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enough. I'll be blue in the face saying this until

0:49

I think the day I die is like the idea

0:51

is more important than everything. That's Patty

0:54

Galloway. The most sought after YouTube

0:56

strategist in the world. He's worked

0:58

with clients like MrBeast, Jesser, Ryan

1:00

Trahan, Noah Kagan. All in all,

1:02

his clients do 750 million views

1:04

per month. And

1:08

that's because Patty puts most of his focus

1:10

where other creators don't. How much time

1:13

is spent on ideas? They're like, oh yeah, I think about it when

1:15

I walk around. I have like

1:17

a brainstorm session once a week. Let's just say you

1:19

got 40 hours in typical work week. You're

1:21

spending one hour of that time on

1:24

the actual most important thing. So in

1:26

this episode, we're talking about what makes

1:28

a great video idea, how to develop

1:30

great titles and thumbnails, why it's better

1:32

to take a few big swings rather

1:34

than a lot of small swings and

1:36

why you should be spending more time

1:39

in pre-production. What

1:42

is step one of like how the

1:45

best of the best are planning

1:47

videos and going all the way through to publish?

1:50

Time allocation. I think a huge

1:52

amount of it comes down to where they're actually

1:54

allocating their time in the video

1:56

making process. The biggest sort of paradigm shifts when I

1:58

go into a channel is... is reallocating

2:01

time towards ideas and

2:04

towards thumbnails and towards packaging that idea to

2:06

begin with. I just can't say it enough,

2:08

I'll be doing the face saying this until

2:10

I think the day I die is like,

2:12

you know, the idea is more important than everything.

2:14

Of course you can have a great

2:16

idea if you don't execute it, it's no longer a great idea.

2:19

But the idea itself is almost like sets the

2:21

standard of what this video could become. Is this

2:23

going to be a 50k video? Is this going

2:25

to be a 5 minute video? That idea to

2:28

begin with is so important. And yet

2:30

when I do a sort of analysis on a

2:32

channel, let's say at 100k subscribers, I say, how

2:34

much time is spent on ideas? They're like, Oh, yeah, I think about

2:37

it when I walk around. I have

2:39

like a brainstorm session once a week. And

2:41

I'm like, Okay, so you spend an hour

2:43

of actually intentional time coming up

2:45

with ideas per week. Let's say you've got conservatively conservatively

2:47

40 hours in a week. Of course, we both know

2:49

a lot of YouTubers work a lot more than that.

2:52

But let's just say you got 40 hours in typical

2:54

work week, you're spending one hour of

2:56

that time on the actual

2:58

most important thing. The first step is usually

3:00

trying to instill this new sort of philosophy

3:03

and culture towards making content, where

3:05

I like to really analyze what

3:07

we make, how we make it,

3:09

what's the rationale behind making a specific idea in

3:12

the first place. Some people don't like that. And

3:14

I completely understand that because I always

3:16

think there should be some level of like, Oh, this is

3:18

just fun. Let's just do it. You know, there should still

3:20

be like room there should like be a quota for experiments

3:23

and innovation and just like doing something for the

3:25

hell of it because we feel like it like

3:27

that's completely fine with me. But for

3:29

the majority of the content if the goal is

3:31

purely to grow on YouTube, and this is like

3:34

another another conversation we get into, like what the

3:36

goal is because I find a lot of people

3:38

are like, my goal is growth at all

3:40

costs. And then you say, well, you

3:42

need to think a lot more about your ideas and like, no, that's

3:44

silly. I just want to do whatever I want to make, you know,

3:46

so there's like a lot of different forces at play. But realistic, I

3:48

would go into a channel, I would just say, Okay, we

3:50

need a better system for coming up with ideas. Once

3:52

we come up with ideas, we need a better system

3:55

in how we're actually packaging those ideas. And if

3:57

we can package ideas, what I mean by packages.

4:00

If we can't silence on an idea

4:02

that can be clickable for our

4:04

audience, it's not an idea anymore. We

4:07

just scrap it. And I get this all the time. You know,

4:09

I've got this amazing idea. It's going to be so

4:11

funny. I just can't take away the thumbnail there. And

4:13

I'm like, well, then it's not a good, it's not

4:15

a good YouTube idea. Unfortunately, it seems to take that box.

4:17

It needs to be a great idea. It needs to

4:19

be very flickable. We need to be able to make

4:21

a clear thumbnail around this. Then after that,

4:24

like the actual planning of the video as well, before

4:26

we sit down and shoot it, like

4:28

what is the intro going to be? It could be right

4:30

out three or four different introversions, record them, listen to them

4:33

back, decide which is the best one to shoot on today,

4:35

etc, etc. So I

4:37

think a lot of the first thing

4:39

I do with the channel is just look at the pre-production

4:42

side of things before the actual production. And

4:45

then obviously I'll go in and I'll see what is their actual

4:47

content like. You know, what are they like on camera? How

4:50

is their pacing in

4:52

the video? Even just looking through the retention

4:54

curves on their channel? Like, is there

4:56

any obvious retention danger zones that

4:58

they just consistently lose viewers? The sort of typical

5:00

stuff that a lot of people hear with YouTube

5:02

analysis. I think the thing that

5:04

definitely sets me apart is that extreme focus on

5:06

the idea file and thumbnail to begin with.

