If you do these eight things daily, you’ll improve at making videos. You’re going to understand your competition better so you can compete better. You’re going to understand your audience in a whole other way. And you’ll become a content-making machine even if you only have a little time to make content.
And it’s going to take a little while to start seeing improvements. So, let’s get into it. Starting right now.
The first thing you should do is study the homepage of YouTube and suggest videos for 15 minutes per day. When doing this, you can write down any titles that stand out to you or that you think are good. You want to ensure that you are looking at the structure of the titles that stand out to you and the structure of the titles on high-performing videos. You can tell what those are because they have a lot of views on them. But as part of this title research, you want to look at character length; you want to look at the specific words being used, and you want to look at the placement of the words being used so you can get to understand how people write compelling titles.
You also want to make sure that you’re looking out for any thumbnails that grab your attention, any thumbnails that you can use for inspiration, and any that have good designs or that pop out to you or grab your attention in some way. When you’re doing this for the thumbnails and the titles, you want to make sure that you’re screenshotting anything that stands out and that you are filing that away somewhere.
You can use Notion for this because you can create a page there and drop all the thumbnails you like. You can make a title area and drop in all the titles that you like, and so on. It makes it easy to keep everything organized. Plus, if you use Notion, you can add notes if you want to. Doing this every day is going to help you write better titles, it’s going to help you make better thumbnails, and it’s going to help you better understand what people are responding to right now on YouTube.
It can also help you develop some unique video ideas that you see people doing in other niches that you can apply to the niche you’re operating in.
The second thing to do is go to the YouTube search bar, type in the content you make, and click on one of the videos that show up in the top five spots. Or, of course, if one gets recommended to you on your homepage, you can also click on that one. But the idea is to make sure that you are clicking on something related to the type of content you make. Once you click into the video, click on the channel name, and then look at all the videos that have been the most popular recently.
You can also use vidIQs or TubeSpanner’s view-per-hour tool to see which consistently gets traffic. Then, you want to watch those videos and note how they start the video, how they move through each part of the video, and how they end it.
Next, while you’re in one of those popular videos, or you can do this across multiple videos, look at what they’re linking to or doing in their descriptions, read some of the comments, and note anything that stands out to you.
For example, if you see somebody say something in the comments, they’re like, Hey, I really liked that part that you showed that was a little behind the scenes about that tool you were using. Write that down so you can consider adding something similar if you make a similar video.
When looking in the descriptions, make sure that you are looking at the things they’re promoting as an affiliate. Look at any sponsors they’re linking to or any links they have of products they promote. Doing this will help you learn how the other people in your space are making money.
You also want to look for community links. Community links are where they’re linking to a Discord, Facebook group, or some community they have. And when you see that type of thing, you have the option to join, of course, but you can also use that as kind of proof of sorts that people are joining those types of communities and that those types of communities can be built around your type of content.
And as a quick side note, if you are going to be taking notes on a bunch of videos, there is a tool that can help you with that called TubeSpanner. They have a notepad as part of their browser extension.
Next, go to their channel page and click on the content tabs at the top to see what else they’re doing. Are they streaming? Are they using shorts? Are they posting in the community tab? If they are posting many different types of content, you want to ensure that you note how they use that content and what type of content gets the best response. You also want to note how often they’re publishing each content type.
Doing this will help you better understand the people you’re competing against with your content. Reading the comments will help you get more in tune with the audience you’re trying to reach. And it will give you some insight into precisely what is working well in your space when you start matching this across various channels in your space.
Next, at the beginning of every week, you want to write down one skill you’re trying to improve over the week. Every day, as long as you have time, you want to ensure you watch at least one video or read something about the skill you’re trying to develop. For example, if you know that you need to get better at making thumbnails, then in that case, you need to watch seven videos over the next week at least to understand how to make a better thumbnail.
These could be tutorials that take you step by step on how to make a thumbnail, or these could be concept videos. So, for example, it doesn’t have to be a video specifically on how to make a YouTube thumbnail. It could be a design tutorial or a color theory tutorial. Doing this every week will ensure that you’re continually working on improving your skill sets as they relate to YouTube.
