Any of you guys who are YouTube creators probably know just how important a really solid, good YouTube title is for your video. It can make or break, the difference between a millions of views and a flop dud. Well today, let’s talk about what elements you need to think about in order to create and write really good enticing titles for your videos.
Gary Potter wrote and asked this.
Can you do a video explaining how to make gripping YouTube titles?
Yes I can, and actually, I haven’t done one of these before, already. If you check out my video. It’s linked up in the description below this video, or an interactive card around here. It’s called “You Won’t Believe This Trick for Getting More YouTube Views”, and you really won’t believe the trick. It’s a really good video. I love it. One of my favorites here at the channel, so go check that out.
Pitch Value or Benefit
So number one is that if you are making informational, instructional, DIY type of content, then the titles of your video must pitch the value or the benefit that the user is going to get as a result of watching your video. So there’s two ways to do this. One, you can just flat out just state what your video is about. You know? “Write Better Titles for Your YouTube Videos”, that’s it. Right? That could be a title that’ll be really not enticing. Or you could use a title like the one I use in the video I just talked about. It’s “You Won’t Believe This Trick for Getting More Views”, and the trick is writing really good titles, and I talk more about how to do in a way that’s really enticing, but I use an enticing title because it’s pitching the whys.
The benefit of it is getting more views, which is what actually people care about. So usually, if you talk more about that end result that people will get, your videos will be more enticing, you’ll get more views. But that doesn’t mean they’ll always be searchable because sometimes, people are just searching for not how do I get more views on YouTube, but they’re actually searching for how do I write good YouTube titles, so it might be appropriate to do both videos as I’m doing this case.
Tease Part of The Story
The other way to write titles is more for those of you who are storytelling type of channels, so you’re like you’re vlogging, or you’re talking about stories or events, or maybe you are even a gaming channel,– like I consider those storytelling type of channels as well– then you want your title to tease part of this story in a way that would entice people to want to click and find out what happened. Like what is the full story there? And these types of titles work best when they are accompanied with a really good enticing thumbnail that works and in conjunction with that title.
One of my friends that I think does a really good job of this is Bryan Lanning over at Daily Bumps channel. As you can see here, it’s a daily vlogging channel. But they’re just telling stories about their life, but they use really good enticing titles with thumbnails that match. And you see the combination of the two together really works well. They have many videos and millions of views because of that.
Know How to Think About Titles
To write really good titles on YouTube requires that you know how to think about titles, not just like come up with like how to do this, how to do that, but you have to understand the psychology. What people are thinking on the other end as they read your titles and watch your– and see your thumbnail. A book that was really helpful for me, in fact, it’s not really, I can’t really call it a book ’cause basically, like there’s only 20 pages of it that are valuable, and it’s called “Advertising Headlines That Make You Rich”. And I’ll link to it on Amazon. The description below if you want to go check it out and for yourself.
I would definitely only buy the Kindle version because like I said, it’s going to take you maybe 10 minutes to read the whole book. It’s just really lot of fluff. And is definitely one of those books that over promises and under delivers overall, but there were some very valuable things in there. Specifically, 20 titles that he outlines, like you put the blanks, you can just substitute the different words in the title and it helps you learn how different titles make the viewer think about the content that they’re about to consume.
So for example, from the book, one of the examples that he uses is do you make these blank mistakes? You know, you fill in the blank with whatever the topic is of the industry that you’re in or the topic that you’re talking about, whatever. So do you make these YouTube mistakes? And the reason, the psychology behind this title is that people often worry about mistakes that they’re potentially making, that they don’t even know that they’re making. They don’t even know that it’s holding them back so they are always kind of worried about making mistakes.
But when you use a title like “Do You Make These Dating Mistakes”, “Do You Make These YouTube Mistakes”, “Do You Make These Financial Mistakes”, things like that. People are like well, I don’t know, and it’s intriguing, it’s enticing and they want to watch because you’re tapping into that psychological need that they have to know, like am I making mistakes and I’m not even aware of it.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments below as always. What advice would you have for Gary Potter, and what have you learned that works really well for writing enticing titles? What methods you have for different titles that work for different types of content, different genres of content, anything that you guys have to share with the rest of us and myself included.
Like this is something I always struggling with, just to be honest for you guys. I’m going to be completely honest. Half the time when I make these videos, you know, on Video Creators, I just put them up and I’m like Arrgh, this is the best title I could think of when I posted it, ’cause I’m on to the next day’s video already usually by that time. So the titles are super important. We know that. Please help me out. Hopefully this has helped you out a little bit. So we can all work together. And the rest of you guys, read the comments down there because I know you’ll learn a lot from them as well.