5:09

What makes an idea a great idea or something

5:12

that makes you think, okay, that goes on the maybe pile

5:14

at least. The

5:16

biggest thing for me is establishing

5:18

the criteria of what that idea is. So

5:20

to kind of expand on that, like, let's

5:23

just say your criteria is this video has

5:25

to excite us because

5:27

I don't think we should make videos that we don't, are not

5:29

excited about just because it could get viewed in the reason to

5:31

do it. Is this video feasible? That could be another thing, part

5:33

of the criteria. So you need to pick some of those boxes.

5:36

So yes, we can pull this off and yes, we're

5:38

excited to do it. Do we have evidence that this

5:40

video could guess X amount of views? So let's just

5:42

say your goal is to get 100,000 views. Do

5:45

we have evidence that this video could get 100,000 views? Now,

5:48

that's the first box in the criteria that doesn't

5:50

have to be ticked. But ideally, we should be able to

5:52

look around and say, well, we've done something like this in the past and

5:54

it's worked well, so yes. Or we've

5:56

seen other channels experiment with similar ideas that

5:58

have done well, so yes. The reason

6:00

it doesn't always have to be ticked is because sometimes you

6:02

can predict and you start to just go with an idea

6:04

because There's not much evidence on it, but you still want

6:07

to give yourself back for to like I talked about for

6:09

Experimenting and trying new things which is important

6:12

because you know with some of the ideas mr. Beast has

6:14

posted over the last year You know, he can't

6:16

really go around and look at a huge amount

6:18

of other people who've done similar who else gave

6:20

away an island Yeah, what else given away island?

6:22

Yeah, and we even did on this. Yeah, it's

6:24

kind of hard to find that data So, uh,

6:27

yes, it's a important to have like a criteria

6:29

like that There could be other things like can

6:31

we think of the clickable thumbnail being part of

6:33

the criteria? We got to use the size of

6:35

the issue proceed, of course But I think the biggest

6:37

one the thing I've been leading up to is

6:39

just looking at the idea and saying

6:42

Does this have appeal in a wide

6:44

percentage of my audience? So

6:46

if you think about your channel is this big potential pool

6:48

of viewers and you can break them up into like, you

6:50

know You got your core viewers. You've got the casuals who

6:52

kind of dip in dip out You've got

6:55

the new viewers that haven't seen your content

6:57

before but our potential good target viewers

6:59

for your channel I like to look at an

7:01

idea and just put it through this sort of

7:04

like lens of saying does my core like this?

7:06

Does it also appeal to a new audience and

7:08

a casual audience? Because also often I see people

7:10

that just pandered to the core and what happens

7:12

then is you just end up making videos that

7:14

just Get as many views as your core and

7:16

you're not really in a good growth stage And

7:18

then at the other people that just make videos

7:21

for new viewers So they're constantly trying to attract

7:23

that new audience and they have no longevity. They

7:25

have no prudine on their channel They're just jumping

7:27

around on trends without building any actual clear

7:29

strategy or belong term So the core viewers

7:31

feel neglected and when I think about the

7:34

channels that I've gone into and had the most impact

7:36

It's always been that case to say well, what do our

7:39

core like what about what our core

7:41

like can we make into a bigger ideas? Let's

7:43

take an example like Jesser who's the basketball channel

7:45

I've worked with I go in and I look

7:47

at his channel He was doing sort of four

7:50

three hundred four hundred thousand views a video He'd been a

7:52

bit bigger in the past, but he was down

7:54

a bit of a downward trend I look at those

7:56

videos. I'm like, okay, these are okay, but what does

7:58

the right is like? basketball. So we can

8:00

make basketball team videos, but how do we go

8:02

bigger? How do we make an idea that's not

8:04

just interesting to people that love Jess or love

8:07

his whole world and community builds up. So that's

8:09

when we came up with some different ideas, which

8:11

went on to perform 510 view plus, because

8:14

those ideas just penetrated beyond just the core,

8:16

they had this sort of casual white appeal.

