What does it take to get someone to click on something that you’ve made?
It used to be easy to find an audience online, back when the community was smaller. But these
days everyone’s competing for attention, and everything has become over saturated.
At least that’s what a lot of people seem to think, and it might be true, or it might
be that nostalgia is just clouding our memories of those good old days, but you know what,
it doesn't matter because that is the past. So, looking forward, what can we do to have
a better chance at building an audience. Well first things first, I am not an expert,
and anyone who claims that they can predict everything about online success is either
wrong or they are lying to you.
Okay, so let’s start with why someone who has never heard of you before would want to
click on something you have made. Clickbait. It’s when we try to offer something
so enticing that people cannot resist clicking on it.
Here are some examples: The exaggerator: COULD HAVE KILLED HER! MARRIAGE
MAKES YOU FAT! SCIENCE CONFIRMS The Injury: ‘CRACKED HIS HEAD OPEN” “BABY
CUTS OFF TOE” The Shock: TACKLED BY POLICE, MY SISTER GOT
IN A CAR ACCIDENT The Lie: Quitting YouTube! I'm Quitting YouTube.
Quitting YouTube? and finally, the censored:
Now all of those examples have tons of views, and they certainly are effective at grabbing
our attention, but I think audiences are smarter than that, I think people are beginning to
filter out these shouty, cheap exaggerations. So what’s a good mid point?
This title and thumbnail wouldn't really mean anything to an audience, I doubt many people
would click on this at all. So let’s add a bit more information. This
is better, but the thumbnail is literally just a face, and the title is unclear as to
what the video is about. What would I gain from clicking on this?
This one has an eye catching thumbnail, and it certainly claims to offer something that
a lot of people are interested in. But, I think this is too much clickbait - and it's
a bit long as well. So let’s dial it back a bit, and there we
go. That video pops up and we know what it’s
about, what we could gain from watching it, but it’s not screaming in our face.
So it’s definitely worth thinking about the title & the thumbnail quite early on in
the process of making a YouTube video or a blog post or whatever it is. I usually write
down a whole bunch of different wordings and variations of the title so that I can find
something that is nice and short, but still clear, and with a little sprinkle of clickbait.
The good thing is that if you’re making content regularly (which you should be if
you're trying to grow an audience) then you’ll have lots of practice at making titles and
thumbnails every single time you make something. Plus, you get that constant feedback of seeing
how each title and thumbnail performs as far as the views go.
It's a constant learning curve.
So when I started this channel I was fifteen, I had no connections, and I had no funding,
but I made the decision to make a video every single week, and see what happens. That’s
probably a pretty good first step for a lot of people.
But it’s not easy, and even then, three years ago people were still complaining about
how YouTube has changed so that it's not as easy for people to get found. But you know
what, they were right - after a year of shooting and editing 52 videos, what I thought at the
time was pretty difficult volunteer work, the most popular video on the channel had
4,000views, which was kind of disappointing in relation to the videos that I was watching.
But slowly, slowly, month after month, you know a few more people would start watching
the videos, and gradually it did snowball into more and more.
So it probably won’t be easy to build an audience online,
but you don't have to have started your channel in 2009, or be friends with people who are
already established with their own audiences. Because just as a lot more people are creating
content, there are also a lot more people who are joining sites like YouTube and there
are more people to watch the same content. But the thing is, most people don’t even
get through that first year, they don't get the chance to find out whether they will then
begin to snowball and grow and grow. So with all that in mind, there is a reason
why I don't usually talk about this stuff. I don't usually talk about marketing on this
channel, even though I do spend a good amount of time thinking about views and thinking
about thumbnails and titles, it's hard not to. And it's because getting people to click
on the video is really only the first part. To me the more important part is whether they
then decide to stick around and watch the rest of the video, whether they decide to
watch other of your videos, whether they decide to share the video with their friends. And
all of these things are part of a much bigger topic called trying to make good content and
I actually did separate video about that, because it just cannot fit in to this one.
And I'll link that as the first thing in the description.
So yeah, my name’s Simon Cade, this has been DSLRguide and I’ll see you next week.