- One mistake is not gonna decapitate your entire channel,
but creators a seem to think that.
(upbeat music)
Now then, hi folks, I'm Rob, welcome back to vidIQ,
educating you on your YouTube journey.
And today's education is all about YouTube mistakes
There are the YouTube mistakes you've already made.
These are the YouTube mistakes
that no doubt even after watching this video,
you will still make.
I know this from personal experience
because despite all I know about YouTube,
and all of the videos I've made,
I still make YouTube mistakes.
Because after all, I'm only human.
You know right now I could be making a YouTube mistake
by laboring too long on this intro about YouTube mistakes.
There is a reason for this.
A supposed myth that (beeping) if you say a certain key word
enough times in the first 30 seconds to a minute
of a YouTube video,
it might surface more in search about YouTube mistakes.
So YouTube mistakes, YouTube mistakes, YouTube mistakes.
Am I making a mistake right now
by saying YouTube mistakes too much?
And can you even tell I'm saying YouTube mistakes
from my accent?
We'll find out in about a week after we publish this video
whether or not this is ranking for YouTube mistakes.
Once again, for regular viewers,
you find me in this alternative studio setup.
Two observation.
Somebody thought I'd strategically placed
this ring light here, so it looked like a halo effect on me,
and, of course, I did.
(soft choral music)
And then somebody observed that there was a spider behind me
somewhere about there, but I went through the entire video
and I have no idea what they're talking about.
Anyway, let's start giving you some value
in this video about YouTube mistakes,
before the subscribe button appears along the bottom.
I've gotta make sure to give you some value
before that appears, so it triggers you
to subscribe to my channel
even though I've already said
that I don't care about YouTube subscribers,
I'm more interested in return viewers.
Maybe that's another mistake.
All right, all right, less of a waffle,
let's get down to YouTube mistakes,
starting with thumbnails.
When it comes to thumbnails,
however important you think they are right now,
they're at least twice as important as that.
However long you spend making your thumbnails,
well, in the future spend twice as long as that.
I happen to believe
that the most valuable currency on YouTube is time.
But it works differently
for different stakeholders on YouTube.
Those being YouTube themselves,
advertisers, viewers and creators.
For example, when it comes to time for creators
they want as much as possible.
That increases their watch time, average view duration,
audience retention, 4,000 hours of watch time.
You get the idea.
But when it comes to the viewer browsing through content,
time means something completely different.
They want to know what they're going to watch
within a fraction of a second
by looking at the thumbnail and the title.
Now, I want you to try a little bit of an experiment here
do a search on the mobile app of YouTube
and you'll probably get two results on screen,
possibly three thumbnails at most.
What I want you to do,
I know this is gonna sound crazy,
but close your eyes for around about five seconds
and then just blink and look at the thumbnail
and you tell me, perhaps in the comments,
which thumbnail stood out more.
On average, you're looking at a thumbnail
for a second or less.
Now I'm not gonna take credit for this tactic.
I'm currently reading Derral Eves' book,
the "YouTube Formula"
and he suggested doing something similar,
and I get where he's coming from.
You could also do this with your channel.
So go to the video tab,
scroll down until you can see nothing but thumbnails
and, again, close your eyes for a few seconds
and then blink.
See which thumbnails stick out.
If there are any thumbnails at all that are jumping out
then I'm afraid your thumbnails
are not grabbing a viewer's attention.
If on the other hand,
there are one or two thumbnails on your channel
that do jump out of a screen and into your eyeballs
then this could be an indication of thumbnails
that really work on your channel
and you can use them as possible templates going forward.
Now (beeping) as a little side segue,
vidIQ does have a tool to help you do this to some extent.
Before you even publish your video,
you can put a search term into our thumbnail preview tool.
And it will compare that video, its title and its thumbnail,
against those videos that already rank for that search term
to see if you are competitive.
Now, there are all sorts of common little mistakes
that creators make more often than not
using far too much text on their thumbnails.