8:18

I always say with my content on my

8:20

personal channel, I always say, I want

8:23

to make a video that a YouTuber with 500 subscribers

8:26

will find really useful. A YouTuber with

8:28

no subscribers who has no idea what

8:30

the platform is even about will find useful. A

8:33

video that Mr. Watch

8:35

and say, that's pretty interesting. I knew this, but it's

8:37

kind of interesting. And also a video that my mother

8:39

could watch and say, Oh, that was pretty interesting. So

8:41

that can sometimes put you in a weird position because

8:43

you're trying to patter to everyone. So I think there

8:45

is like a counterpoint to that. But at least for

8:47

the content that I make on Watch and other really

8:50

helps because I just look at it and say, I'm

8:52

going to make something that's just really interesting to as

8:54

many viewers as possible. And it really

8:56

helps. After a quick break,

8:59

Patty and I talk about packaging videos with great

9:01

titles and thumbnails. So stick around, and we'll be

9:03

right back. Inclusion

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now back to my conversation with Patti

10:46

Galloway. I want to talk about

10:48

the concept of packaging because this is something that

10:50

until I went through your fantastic accelerator, I hadn't

10:52

thought about the concept of packaging, which I want

10:54

to talk about how that applies to YouTube specifically.

10:56

But as you're listening to this, I want you

10:59

guys to think about packaging, even

11:01

outside of YouTube. I think packaging

11:03

is such

11:05

a useful concept that I want to spend some

11:07

time here. Can you explain what packaging is for

11:09

a video on YouTube? I like

11:12

to think of YouTube as

11:14

a game of clicks and watches. So

11:16

a lot of people, again, in terms

11:18

of their time allocation, but also in terms of what they

11:20

waste as important in their mind, they

11:22

will put all the emphasis on the

11:25

actual content. Now that's important. And I

11:27

would still say that is the most important thing.

11:29

Like good content is obviously the most important thing

11:31

you can succeed on YouTube with like

11:33

kind of mediocre thumbnails. Sometimes if your content

11:35

is just exceptional, but it just penetrates through

11:37

and people just share it. We've seen so

11:39

many examples that are kind of channels that

11:41

don't have the best thumbnails because their content

11:44

is just phenomenal. They still perform. Whereas it's

11:46

kind of rare to see someone who makes

11:48

terrible content do well, just because they've

11:50

got good thumbnails. I'm sure people in the comments will

11:52

call me out on that and say countless examples. But

11:54

I think in general, let's find it. Let's find those

11:57

examples. Yeah, that's how I do it. But

12:00

with that said, though, the

12:02

thumbnail itself, like even if we were to just

12:05

conservatively say, like, okay, the click part of that

12:07

equation, so if YouTube is clicking and watching, let's

12:09

just say the click part of that equation is

12:11

basically 40% of it, 40% of what's important for

12:13

YouTube. Again,

12:15

just like with time allocation, even with how

12:17

people deem as how important this is, it's

12:19

still something that is given like, 3%, 5%,

12:22

6% weighting instead of maybe 30 or 40% like it should

12:27

deserve. So again, I talk to

12:29

people and they don't go shoot an incredible

12:31

piece of content they'll spend days,

12:34

maybe even weeks making this piece of content and

12:36

they're making the thumbnail an hour before the video

12:38

goes live. So packaging for me is just that

12:40

whole psychology around thinking of what we can put

12:42

in front of the viewer, that's going to make

12:44

them click on this video. In terms of coming

12:47

up with a good title and thumbnail, like for

12:49

title does a few best practices for me, it's

12:51

always keeping it really simple, people sometimes

12:53

confuse simple and short, I do have a preference

12:55

for short titles, but sometimes you can have a

12:57

title a little bit longer, but it's still really

12:59

simple and easy to read, that's important and that

13:02

can still work. So I like to look

13:04

at titles that are really simple, really readable, think

13:06

about people at all different sort of reading

13:09

levels, but also all different languages because realistically,

13:11

you're going to get viewers from other

13:13

countries, other places that

13:16

English might not be their first language. If you

13:18

go into any big American channel that has a

13:20

primarily US based audience, let's just say they have

13:22

60% of their audience in America. Now, of course,

13:24

you might add on a bit of Canada, a bit of like UK,

13:26

a bit of Australia, they could have 20% or 30% or more viewers

13:29

that are essentially

13:31

watching from India, from other countries, from

13:33

Africa, from obviously South America, as a

13:35

big audience as well. So like there's

13:37

all these different viewers potentially out there.

13:39

So I always kind of, when

13:42

I see a title that's like using

13:44

complicated words, or it's just deliberately like

13:46

difficult to read or too vague, I

13:48

always like get red flags. I want to see

13:50

something that's really simple, easy, straight to the point.

13:53

I like to use really punchy language and titles,

13:55

generally speaking, like that's just take my channel as

13:57

an example of it. I'm not sort of going.

14:00

Hey, here's why MrBeast is really

14:02

cool. You should watch this video.

14:04

It's very much like how MrBeast

14:06

broke YouTube. And it always kind

14:08

of stood to me because I had a friend that was

14:11

really into journalism. And he just

14:13

looked at my channel from completely on the outside.

14:15

I was like a complete non-YouTube viewer. I

14:18

don't think he even watched YouTube very much. And he just goes, you

14:21

know what, I like your titles are just great

14:23

because they're just punchy. They're straight to

14:25

the point. There's no vagueness. You're not trying to

14:27

be clever with a pun. You're just saying how

14:30

Mark Rober beat the algorithm, how MrBeast blew up

14:32

his channel or whatever it might be. The Jesser

14:34

example of the channel I work with, one of

14:36

our videos from last year that

14:38

did really well was going to five NBA

14:40

games in 50 hours. We didn't overcomplicate it.

