sauce to this success?
How do you get people from watching search-based content
to browse-based content on your channel?
Well, maestro, drum roll please.
(drum roll)
Give the viewer what they want
and then give them what they need.
Yeah, that's gonna take some explaining, isn't it?
I'm sure we'll all agree
that a good title is super important for your video, right?
It's one of the first things a viewer sees,
and this video title is very direct.
If you watch it,
it should help you write better YouTube titles.
But performance-wise,
the video's done, meh, 70,000 views in a year.
However, it has achieved its objective.
It does get search traffic,
it is evergreen content, and it does rank on YouTube
underneath a Think Media video that has 200,000 views.
But here's the thing, is having a video
at the very top of the search rankings
with 200,000 views a good thing?
To me, that suggests how to write a YouTube title
has a very limited search volume on YouTube.
And that's a bad thing.
But we all know
that writing YouTube titles is very important, right?
Yes, absolutely.
However, it's not what creators want.
It's not what creators crave.
It's not what creators desire.
And when that mentality clicks in your head...
Believe it or not, this video is also about the same topic,
how to write titles for YouTube videos.
Not that you would know it
from the title of the video itself.
To understand why we've done this,
we need to ask you a question.
What do you want for your YouTube channel?
Basically, most creators want more views, more subscribers,
and depending on where they are
on their YouTube journey, monetization.
They want to grow their channel into something bigger
and they want to do it faster.
That is the basic emotional desire
of the average YouTube creator,
and that's what our title intends to trigger.
What if you could double your YouTube views
with just a few minutes of work?
For most people, this sounds like a bit of a pipe dream,
but it's actually quite simple.
All you need is a little bit of creativity
and a YouTube title formula I'm about to share with you.
Did you see what we did there?
In the title of the thumbnail,
we gave our target audience what they want,
grow big, grow fast.
And then we reinforced that in the video hook
right up to the point
where we told them what they actually need.
A title formula.
So when it comes to pitching your video to your audience,
show and tell them what they want,
and the video can deliver what they need.
This is why two videos
about exactly the same topic from the same channel
can have wildly different view counts.
And you won't believe what happened next.
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So back to this video with its new titling strategy.
Yep, it jumped out of the gate with great numbers,
but what amazed me was that the video
just kept going and going and going,
so much so that 250 days after the video went public,
it continues to be a super solid evergreen browse video.
I didn't even think it was possible
to get so many views from browse
so long after the video went live.
Oh, it's getting views from search as well.
I didn't plan for that.
It turns out this video has been double dipping,
but not for that long.
Most of the views have come from browse,
and it's only recently started trending upwards
in search traffic.
Hey, if YouTube's gonna give me more views
from more traffic sources, I ain't gonna complain.
I'm gonna do it again.
Ah, that's right, Rob.
As well as views, small channels want subscribers.
This video did the same thing, but in a shorter timeframe
with even more views, over a million of them,
and almost all the traffic comes from browse features.
More views, more subscribers, what comes next?
Ah, the algorithm.
Everybody wants to understand that, whatever it means.
The algorithm is a catch-all term
that allows you to pretty much talk about anything
when it comes to YouTube growth.
And on this occasion,
more than 1.7 million viewers have tuned in
in less than six months.
And look at that.
Suggested views, browse views,
and hardly anything from search.
Yeah, I think you probably get the idea by now.
So let's create an actionable plan for your channel.
Think of it like this.
Currently, this is where your viewer is,
but this is where you want to get them to.
And you do that by focusing
on one of your target audience's emotional desires
that you know to exist.
Whether it's getting more views or earning more money
or passing a course or losing weight.
The pitch of your title, the pitch of your thumbnail,
the first 10 seconds of your video, the hook,
all start there.
Because the viewer doesn't intentionally have to search
for this type of stuff.
They subconsciously, instinctively know it.
And when they see it on YouTube,
they want it and they're gonna watch it.
So whether you are a cooking channel, a gaming channel,
a tech channel, a fitness channel, a finance channel,
ask yourself this, what is at the top of the list,
the ultimate goal, the basic desire of my ideal viewer?
Start there.
And once you know that,
you need to write a title that is so intriguing
and so curious
that the only way a viewer is going to resolve it
is by clicking on it.
And this is where you start.