You never want to change your YouTube title or the description.
I produce over 20 youtube channels. And over the years, I've learned exactly what
you do want to change and what you never want to change if you want to get results.
So, I'm going to share what does happen when you change things on your YouTube videos.
And in fact, a story of a video that was spiking. And I made a change in what happened there. But
there are some things that you can change and I actually encourage you to change so we're going
to talk about those too. I remember the first time I had a spike, a major spike on one of my YouTube
videos. I was actually on vacation in Dana Point, California and one of my videos started taking
off. We are only averaging around a thousand views a day on the channel and now because of one video,
we had a 10,000 view day. Well, in my excitement, I took a look at that video and I noticed that
there was a spelling error. In the description, there was one letter that was misspelled. Now,
I knew better. I knew that I was not supposed to change the title or the description but I
thought it's just one letter. That can't hurt. So, guess what I did? I changed it, I corrected
the spelling error and I looked at the analytics, and the views stopped. All the views stopped. My
spikes was stopped in its tracks and I started to panic. This was about 10 pm at night. I remember
that because it was an emotional time. I was so excited and then so distraught here. I wondered
what to do. I panicked. I kept watching, I kept refreshing. Like, "It's got to come back. It's
got to come back." Okay, 5 hours went by. So, now it's 3 am in the morning. I haven't been able to
sleep and I decided "What will happen if I change it back." The damage is done. So, I might as well
try it. So, I went back and I put the misspelled letter back. And I hit save. The views came back.
So, why does this happen? Why can you not change a single letter on the title or in the description?
Well, it resets the whole video for the YouTube algorithm. It's as if, "Oh, the old video is not
there anymore. It's a new video and the algorithm has to come back and reassess it and retest it."
So, if your video has got several months of track record and data that YouTube knows,
now it's all reset. This is one of the reasons I train so heavily on this channel of my leaf
strategy where you do the keyword research and find the exact title. Because you want to stick
with the title that you start with. Now let's talk about what you can change. One of the best things
to do is thumbnails. And I've got some software open here it's called Tubebuddy that allows you to
do a/b testing on thumbnails. That means you can launch 2 thumbnails at the same time and see which
one gets clicked on better. So, you'll notice this top one. "How do you know for sure is the text we
used on that one?" The variation, realtors never tell you this. Now, in my mind, I was hoping that
the second one would perform better because I think that that creates more curiosity. Well,
if I zoom out a bit, you'll see that it did. We went from a 7.25% click-through rate up to a 9.53.
Now, where we never want to change our title or description, you can change the thumbnail as often
as you want and it won't have any negative impact on the video. If your new thumbnail performs
worse, then obviously, you'll get less clicks on it. But if your thumbnail performs better, that's
the goal right. We'll get more clicks. Let me show you another example. Now, Paul Jenkins' top
thumbnail here "Bedwetting cures for teenagers". This is obviously on a bed wedding video. This
was a very high performer 8.26%. So, we didn't create a variation just because we thought we
need to do a better job than this. But my team had an idea. So, she put this embarrassed girl on the
screen and that's my guess as to why the thumbnail performed better. We see we got it up to over 10%
but you actually don't know what it was that caused that improvement because so many things
were changed. I'm guessing 6 different things were changed here. The text was moved and the text is
a different color. It's a different image of paul and he's got a different expression on his face.
The background is different, the girl is new. Even Paul's logo, it used to be black up in the corner,
now it's white down in the bottom corner. So, so many different variables changed. We don't know
what caused that improvement. We just know that the second one performed better. If you want to
learn from these changes so that you can make better and better thumbnails in the future, I
recommend doing one variable at a time. So, let me show you this next one. See, both these thumbnails
are identical. The text is the same. The only difference is the top one is red, the bottom
one is blue. And in Utah, there's a rivalry that's red versus blue and blue obviously wins. We've got
a much higher click-through rate, 8.3. Now, check out this thumbnail. All we did is add some icons
and that took the click-through rate from 3.2 up to 4.99. This thumbnail is the same. We just
played around with the color in the background and that caused an amazing click-through rate
of 12.73 to inch up a little bit more to 13.04. In addition to changing thumbnails,
you can change the cards, the end screens, you can pin comments. You can create new playlists
of videos but just don't ever change that title and description and you'll be fine.
Now, something that's actually pretty funny to me is that typos and mistakes can actually make your
video perform better. The first time I learned this, I made a video where I was talking about why
I hire people in the Philippines. And Scott Christopher, he's an actor. He was in this
episode with me and we were talking about it. And he was sharing some of his Filipino history
wisdom with us, okay? And he talked about how America saved the Philippines from Spain. Well,
Filipinos see that a little bit differently and so they commented about it, right? So, we said
something wrong in the video. Well, to this day, a couple years later I still get dozens of comments
every single day correcting us about that. Well, this video has so much engagement that YouTube has
promoted it out and this video has had millions and millions of views. Now, in another example,
I was also talking about the amazing people of the Philippines. But I mentioned that they're a
third-world country. Well, Filipinos like to call their country a developing nation. So,
that's something I've definitely learned my lesson on. It did help my video perform better but I like
to call it a developing nation. Oh and I've got one more example. One time I was filming with Kris
Krohn and he had extremely chapped lips. I guess he'd gotten sunburned on his lips. Well that video
performed better because so many people commented like, "Why are your lips so chapped, man?"
So, I don't recommend that people make mistakes intentionally but if you do make mistakes or if
there's something off in your video, it's likely that'll actually help your video perform better.
If you'd like to know what it looks like to work with me and have us produce your YouTube channel,
I invite you to click the link below and to schedule a call and
make sure it's a great fit for your business. I'd love to help you become the next YouTube hero.
If you haven't learned my strategy yet, I definitely invite you to watch this video next.
It's "How to get a 1,000 subscribers on YouTube in a day". I share my entire strategy there.