14:43

We didn't say, I went

14:45

to five NBA games in 50 hours. And

14:47

it was really difficult, exclamation mark, exclamation mark.

14:49

It's just straight to the point, very matter

14:51

of fact, pragmatic language. And

14:53

that's generally my preference for titles. I will say

14:55

it does change a little bit based on audience

14:57

and based on gender. Even I

15:00

actually see that female viewers, sometimes do prefer a

15:02

slightly different playing style towards male viewers, sometimes

15:04

a bit longer. Sometimes it's on the lower

15:06

case, where it's cut off in the male viewers, like

15:08

a very like pointy in your face thing. That's a

15:10

bit of a generalization, but generally I do see that

15:12

as a trend. But yeah, trying to keep it relatively

15:14

short. Most of the best titles I've put

15:16

together in my life with clients are usually 50 characters

15:20

or under. And sometimes 60 characters or

15:22

under, but generally 50 characters or under.

15:24

And really think about universal, easy to understand

15:27

words. Then in terms of thumbnails, for

15:30

me like the thumbnail is very kind of

15:32

open. The whole world of

15:34

best practices around thumbnails is very open to

15:36

interpretation. I don't think there's a general like,

15:38

this is the only way to make a thumbnail. Cause it

15:40

does definitely depend on the audience. The first thing I would

15:43

say is, a thumbnail to

15:45

me is at least 80, maybe 90%, the

15:48

psychology of the click. And then maybe

15:50

10, 20% the actual design

15:52

of the thumbnail. What does that mean? I'll

15:54

explain. Let's just take the Mark Rober example.

15:57

So Mark Rober has this

15:59

thumbnail where. He's testing if sharks

16:01

can smell blood in water. It's something

16:03

like that. It doesn't take very long

16:05

to design. It's pretty easy to actually

16:07

put that together. It's very natural. It's

16:09

using natural colors and lighting. But

16:12

it has a really interesting

16:14

scenario. You see the shark behind this person

16:16

with his hands out in front of the

16:18

camera. And that creates this really interesting psychological

16:21

reason to click. You're not picking because the corners

16:23

are gray. You're picking because there's a really interesting

16:26

psychological angle of someone about to get attacked potentially

16:28

by a shark. So if you

16:30

look at the best performing film on YouTube, sure

16:32

they're well designed, but it's usually because they're showing

16:34

something really interesting and really

16:36

like a situation about to unfold, a

16:38

dangerous thing about to happen, a

16:41

really unbelievable object or item that no one's

16:43

ever seen before, a tiny cell phone, a

16:46

massive cell phone, these different things. What is

16:48

actually being shown in the film that is

16:50

so much more important than design? Not saying

16:52

design is important, color theory, making sure things

16:55

are clean, obvious, easy to see, just

16:57

like a title like your thumbnail should be easy to

16:59

actually process. I should be able to see it in

17:01

just a glance. Like on the Glandfest, I'll often just

17:03

like put a thumbnail in front of me and then

17:05

I'll scroll by really quickly and just make sure that

17:07

while it's in front of me, I can

17:10

see everything that's happening. I can read the text. I can understand

17:12

the image in just a glance of a second or two. As

17:14

a point of time, I can look at it and take

17:17

too long to watch it or to

17:19

understand it. We all edit thumbnails on,

17:22

you know, I've got a 4K monitor in front

17:24

of me, big widescreen. When I'm making a thumbnail

17:27

on this computer, I have all this read estate.

