- The process I'm going to share with you today
can be used by literally any small channel
with literally any type of content you might make.
That goes for long videos, YouTube shorts,
even live streams.
And we're jumping right in.
If you've watched this channel for any amount of time,
you've probably heard us say that for YouTube,
you really should identify a target audience.
But in order to do that,
you also need to identify
the type of content that you wanna make.
And to do this,
what I want you to do is ask yourself
what is it that I'm good at
or what is it that I'm just obsessed with?
Because starting a YouTube channel
around a topic that you're not familiar with
simply because you think, oh, I think this is trending,
I think this will get a lot of views,
I'll make a whole channel about it,
that's only gonna slow you down.
And once you know what your channel's gonna be about,
that is when it's so much easier
to identify a target audience.
And to do this research,
you wanna look at creators who are kind of
already doing what you're thinking of doing.
This will tell you
if there's even an audience for that type of content.
And then you can see the potential ceiling,
how successful can a channel be
covering this type of topic?
While you're doing this,
I want you to look at the top channels
and see what is it they're doing really, really well,
but also what is it that you feel they could improve upon?
To take this one step further,
you could also be checking out the comment sections
of really popular videos in this space,
to see how the audience is responding to them
and what type of questions
they generally have.
This research isn't something you do over one afternoon.
I would say you wanna spend a couple of days on this,
but by the end of this research,
you're going to
have a much better understanding of your ideal viewer.
The next step in this process
is to actually be your ideal viewer.
I want you to spend the next few days
living as your ideal viewer.
I want you to be joining sub-reddits and discords
and other communities around the topic
that you want to cover on your channel.
Look for questions being asked in these communities,
ask some questions yourself,
and look for things that inspire and excite
this group of people.
I feel like as you're living as your ideal viewer,
70% of your time should really be spent off of YouTube.
The reason being is that you're trying to generate ideas
and while it is good to see what's working
and make your own version of that,
in terms of YouTube videos you're looking at,
it's also good to come up with some original ideas
and those original ideas can be much easily gathered
if you're really familiar with your space.
And that is why it's important to look for these communities
in other places on the internet.
So for all this work you're doing over these few days,
what you're really doing is generating content ideas.
And as you go through this research,
I want you to just keep an active list
of potential video ideas,
and then I want you to put it all together.
So by now, you should have a very specific,
highly targeted,
highly focused list,
of video ideas that you're going to make for your channel.
I want you to put pen to paper here,
script these videos,
or at the very least,
write a detailed outline for each one.
And again,
if you are a live streaming channel,
you should also be planning out your live streams
in a similar fashion.
And if you're having trouble
imagining what this might look like for you,
let me share with you my outline
and all of my ideas that I wrote down for this video
you're watching right now.
I started with writing a clear goal for this video.
In this case,
helped motivate small creators
to focus on specific goals for their YouTube channels.
From there, I went straight into my outline,
which actually became
kind of a partial script for the video.
The next step for me
was to write down a handful of title ideas
once I was finished with my outline.
And I gotta be honest,
I actually wish I had more of these ideas
but I really like these three so much.
And if the video, once published,
happens to perform not so great,
you might notice these titles
kind of changing throughout that first day.
Now, before we move on,
I know thinking of titles ahead of time
can be a little bit intimidating.
You're still trying to figure out
what your video's gonna be about.
I have a tool that can help you here.
Even as a free user of our vidIQ tools,
you will have some access
to the AI title recommendations we have.
Using these is incredibly simple.
Here's how it works.
Start with a phrase that kind of describes
the video you're trying to make.
For me, we'll use one of my favorite hypothetical topics
and that is Pokemon trading cards.
Once you have your phrase,
all you have to do is click get AI title recommendations.
Our AI title generator is going to give you
a number of eye catching titles,
and if you love the one you see,
all you have to do is click use.
But these should at the very least
get you thinking about the type of title
you're going to actually put on your video word for word.
You can also do this totally separate
from the YouTube studio,
by going to app.vidiq.com.
Make sure you're on channel dashboard
and you can continue to use
the AI title recommendations here
without disturbing any of the videos you've currently made.
If you're interested,
the link is down below to download vidIQ,
just make sure to authenticate your channel.
Give it a try.
Plug aside,
the final step for me was
deciding what my thumbnail was going to look like.
I didn't create the thumbnail before I made the video
but I did decide on a couple of different designs.
And all I did for this step
was simply write down a couple of sentences
that best describe the thumbnail
I want to make for this video.
That was just my process.
And you don't even need to do it in that order.
A lot of people like to think of their title
before they even write their script,
which is totally fine.
And you might even have a number of steps in between
that you might add to this process.
The point I wanna make though
is you should have some process like this
before you record a single second of video.
It makes a huge difference.
And then we move onto
what you might think is the final step,
but it's not.
Spoiler alert.
Once you've planned out your video
and put pen to paper,
you have the green light to press record,
but I have a power tip for you.
Don't.
- Are you serious?
- Instead, plan out your next three or four videos
ahead of time.
This extra powerful step
will allow you to tie together
your next number of videos in various ways.
You'll be able to use end screens,
pin comments,
and playlists,
way more effectively.
So for example,
if you write video A, B and C,
and then you understand
what's going to happen in this mini series,
you can record video A
and then at the end of your video,
have a very specific call to action for video B.
Once you publish video B,
update your end screen.
You've heard us use that tactic a number of times,
so whether you use it or not,
the next step is going to be uploading your video.
You've recorded,
you've edited,
you've picked a catchy title,
and you've even made a thumbnail.
You put it all together
and you don't hit published just yet.
(items smashing and breaking)
(bleep)
Once everything is all set up in your YouTube editor
and your video set to private,
there is an extra step we can do,
an extra safety check.
Depending on your vidIQ subscription level,
you should have some access
to our preview in search results button.
All you need to do is think of a search term
that people might use to find your video
and then click preview and search results.
Your video is going to fictionally show up
between the top ranking videos
for the search term that you typed in.
What you're doing in this next step
is comparing your video
to videos that currently rank really high
for the search term.
If you feel like your title and your thumbnail
stand out here, then great,
but if you're having some doubts,
just make adjustments as you see fit
and then you can press publish.
And you might think that publishing a video
means you're done,
and you can move on to the next project,
and it certainly can,
but there is one final thing
we actually didn't get to touch on yet.
And that is that you can actually
go back through your older videos
and in certain cases you could be updating
the titles and thumbnails of those videos,
and give them kind of a second wind.
And there's actually quite a bit to this next step
and that's why I'm gonna recommend
you watch this video right here,
because you can see how the pros did this to great success.