Every time we go through Video Labs with one of our groups, I get SO excited to do this interview with them.
It’s the time where I get to see everything they’ve learned in the class stick and watch them become mini-strategists who are able to answer questions that come in as if my team and I personally trained them to work on our team.
I love watching the “lightbulb” come on for so many of these creators and watch them start to apply what they learn to their own channel.
In our most recent round of Video Labs courses, I asked 4 of our creators to share what they learned from the class. Here are some of the bigger things that stood out to our Video Lab’s students during this last session.
- Utilize playlists. We want viewers to come to our channel and have a fantastic experience while they’re there. We want our content to be BINGEABLE, like our favorite shows! But we can’t just randomly throw videos in a playlist. In your playlists, add your best 5-8 videos to create a clear viewing journey for your viewer to follow. This isn’t a tool to organize your content. When you create bingeable content, that sends great viewing signals to YouTube, which causes them to organically push out your content to more people like your viewers currently watching!
- Understand your analytics. Data doesn’t lie. We like to say here at Video Creators that we make videos for people, not for robots. What our analytics tells us is how our viewers (our people) are responding to our content. We have a playlist here on how to start to begin to understand analytics and how to draw deductions from them to improve your content.
- Spend more time creating great titles and thumbnails. You could have created the greatest video in the world, but if you don’t have a good title/thumbnail, no one will click on it. Your title and thumbnail HAVE to entice your viewer enough to click on it. It needs to be clear what your video is about without giving everything away. Evoke a question in your viewer’s mind so that they physically can’t not click on it. Working on this before you ever pick up the camera is VITAL and can be a game changer for your channel. We can’t tell you how many consults we do with creators where this is the issue. Be open to experimenting with these and see what’s working and what’s not.
- Don’t underestimate storytelling. One of our creators shared that Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks completely changed his view on storytelling. It teaches you what makes a story a story vs. just an anecdote or a sequence of events. This is the difference between a vlog no one watches and those videos you find yourself watching going “why am I so invested in this random person’s life?”
Which one of these resonates with you most or do you feel like you keep hearing and you’re not quite sure if you are doing this well?
Let us know!
Interested in going through Video Labs with us? View our upcoming session dates here.
Thanks for reading!
Keep changing lives,
Tim