17:29

I'm looking at it for hours. I'm tweaking things

17:31

and doing things. This is the same for anyone

17:33

that makes thumbnails or designers that make thumbnails for

17:35

clients as well. We're looking at it on this

17:38

massive screen, whereas a YouTuber sees it just for

17:40

a second. So being able to

17:42

like glance at it and understand it immediately

17:44

is really important. So for me, it's really

17:46

about the thing we're showing

17:48

more than how we're showing us, if that

17:50

makes sense. That thumbnail example you just gave

17:52

has no text on it. Your

17:55

channel, all the thumbnails almost have

17:57

text on it. What's the role

17:59

of text in a... thumbnail? What are the rules you

18:01

have around that? I don't think there's necessarily the

18:04

only hard rules I would say is in general, I

18:06

would stay away from having over five

18:08

or six words. So if you look at the

18:10

thumbnail of my channel, generally, it's like two or

18:12

three words, maybe four, it's like, how

18:14

he beat YouTube or the kid

18:16

who broke YouTube algorithm, whatever. So

18:18

it's generally quite short. In terms

18:21

of text versus no text, I

18:23

have a bit of a pet peeve when I see

18:25

people say never use text, if you use text, sometimes

18:27

it's failure because I think for certain channels, text does

18:29

add a lot. If you remove the text

18:31

from my thumbnails, for example, they just

18:33

end up feeling quite empty because there's

18:35

no action because my thumbnails are all

18:38

commentary videos, video ethics on YouTube. You

18:40

take that Mark Rober example with the

18:42

shark, if he adds text in there, it

18:45

just makes it busier. Like it doesn't need

18:47

to be busier. It's the actual action of

18:49

the concept that is everything is super easy

18:51

to understand. Like imagine you just pointed out

18:54

with an arrow shark, you know,

18:56

it would just like create this like city

18:58

business to the image and it wouldn't feel

19:00

as natural and like raw as it's supposed

19:02

to come across. Think about how we show

19:04

if we could ideally show the

19:06

action of the video without text, I would usually

19:09

have a preference to it. And before

19:11

a lot of channels that operate more in let's

19:13

say, commentary, education, tech reviews,

19:15

stuff like that. I think the

19:17

text does add quite a lot. So it does depend on

19:19

the channel. I'm hearing you say action.

19:21

And I'm thinking about tension

19:24

and open loops. Are these the same thing

19:26

in your mind? Are you intentionally saying action

19:28

versus like, oh, there's clearly tension in a

19:30

thumbnail, or there's an open loop here that

19:32

you want to close? For me, the action

19:34

example is more pertinent to entertainment

19:36

channels. So the channels that

19:38

are focusing on like showing you something really

19:41

cool. And it's

19:43

inaction and like things are happening like there's a

19:45

shark creeping up on Mark Rober. And Mr. Beast

19:47

is like hanging out the side of a helicopter

19:49

with a massive islands beside him. So

19:51

the sort of natural sort of focus

19:54

of the the film is of action, it is

19:56

of a thing appearing and happening. But

19:59

a lot of you should concentrate talking head. A

20:01

lot of YouTube content is commentary. So for videos

20:03

that are like that, it's much harder to sort

20:05

of promote action in the thumbnail. So for

20:07

ones like that, I think more about yeah, like, how

20:10

could we open a curiosity loop? How could

20:12

we like, you know, create

20:14

a thumbnail, maybe you're just holding up a laptop,

20:17

and you just got texted beside the laptop that

20:19

says waste of money. So then immediately you're like,

20:21

why was it a waste of money? That's like

20:23

a very dramatic statement that's immediately going to grab

20:25

your attention. So I do think yeah, action is

20:27

more focused for me when I think about entertainment

20:29

channels. So like if you're an entertainment channel, like

20:31

you're supposed to be entertaining people, you're supposed to

20:34

be showing things that are interesting and cool and

20:36

happening and real and alive and IRL

20:38

in real life, versus maybe a

20:40

commentary channel, a review channel, a talking head channel

20:42

and education channel, your life you're going to be

20:45

making your videos in your bedroom. So the action

20:47

is sometimes harder to get across the

20:49

viewer. With that said, though, I saw this

20:51

still now recently from someone who is going

20:53

through these different AI tools that he thinks are

20:56

really effective. He could have quite easily made that somehow

20:58

like a picture of his face pointing out like a

21:00

logo of one of the tools and it wouldn't have

21:02

been that in action. But instead, he went for a

21:04

version where he was on a keyboard, he created this

21:06

like motion blur effect around him as if he was

21:09

like in the movie limited or limitless. So like he's

21:11

like, whoa, things are happening. Like

21:13

it's going, the little logos from the software like

21:15

twirling around as well. And it just looks like

21:17

an action packed video, even though it

21:19

was still like a list to go talking head type

21:21

content. So maybe there are ways

21:23

you can create action in some emails, even

21:26

if there isn't much happening in the video. So like to

21:29

me, it's about portraying the feeling that you're

21:31

trying to get the viewer and it's portraying

21:33

what the video is supposed to be delivering.

