- Okay, there we go.
Ugh.
Uh.
I've got no video ideas.
- [Male] vidIQ.
- [Female] vidIQ.
- [Male] vidIQ.com.
- All right, let's try
and do this in one take.
Remember in my earlier video I said
YouTube is like running a business?
Well each video is like a product
or service launch
and you've gotta do that two
or three times a week.
So imagine trying to come up with
all of these ideas all of the time.
And if you can you end up procrastinating.
And as I've already said, YouTube hates that.
So how do you get beyond that?
One take!
Hello, I'm Rob, and welcome to vidIQ,
the YouTube tool and channel that aims
to educate you on your YouTube journey
and chart that success in 2019.
Throughout this series,
and if you are new to YouTube,
our aim is to help you get more views
and more subscribers to ultimately grow your channel.
If you wanna watch the full playlist in this series,
I'm gonna point into the middle of the air,
where hopefully a card should be appearing around about now.
And I do, of crouse, highly recommend
you clicking on that button
somewhere on your screen right now because we don't only do
beginner videos, we do live streams,
auditing your channels
and looking at some of the awesome tools
vidIQ has to offer, along with some fun stuff as well.
So make sure to subscribe
and click on the notification bell.
I remember saying in our very first video
in this series that you should just press record,
make some videos, upload them
so you can get an understanding of how the YouTube
sausage factory works.
But what we've also talked about already
is a YouTube strategy,
which is to focus on a particular niche,
where you're actually narrowing down your topics.
And that could make it
more difficult to generate video ideas.
So here's few tips, tricks
and tools that you can use
to ensure that you have a long list of video
ideas so you never run out of them,
it's just finding the time to make them all.
We're gonna start simple,
and that's probably your best friend
when it comes to generating video ideas.
And it's the search bar on YouTube.
Why is it so powerful?
Well remember YouTube is the second largest
search engine in the world,
and two billion people use YouTube every month.
What makes the search bar so powerful
is the suggestions that it gives you.
Let's start very basic
and I'm gonna type in the word slime
and look at these suggestions that come up.
The third suggestion is already fascinating,
slime asmr, it's combining two different
genres together,
and that seems to be a search people are actually
looking for these days.
Usually though you want to be a little more strategic
with your searches.
So let's say you were a slime channel,
you might search for how to make slime.
And just look at the video suggestions here.
How to make slime without glue.
How to make slime with glue.
How to make slime with activator,
whatever that is,
I have no idea,
but if you're interested in the topic of slime
I'm sure you will.
And there are at least 10 video ideas
that you could take from this
simple suggestion from YouTube.
You can take this concept even further as well
with this pro tip.
We have here a keyword phrase,
how to make slime.
What we can do now is play the alphabet game.
All we're gonna do is add a single character
to the end of this phrase.
How to make slime a.
And look at all the options we get.
And then we can add b,
and then we can add c.
And so on like this through the alphabet
and this could generate literally
hundreds of ideas from a simple keyword phrase.
And these are not random search terms
that YouTube is just throwing at you,
these are search terms that people are searching for today.
It's the pulse of the YouTube search, what's popular.
And we can look at this with some trending topics.
This time I'm gonna search for part of somebody's name
and that is stef.
And the result we're interested in here
is Stefanos Tsitsipas, half way down.
Who is he and why is this important?
Well he's a tennis player
who very recently beat Roger Federer at
the Australian Open.
So it was a big news story in tennis
and that's why his name now also completes from stef.
And there you have the YouTube search bar.
The simplest tool to use,
but one of the most powerful
for generating very simple video ideas.
Now what we're gonna do is
sprinkle a little bit of vidIQ magic all over this.
Down the right hand side here you have some
vidIQ tools which you get
when you install our Chrome extension.
The first one being keyword score.
This is generally saying that it has a high volume
search but low competition score.
In other words, a lot of people have been searching for this
and not many videos were being put out by video creators.
So there may be a window of opportunity
for you here to get in on the keyword
if tennis was your video topic.
Below that we've got related queries
so this could add more video ideas to your content,
following on from the keyword of
Stefanos Tsitsipas,
and one final tool I wanted to show you here.
If we click on inline keywords here,
it shows you all of the video tags
or metadata for the videos that are doing well.
So you could look at these keywords
and maybe use them for your own videos.
Or if you click on one it launches our keyword inspector
and shows you how the keyword has been trending
over the last 30 days.
So as we can see,
as Stefanos Tsitsipas was doing very well in the tournament,
he was starting to peak
and really trend,
but after the tournament interest very quickly waned.
So this is one of those red hot keywords
where the window of opportunity may already have passed.
And I just want to show you
how powerful this search bar can be
when you follow it with your content.
I've got a search here for how to unlock an iPhone X.
And if I scroll down this list,
I'm interested in this video because
it has just 6,000 subscribers from the channel
but a video with over 130,000 views.
And the simple title is How to Unlock an iPhone X without
Face iD or Passcode.
So very keyword rich, telling the viewer
exactly what they need,
and it's supported by these very focused keywords as well.
So we're talking a lot about how focused
all of your video content should be
on one particular topic
and this video nails it absolutely perfectly.
That's a lot to take in isn't it.
What we've just done is transitioned
a little bit from generating video ideas
to search engine optimization.
Making your videos as discoverable as possible on YouTube.
I don't want you to stress too much about SEO
or keyword research right now.
But you have to remember,
from YouTube's perspective,
they know relatively little about your channel
when you first start out.