Remember, economy of time.
Viewers are looking at your thumbnails
for a very short amount of time.
The more text that's on screen, the more they have to read
and decode the thumbnail.
Often that text blocks out something important
in the thumbnail itself.
Repeating the title in the thumbnail just feels like a waste
and also consider the size at which most viewers
will see your thumbnail.
You're designing it on a big desktop screen.
Viewers are seeing at (slide whistle) postage stamp size
on a mobile phone.
So it still needs clarity at that size.
With that in mind, try to use
no more than three dominant colors.
Any more (beeping) and it just gets a little muddy.
Try to think about how many elements you're going to use
in your thumbnails.
Again, if you use more than four or five elements,
there's too much on screen, there's too much to decode.
You know how at the beginning I was saying
that thumbnails are more important than you think they are
and you should spend more time on them?
Well, flip that on its head
when it comes to the complexity of a thumbnail.
Your thumbnails right now are probably far too complicated.
They probably have far too many colors.
They probably have far too many elements.
So the next time you make one, simplify.
I didn't really take thumbnails seriously
until about two or three years ago.
This might be because when I first started out on YouTube
custom thumbnails were not available to me.
At the time, and we're talking about a decade ago,
custom thumbnails were something that were only available
to people in the YouTube Partner Program.
So without any access,
I didn't put that much attention into them.
And when I did get access to custom thumbnails,
what I mostly did was an icon
or an object representing what I was covering in tech,
and then lots and lots and lots of text.
Yeah.
Rudimentary to say the least.
So if there's one tangible thing that I want you
to take away from this video,
it's that thumbnails are really important
and you likely should be spending a lot more time on them.
The next mistake is less tangible.
It's more to do with mindset.
And that is, assuming that YouTube
is pretty much all about two metrics.
Those being views and subscribers, especially subscribers.
Now I grant you, there is some irony here
because many of you may have discovered vidIQ
through searching for how do I get more subscribers
or how do I get more views on YouTube? (dinging)
Unfortunately, that is a game that we have to play with
because we know people search for that term,
we have to sometimes create videos
that cater to that very surface level search term.
But as many of you will know,
YouTube is about so much more than views and subscribers.
Even if we just go to the next surface level,
we're talking about watch time and average view duration
and click through rate and impressions.
The next layer we might peel back
reveals relative audience retention and traffic sources.
A creator wouldn't just want to know how many views
or subscribers they got in a day.
They might want to know how many new people
discovered their content
and how many people returned to their content
after watching previous videos.
All of which now YouTube provides in analytics.
When a creator asked us the question of,
"How do I get more views and how do I get more subscribers?"
I'll be honest in saying that I don't think that creator
is ready yet for the complexities of YouTube.
So my simple response to that question from now on
is make more videos.
If you make more videos, you gain more experience,
you'll improve your skillset and you will get, crucially,
data that you can take action on in the future.
Once you've done that 50 to 100 times,
then you'll have some more nuanced questions
about how to grow your YouTube channel.
And now this is the perfect point at which to do that.
(computer beeps)
(mouse clicks)
Oh yeah (bell dings) oh yeah.
The next YouTube mistake weirdly enough
is all about making YouTube mistakes.
As soon as you start your channel
you're going to be making mistakes, and that's okay
because you're going to learn from them.
But when you started to have some success
on your YouTube channel and you're building an audience
you can fall into a comfort zone,
or you can start to think
that your YouTube channel is made of glass.
And if you make any mistakes on that channel
it's going to shatter.
One mistake is not gonna decapitate your entire channel,
but creators seem to think that.
And so they don't want
to risk upsetting the YouTube algorithms
by testing something different.
Remember, your entrepreneurial spirit
in creating a YouTube channel and testing
and experimenting with different things
is what resulted in success on your channel
in the first place.
I'm as guilty as anyone regarding this,
especially on my old tech channel,
where I would just make endless videos about the same topic
because I knew that would bring in a certain audience,
views, subscribers and so on.