21:35

So you know, if you're giving

21:37

if you're saying five habits could become

21:39

more healthy in your title, which

21:42

no one did that video very generic, probably terrible

21:44

title. But let's just say you're doing that

21:46

video, I would still look and say, well, you

21:48

know, we could just have our face with five

21:50

habits beside it, or we could actually be doing

21:52

one of the habits because even though that's a

21:54

maybe more relaxed video, it's not really an entertainment

21:56

video. I'm assuming if you're talking about habits, you're

21:58

probably going to be showing yourself with some

22:01

B-roll of doing those habits. So maybe it's you in

22:03

the cold shower, maybe it's you at the table eating

22:05

an apple or whatever it might be. So

22:07

there are ways to promote action in thumbnails even when

22:09

there's not that much stuff happening in the video. When

22:12

we come back, Patty and I dive really

22:14

deep into how he creates variance of different

22:17

titles and thumbnails. So don't go anywhere, we'll

22:19

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25:06

let's get back to my conversation with Patti

25:08

Galloway. If I have an idea that

25:11

I think has precedent for having a lot of views,

25:13

it's a good idea. I'm excited about it. Before

25:16

I actually go to publish this thing, how

25:18

many title variants do you think I

25:20

should have? How many thumbnail variants

25:22

do you think I should have? Or should I pick

25:24

the best one of each and go

25:26

out with that? In terms of title

25:28

variations, because titles are just so easy to

25:30

write, at least I find and then now

25:33

with chat GPT, it's even easier

25:35

to come with variations. If anyone doesn't

25:37

know, just give it a title and say,

25:39

give me variations of this you should title and then

25:41

say, make it shorter or add more emotion or add

25:43

a word like this in the title and you would

25:46

just get an infinite amount of variations. For

25:48

title variations, I do quite often find

25:50

that myself and clients go through a

25:52

lot for a single video. Like there

25:54

is one specific client where a recent video

25:56

we have 45 or 46 different type of

25:59

variations. for one 10-minute video.