And keep in mind you can keep that skill set the same every week. You can work on the same thing for a month if you want to, but the idea is to watch something every day that will help you level up. And, of course, as part of that time you spend doing this, you also want to ensure that you are practicing that skill.
Next, watch a YouTube help video. Listen to a YouTube podcast or read something from youtube.com/creators or the YouTube help pages on Google. In addition to all the YouTube help content, YouTube also has free resources to help you. They have the Creators section of YouTube, an educational resource that’s free for you, and you should be learning from it.
There’s also the Google help pages where you can get more granular information about things happening on YouTube and things you will be dealing with as a creator. This will take you anywhere from five minutes to one hour because of the podcast option. But the idea here is to ensure you are educating yourself because YouTube is constantly changing.
And as a content creator, if you want to do this for a while, you need to ensure that you’re staying up to date with what’s happening now, the things that are working now, the things that are not working now, and all of that. And the best way to do that is by watching this type of content. Just anything related to how to get better at YouTube.
Next, you want to look around your YouTube analytics, even if you need to know what you’re looking at. YouTube gives us stats on every video we publish. It’s beneficial information, but it cannot be obvious. However, if you’re looking at them every day and trying to make sense of them, you will understand better how people engage with your content.
So, you can modify things if you need to. Focus the most on your audience retention reports, click-through rate, how it relates to watch time, and comparing videos against each other. When you’re in your analytics, if you hover over some of the information you’re seeing in your quick view dashboard, YouTube shares some additional information to help you better understand what it is that you’re looking at, just in case you’re brand new.
But doing this will help you better understand a part of YouTube that most content creators are intimidated by. But once you learn how to interpret what you’re reading, it can be a game changer for you and your YouTube channel. As a side task on this one, if you’re not digging around in your YouTube analytics, you want to dig around in your Creator Studio just for a little bit so you can make sure that you know all of the available options.
And when you see something that you don’t know what it’s actually used for or the purpose of it, then hop on Google and try to figure it out with that time.
Next, you want to make something every day. What you’re making can be short. It doesn’t even have to be published on the Internet.
The goal here is to get more comfortable creating and also to train your brain to move quickly when it’s time to make content. You can also spend a little bit of time on this. The whole goal here is muscle memory, right? So, all you need to do here is get your phone, go into selfie mode, and sit there and talk to the camera if you’re somebody on camera.
And look, this is something you can spend a little time on. If you’re somebody who’s on camera, then in that case, do selfie videos on your phone and practice talking to the camera in the way you talk to the camera when making videos. If you have a faceless channel where most of what it is that you do is voiceover work, then in that case, you don’t need to show yourself on camera, just practice recording your voice and speaking the way that you do on video.
Then, view or listen to some of what you’ve recorded. And when you do this, what’s going to happen is you’re going to start noticing things like, Wow, I’m using a lot of filler words, or, I repeat that particular word a lot.
But when you do this, this will help you create momentum by taking action every day to make something and just getting used to hitting the button and going for it. This will also make communicating on camera or through your voice second nature because you will be doing it so much.
And it’s going to make you a lot more efficient when you’re making your accurate content because you’re going to have your brain trained on going a lot faster and a lot smoother without making tons and tons of mistakes. Now, when you do all this and study other channels, you will eventually run out of channels. Eventually, you’re going to get an understanding of your YouTube analytics. Eventually, you’ll know all of the features inside of YouTube that you can use as a creator. When it comes to this point, you also start studying other niches so you can see how people edit their videos and other niches. You can start to see how they optimize their videos in other niches. And you can use that for inspiration for what it is that you’re doing.
And look, as you’re doing these things, it’s going to help you better understand YouTube overall, and you’re going to start doing better. And you want to ensure you are prepared for what happens when you start doing better on YouTube.
It will show you how to set up your channel correctly so that when you start having videos taken off if you don’t already, you can ensure that your channel’s adequately set up to absorb that traffic.