And sometimes I've done that a little bit on this channel.
I know that we could get a lot of views and subscribers
by just making how to get 4,000 hours of watch time,
how to get 100 subscribers, how to start a gaming channel.
That's our evergreen content.
We know our foundation,
but this very video is an attempt
to break that cycle of comfort.
I have no idea if these two camera monologues
are going to be successful.
At the same time, I had no idea if viewers were
gonna find our content on copyright issues interesting.
But I took the risk.
I made videos and those have proven to be successful.
So we'll do some more of them in the future,
but I always wanna be testing
and I always wanna be experimenting.
That's why I've decided,
certainly in the last couple of weeks,
to be more transparent with you
about the things that I'm doing here on vidIQ
and also our analytics.
Audience retention on our videos here at vidIQ on average
is around about 40%.
And that on the surface seems really bad.
And I'm trying my best to improve that.
On average, we lose a 1/3 of our viewers
in the first 30 seconds.
And I personally think that is terrible.
That's why I'm experimenting
with different types of introductions.
But if I look at the relative audience retention
on our videos, it's higher than the average.
So maybe I'm trying to solve a problem
that isn't actually there.
In the YouTube education space,
the numbers we have are good.
And they probably are given the size of a channel.
When you start to worry if one video
is going to impact your channel,
you're thinking about the system and the algorithm
rather than your community.
Even when you have had some success on YouTube,
never stand still because YouTube is always changing.
And now we come to the next mistake,
which is worrying too much about the technology.
Your skillset matters a lot more than your technology.
Take Mr. Beast as an example.
Before he turned into the mega channel that he is today
with around about 60 million subscribers
and a whole production team behind him,
he gained his first 100,000 subscribers
through nothing more than an iPhone 5, LOL.
Absolutely, you should always be looking
at ways to up your production quality with new technology
when you can afford it.
But more importantly, master the technology
you have to hand now.
For me, it's been playing around with the lighting
for the last 12 months.
I've gone through so many iterations
of panel lights, ring lights, little diffusers.
And I'm getting to the point now
where I'm actually satisfied with the way I look on camera.
I just need to improve the way I present on camera,
but we've already spoken about that in another video.
And then we come to research.
Most creators don't put in the research
because they just want to create.
Again, I'm very guilty of this.
In this particular example, I'm not necessarily talking
about keyword research, although that does matter a lot.
Knowing the language of your audience can be crucial
for that title and what you say on camera,
as I've done in this video, YouTube mistakes,
along with descriptions as well.
What I'm more talking about here is the content that exists
on YouTube in your space.
Going out onto YouTube and searching for topics
that you think your audience are searching for.
Watching successful channels
and not necessarily imitating them,
but taking all of their best aspects
and putting your own words, your own spin,
your own riff on that content within a topic
can be a good starting point.
We can take the YouTube education space as a good example.
We're all pretty much talking about the same things.
Growing your channel,
turning it into a business, earning money.
We take something objective and make it subjective.
But if you watch each of us creators,
we'll all talk about it and present it in a different way
because we all have our own unique style.
And it's all down to viewer and audience opinion.
Which style do you like most?
I'm gonna be honest with you again
and say that this different format of video
is influenced a little bit by some of the content
that Sean Cannell is making on Think Media.
But he does that so much better than me,
but he's not as funny as me, or actually he probably is.
So, yeah, I can't win.
But again, I will admit
I'm still completely out of my comfort zone
with this style of a video format.
What I will say
if you watch my previous similar video to this
I've not used a script at all this time.
I do have some bullet points over to the right-hand side,
but I've not referenced them really at all.
I am giving you the viewer more attention this time,
but it does mean that I feel
as if I'm waffling a little bit more.
Again, you're gonna be the judge of that.
So, in summary, this video is all about the big mistakes
YouTube creators make,
which in turn could be a huge mistake of a video.
As long as we all agree on that,
I'll see you in the next one.