26:02

And that just came down to like, what's the best tile? Okay,

26:04

let's look at that tile. That's pretty

26:06

good. How about this? How about we shorten it? How

26:08

about we add this word? Is this a better adjective

26:10

than this objective? If we put it in chat GPT,

26:12

what words does chat GPT think we should be using

26:15

for this tile? And we just went down this rabbit

26:17

hole of continually going through it. And then what you

26:19

do is you just zoom out. You look at the

26:21

craziness that you've put together where there's probably titles on

26:24

that page that make no sense and aren't even proper

26:26

English. You eliminate all the ones that don't work. And

26:28

then you just look and you're probably left with four

26:30

or five really good variations. And

26:32

then you go from there and just pick the one that

26:34

you feel has the best potential for your channel. If I'm

26:36

doing this title game and I come up with 30 and

26:39

it's me and maybe a team member, but we don't have

26:41

Patti Galloway in our corner, how do

26:43

we narrow that down? Like what should we be

26:46

looking for to have the sense of, okay, these

26:48

are the three best or even the

26:50

first best we feel best about? Consensus between

26:52

the team, I think is important. Like just

26:54

asking people like, which do you think is

26:56

most interesting? Some of it is gonna come

26:59

down to subjectivity, but that will

27:01

be the first stage for me because you guys are

27:03

the ones who are creating the content. So you do

27:05

have some information on previous videos. You've roughly seen what

27:07

might've worked in the past and you

27:09

might've roughly seen what worked for other people too. So

27:12

I would first just look and see what is our natural

27:14

sort of opinions on these

27:16

titles ourselves. I then ideally would

27:18

ask someone externally. So like oftentimes people think, well,

27:20

this is already a good Patti, but we can't

27:22

afford to hire you or you're busy or you've

27:25

got a wait list or whatever. But

27:27

you can just find another YouTuber who's at a similar level

27:29

and just get a second pair of eyes. Ask

27:31

Twitter, ask your Instagram followers, ask your community

27:33

tab. All those things are nice ways

27:35

to get a second pair of eyes. And I think it's

27:37

really important just to go through stages of feedback. So maybe

27:40

as a team, you've now got a sense to sort of

27:42

four or five ones that you feel stand

27:45

out the most to you as a viewer, if

27:47

you were in the viewer's shoes, because maybe

27:49

you have like a certain list of non-negotiables,

27:52

like it has to have 160 characters, it

27:54

has to be easy to read, it has

27:56

to have short wording, we don't want to

27:58

have too many adjectives in one file. because that's obviously

28:00

too descriptive and you narrow it down from 30 to

28:02

5 and then on those 5 you have a bit

28:04

of a general chat as the team over which ones

28:07

could be the best to put forward and then you

28:09

have maybe a little bit of a YouTube council you

28:11

have a group chat with other youtubers you find some

28:13

other youtubers you can reach out to on Twitter or

28:15

whatever that kind of stuff I still feel is underutilized

28:17

like I really do it's very easy to connect with

28:19

other youtubers and there's lots of discords

28:21

out there you can find other youtubers at a

28:24

similar size and just say hey that's kind of

28:26

group that like four or five of us and every

28:28

time we have a title we'll just put in there

28:30

and we'll just brainstorm for each other and just help

28:32

people make decisions on files and I also think there

28:34

should be some level of like how

28:36

the similar title style works for us well in the

28:38

past or how does it work for our competitors

28:40

or other people in our niche and using that as a

28:42

bit of extra evidence as well so you have like a

28:44

mixture of personal preference external

28:47

preference and then a little bit of data or a

28:49

little bit of like looking at what's worked in the

28:51

past as a combination of deciding which to go for

28:53

how do you think about thumbnail variations

28:56

so for some variations because January a

28:58

thumbnail will take a bit longer than

29:00

the title I don't like to overwhelm

29:03

people I will just get out there in

29:05

the open I have made videos where there's

29:07

been 30 variations of the thumbnail like that

29:09

has happened and that does happen quite regularly

29:11

usually variations are just like moving the text

29:13

around changing people in the thumbnail different things

29:15

like that but there is that does

29:17

exist at the top level of YouTube I work

29:19

with creators that are doing millions in revenue and

29:21

that is worth it to us to have a

29:23

huge amount of variations but I

29:25

would say for the majority I like to break it

29:27

down to basically three like three concepts you've got your

29:29

first one that you you've got maybe the most obvious

29:31

one you've got another one that you might have a

29:34

bit more of a kind of out there versions a

29:36

little bit less obvious something that's

29:38

a bit more experimental the thing for me

29:40

is each option should be adequately different because

29:43

some people again they might hear me speak or

29:45

other people speak and say make multiple thumbnails and

29:47

they just make three thumbnails where the t-shirt color

29:49

is different but that is not what we mean

29:51

we want very different concepts because if

29:53

the first concept isn't working you're not going to

29:55

save a video by just changing it to a

29:58

video an image where now the t-shirt is blue

30:00

instead of red. Probably not going to

30:02

save the video. So I like

30:05

to think of adequately different options. I like to

30:07

think of three main options usually for most channels.

30:10

And again, a similar sort of process

30:12

of elimination in terms of maybe

30:15

you sketch out and you concept. So

30:17

you come up with 15 concepts or

30:19

10 different concepts that you can either really quickly

30:22

sketch out yourself. I like to really quickly sketch

30:24

them out myself. I'll never show them publicly because

30:26

they are the worst sketches ever known to mankind.

30:28

But it's still like a useful way of being

30:30

able to say like, Oh, like, here's how this

30:32

could look like one of his faces. Oh, I

30:34

can kind of see how that could look. So

30:37

building out maybe 10 sketches and then narrowing it down

30:39

to like the three that you actually go

30:41

forward with. But most people listen to this unless

30:43

you're making like daily content and you don't have

30:45

time, I think you do have time to make

30:47

three stuff like concepts for a video. Even if

30:49

they're rough, I just want to see people

30:52

really putting more effort into that. And I think, again,

30:54

not to like hint too much at the future, but

30:56

I've been playing around with different different AI in

30:58

terms of thumb that generation that I think it's

31:01

getting really helpful. Unfortunately, I can't reveal it because

31:03

I just want to make sure that anything that

31:05

we're doing like this is is

31:08

especially with clients kept quite private, but there

31:10

is clients I've actually built out some of

31:12

that concepts completely with AI. Now,

31:14

the final product is going to be maybe using a

31:16

bit of what AI taught us to make a better

31:18

in real life photo that we took ourselves. So

31:20

like there are times where we're completely using AI

31:23

to thumb that generation. I want to

31:25

talk a little bit about your idea around like

31:27

content buckets or idea of buckets, because

31:29

I think this is a really helpful,

31:32

empowering concept to somebody who now wants to

31:34

spend more time in the idea phase or

31:36

making sure that they're picking good ideas. What

31:39

are these buckets? For sure. One thing I would

31:41

say is like, it's definitely something that I have

31:44

borrowed from other people who also use that

31:46

same terminology and have you

31:49

know, use that when teaching YouTube. So it's definitely

31:51

not something that I came up with originally as

31:53

an idea of buckets. But generally, I think it's

31:55

really helpful for people to look at

31:57

their content and almost use. all

32:00

the through lines. So say let's say let's take the gesture

32:02

job because it's top of mind for me because we talked

32:04

about it a few times. On

32:06

his channel he's got this book

32:08

is so like a category of content

32:11

or like a series of content that

32:13

involves going to NBA games. So we've got

32:15

like going to the getting exclusive access to

32:17

the NBA Finals or going to 3A NBA

32:20

games in 24 hours or going to a

32:22

GLE NBA game all these different things. That

32:24

becomes a book out of content and in

32:26

terms of brainstorming you can then use that

32:29

as a jump off point. So you can

32:31

say when you're brainstorming you could be like

32:33

let's brainstorm more going to games ideas and

32:35

maybe another bucket is trick shots. Let's brainstorm

32:38

more trick shot ideas. Maybe another bucket is

32:40

vlogs or something else. I wouldn't really recommend

32:42

vlogs but something else. You could use

32:44

each of those buckets as jumping off

32:46

points for brainstorming. I do

32:48

find one thing I do want to point out a bucket is sometimes you

32:51

get too caught up with it because you know I suggest an idea and

32:53

they're like that that falls outside of

32:55

my bucket so I'm not going to do it. I

32:57

think youtubers should never be rigid like that. You should

32:59

be flexible to like doing all the different content that

33:01

could appeal to your viewer. Of course you want to

33:03

keep it quite consistent and I like to think of

33:05

a catalog of videos as opposed to like how

33:08

we're going to approach it things all over the place. When

33:10

I think about buckets in general I'm almost

33:12

just thinking about series on a channel without

33:14

making it an episodic one two three four

33:16

five. Generally speaking that doesn't work amazingly well

33:19

on YouTube so just think of buckets as

33:21

a way to break up the content you

33:23

make into maybe three or four main series.