So trying to give them as much information as possible
such as using keywords that people are searching for
will certainly give you a little bit of a boost
when you first start creating videos.
If on the other hand you find keyword research
absolutely fascinating,
we've made a monster guide on this already,
there is a link right here.
One more thing I want to add
about making trending topic videos.
I have said previously in this series
that you should try and work to 75-80%
of your YouTube capacity.
In other words, if you can make four videos a week,
then make three so you've got a bit of space to experiment,
or in this case go after trending topics when they happen.
Now this could be a reaction to a new film trailer
or covering a big news controversy in technology
or a political event,
whatever your interest of topic is,
if you have the opportunity to talk about
something that's happening now,
try it and see what happens.
The reason I say this is because we jumped
on the PewDiePie versus T Series subscriber rate story
in December as a trending topic
and our viewing figures went through the roof.
I don't recommend throwing all of your efforts into
trending topics because it can be a very difficult
nut to crack.
It is a little bit like a shot in the dark,
but when you hit that bullseye
you can really benefit with millions of views.
And let's face it, from an idea generating point of view,
whatever you're passionate about,
there's gonna be new stories on your passion
every single day,
you just need to find the right ones
and nail it with the right video.
Okay, onto the next idea generator,
and that is the people I'm talking to right now.
You, the audience.
There are many ways to involve your audience
in generating ideas for your content.
One such way is to post a comment on your own videos
asking the audience what they would like to see next,
and then pinning that comment to the top of the video
so everyone sees it.
A good idea is also to sift through the comments
from time to time because chances are,
especially if you are an educational or how to channel,
people will be asking you
to make certain videos on certain topics.
By simply filtering the comments on vidIQ
for can you make a video, I found several comments,
which could easily turn into full blown videos.
And let's not forget the people who are watching right now.
So as somebody starting a YouTube channel in 2019,
what videos do you want to see
in this series to help you grow your channel?
Let us know in the comments below.
I'll be reading them all
and probably making videos out of some of 'em.
Another fantastic way to generate video ideas
is from your "competition."
I don't know why I'm using quotes.
You could call them your colleagues,
your fellow video creators.
There are gonna be thousands of people just like you
making similar content, so you want to do
a bit of spying on them because they may have
some great ideas you can turn into videos.
Now you can of course track your so called competition
by subscribing to them,
but we have a tool that helps you a little bit
with this sort of thing.
It's called our competitors tool.
And what this does is it shows you the most popular videos
for the channels that you're following
in terms of views per hour.
So these are ones with high velocity in the last week.
So we can see from our competitors,
that the Creator Insider channel
is making something about new features in Studio Beta.
We could look at that, maybe make a video on it.
Sean Cannell has videos about how
to make videos that get views, a complete checklist.
Again, we could look at that
and maybe use some of those ideas
for our own video content.
There's one here about how to increase audience retention.
These are all topics certainly within our wheelhouse
and we could maybe use this to create our own video content.
Now let's clarify what I'm talking about here.
You're using these competitor's videos
to get inspiration for your own content.
You're not going to watch these videos,
jot down everything they say
and then just copy on your channel.
What you should be looking at here
are the general topics
and keywords that these channels are using
and then putting your own spin on these things.
By virtue of you creating a video on that topic
you'll add your own flavor to it.
I'm pretty certain that there's already
hundreds, if not thousands of videos
on this topic of generating video ideas for YouTube channel.
But because of my experience as a video creator
and my passion for the subject,
I'm hoping that this is a fresh perspective
on generating video ideas.
Of course, you the audience will be the judge of that
and whether or not this video is successful
and starts to rank for the search term
of how to generate video ideas or similar.
Now so far we've only looked within the YouTube platform
to help us generate video ideas.
But remember the internet is a pretty big place.
Whether it be Facebook groups,
or what you would call influencers
on Twitter and Instagram,
news sites, Reddit, there's always going to be sources
of information that are absolute gold
that you can turn into ideas for your YouTube videos.
Just to give you a quick example of the sources we used
to help us generate video ideas,
we follow YouTube wherever they are on the internet,
especially on Twitter.
The Team YouTube Twitter handle
is a goldmine of information.
We look at there YouTube Blog
and the Creator Blog.
We're also scanning the YouTube sub Reddit,
there's plenty of fun stuff to look around at there.
Tubefilter is an excellent one
for new source about YouTube things.
And also YouTube's support
and community pages are really valuable
when you want to cover something about monetization.
If you followed our channel for any length of time
you will know that monetization is a big issue
for video creators every single day.
And every time we make videos on that
we get a surge in views.
So that's one area where we've carved out
a little bit of a niche in the YouTube space.
So there you have some broad strokes.
I don't know why I'm animating that,
but it feels good, on how to generate
video ideas on YouTube.
However, if you don't feel as if we went far enough
in this video, we've actually done another
video on this topic around about six months ago,
30 specific ideas for generating video ideas
for your YouTube channel,
where I have a little bit more fun in that one.
I even start with a rap,
so it's worth checking out just for that.
♪ Now this is a story all about ♪
♪ how my analytics got flipped upside ♪
Get it off screen, they don't need to see it now.
Don't forget that some of the tools
I showed you in this video come from vidIQ,
the Chrome extension that will help you research
YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel
and take actionable steps to help
grow that very channel.
If you want to see more from this series
as we chart your success in 2019,
the playlist is over here.
There's more awesome vidIQ content right down here.
As always I'm pointing into thin air,
so I hope you join me on either of those videos.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day.