- Win the click.
Get the views.
Hello, I'm Alan Spicer, your favorite YouTube expert
and you've found me through my title
or my thumbnail and clicking is the key.
When I first started YouTube two, three years ago,
I had a major problem on getting attention.
I had a major problem dragging people in
to watch my videos.
You're probably the same.
You sat there and you wonder why
you create such good stuff that could educate people
or help people and they just don't find you.
Or someone with someone with a very similar video
wins the click and wins the race
and off they go to the races.
Your video has a few hundred views.
They have hundreds of thousands of views.
Their channel blows up and you feel left in the dust.
It took me many months and lots of soul-seeking
to finally figure out there's a core premise
and it is clickable titles.
And there's four ways to go about it.
One: the curiosity gap.
How many times have you clicked on a video
because it's intriguing?
It's promising you something that might educate you
or open your eyes.
How Jimmy ate two thousand chocolate bars
in one sitting.
Why skydivers use this specific ring.
What crazy thing saved this man's life?
Or one of my favorites, why was this building
left abandoned?
Why is this town under the ground no longer used?
This is what's known as the curiosity gap.
It's something that intrigues people to watch an explainer,
something that hooks them in and drowns them
in the storytelling.
Tom Scott is very good at this.
If you've never seen him, he's a British YouTuber
that throws out curiosity, old technology,
coding, war-time detection radars,
explaining why there's a huge city out in the desert
in Texas that's never been built
but there's houses planned.
If in my title, I was just to say,
"Use titanium for jump rings,"
it's not curious anymore.
It gives you the answer if you're a skydiver
but it doesn't intrigue you.
It doesn't bring you over to watch the story
and listen to the reason.
If Game of Thrones episodes were just labeled
the spoiler each time,
Game of Thrones, Season Three, Episode Two:
Gandalf Dies.
Game of Thrones, Season Eight, Episode Four:
The Dragon's Actually Made of Chocolate.
Frozen 2: Olaf Melts,
then it kind of takes the mystery away.
There are no reason for you to look at that title
and to try and guess what it means
because it's saying exactly what it says on the tin,
unless someone's tricking you
and if they're tricking you,
you kind of don't care anyway.
It's kind of like a headline reading.
The curiosity gap is something that hooks them in
and makes them listen.
Two: the new, the secret, the thing that plays
with your brain.
It's the fear of missing out.
If it's something new, you want to be on it straightaway.
If it's a secret, you want to be in that little club.
I've done it a few times on my channel.
Whenever there's a new piece of news
or a new feature on YouTube or a secret thing
that people don't tend to use that often,
I'll sneak it in at the start of the title
or I'll put it in the thumbnail.
The reason for that is because new and secret
plays with your brain.
It makes you think that, ah I've got to get in on this.
Well, what if I've missed it?
What if I never learn this thing?
Or if it's relevant to your platform,
you're intrigued.
You don't be the only one that don't know.
Three: worst, best, top.
Same as the FOMO, everyone likes the idea
of ranking things.
Always so and so and so and so,
who earns more money?
Who's someone that we should not
pay attention to anymore?
If you're searching for cameras,
you want to know the best.
You don't want to get third.
Or you've got a camera and you want to know
if you rank in the top ten.
You want to know how well you are doing
or how well you can be perceived as doing.
Without compilations of people falling off of skateboards
or in our country, in the U.K.,
there's You've Been Framed!
They are power words.
Worst. Best. Top.
Things that people kind of gravitate towards
are intrigued.
That's why you see top tens and top fives and top 20s.
They've even combined the best top ten,
et cetera, et cetera.
And Four: Most titles that are clickable
have these two elements.
A search element and an intrigue.
This is what builds that curiosity gap
and these could be done by the best, or the new,
or the latest, or the worst.
But the most successful titles
have a key word or a key phrase
that people are optimizing for
and then something that hooks them
as a wow or an intrigue.
I got one million views in six seconds
dash wow, you won't believe this.
Both are intriguing.
Both have a curiosity gap.
This video is called 'Make Clickable Titles Every Time.'
So the key search term here is 'Make Clickable Titles'
and the wow is 'Every Time.'
But maybe in a video that I'm working on at the moment,
'The SECRET to YouTube Success That The Big YouTubers
NEVER TELL YOU!'
The key phrase there is 'Secret to YouTube Success'
and the wow is, 'The Big Channels Never Tell You'
It's that curiosity gap, it's that confusion,
it's that intrigue.
It's that fear of missing out.
It's that, ah, it's that grabbing you.
Are your titles too direct?
Are your titles without whimsy and wonder?
Or maybe, you just need to level up your video game.
Here's a playlist on how to make better videos.