33:25

I would say most channels that work with

33:27

that do have a bucket focused approach to

33:30

content have kind of three or four main

33:32

buckets to use as like groupings

33:34

for the channel and just makes it sometimes easier to brainstorm

33:37

ideas around it and give the audience a bit of consistency

33:39

because if you're going to look at your channel and saying

33:41

hey I've got 15 different styles

33:43

of videos that can't really be put into in

33:45

the same bucket because they all cover completely different

33:47

material you might actually have a problem on your

33:49

channel that's deeper than anything else.

33:52

So listening to this you know people are probably thinking

33:54

wow that sounds like a lot of time and a

33:56

lot of effort spent in like

33:58

the idea and packaging. packaging phase. And

34:01

I would agree, something that

34:03

I've realized bringing this in though,

34:06

it feels like it's more worth it to spend

34:08

more time on each individual video

34:10

idea, then try to put

34:14

out just something on a really

34:16

fast paced schedule. It feels

34:18

like the upside is higher to take

34:20

bigger swings than more frequent swings. And

34:22

that's something that I've really taken away

34:24

as I've gone down this YouTube

34:27

journey is like, think bigger, plan longer,

34:31

be more flexible on like the schedule that you're

34:33

publishing on. Do you agree with that? I

34:36

100% agree. There

34:38

are very few exceptions. I think the exceptions

34:40

would be something like news. So if

34:42

you make news content, like it's no good to

34:44

me seeing what happens last week

34:46

today. No, like news content is very time

34:48

specific. So if you make content that is

34:50

extremely time specific, I'm also thinking like, tech

34:53

reviews, the things come out right away, it's very important

34:55

to be just like the content machine, get your content

34:57

out. But for most channels, I

35:00

think you can benefit from the quality

35:02

approach. Like I actually gave a big

35:05

talk at a big conference. And

35:07

the talk was how to grow more

35:09

by posting less. That was like

35:11

my whole philosophy. Because I think it's very conventional wisdom

35:14

on YouTube that you have to be consistent, you have

35:16

to post lots of videos. I think that's important at

35:18

the beginning stage of your journey for sure. Like I

35:20

would recommend beginning YouTubers post as much as they can

35:22

without burning themselves out, like post as much videos as

35:24

you can get the reps in for sure. Once

35:27

you get to a point, I think it's important to look

35:29

at it and be a bit more tactful with what

35:31

you're doing. And don't just have this diagram

35:33

approach of wanting to make video and to

35:35

make video and to make video. I find

35:37

myself having to almost deprogram YouTubers from that

35:39

philosophy and way of thinking on a daily

35:41

basis. And these aren't just beginners, they're like

35:43

YouTubers with a million subscribers, that's like, like,

35:46

it's better to miss this week's video than

35:48

post a bad video that's gonna like

35:51

not satisfy our viewers is going to churn viewers, people are not

35:53

going to click on it, they're going to be like, what, like,

35:55

why did you post that way, but not the user standard. So

35:58

I do like to have the approach.

36:00

I think it can work in any every niche. An example

36:02

I use quite a lot is I've done

36:04

a bit of advisory work for the last two years with

36:06

them or last year and a half with Noah Kagan. Before

36:09

I came in to help with Noah Kagan and his team

36:11

they were posting three or four videos a week for two

36:14

years. In this sort of six months after I started working

36:16

with them we reduced that up to a frequency down to

36:18

three or four videos a month. So not three or four

36:20

videos a week three or four videos a month and

36:23

if anyone wants to go look at a graph

36:25

of 2021

36:27

November 2021 onwards you'll see the

36:29

the years before that and then the

36:31

years after it and how quickly that trajectory

36:33

happened. Why long form? Like shorts have

36:36

helped us since but it was long form that

36:38

originally took off that massive trajectory and a huge

36:40

part of that was I didn't do anything that

36:42

special. I helped with some funnels, I helped with

36:44

ideas and myself and Jerry on the team go

36:46

back and forth on things a lot but ultimately

36:48

it was just approaching YouTube with a better philosophy

36:50

and saying no this isn't just a treadmill we

36:52

have to post three or four videos a week

36:54

on. This can be something where we are much

36:57

more tactful and I remember very clearly talking to

36:59

the team and saying like after

37:01

start it was like if something can't get 100k

37:03

views we shouldn't make it and we were very

37:05

tactful over like do we think this is potential?

37:08

Is this a big enough topic? So we went

37:10

from making very niche videos to making videos that

37:12

had that broad white appeal and funnily

37:14

enough the first video we did together now is four

37:16

and a half minute views. So when you

37:18

apply that thinking of course every occasion

37:20

doesn't work like that sometimes it's a lot longer

37:23

when you apply that thinking I think you

37:25

can make a massive difference about the channel.