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What topics should you cover on your YouTube channel? It’s an easy answer, but it’s one that requires some thinking and planning. In today’s episode, Nate Woodbury talks about what topics you should include on our YouTube videos, as well as what we need to keep in mind before filming. Stay tuned to learn more!
You’ve got a lot of energy and excitement now. You’ve heard about YouTube. You’ve seen what’s possible and so you want to make a YouTube channel. What topics should I film on? On this video, I’m going to share with you a great strategy that will choose topics for you that ensure that you get the best results. YouTube provides an amazing opportunity to showcase your expertise. I mean seriously, all around the world right now there are thousands of people searching for you. Except they don’t knew you exist. So, what I mean is they’re searching for your expertise. Right? They want to know. They need help. You can answer questions. You can help them. But there’s just this disconnect. You’ve got this problem of obscurity. So YouTube provides a good opportunity. Because you can answer their questions, put these videos on YouTube, and now these people that are searching for you find you. Right? They see you as the hero in that moment. You’ve provided them help. You’ve given them advice. You’ve answered their questions. So, that’s the answer. How do you know what to make videos about? Well, what expertise do you have? And what questions are people asking? So, the rest of this video, I’m going to be sharing three things. I’m going to talk about first of all, length. How long should your videos be? Then I’m going to talking about these questions. How do you find these questions that people are asking online? So you know what to title your videos. And then I’m going to talk about what this does for the algorithm. So when you make videos like this, how does YouTube use that to help you and help your channel grow. Your videos need to be 10 to 12 minutes in length. Is that surprising? You’ve probably heard people say, “Oh, you got to keep your video short. The shorter, the better.” You know, maximum 2 minutes. Maybe two and a half, maybe 3 minutes?” When you watch a super bowl commercial, 30 seconds, right? They’ve got to pack the whole bunch into a short amount of time. Why is that? Why they need to be so short? Well, it’s a promotional video. It’s a commercial. We know that we’re being given a sales pitch, right? We don’t want to pay too much attention to that. They’ve got to make it really entertaining and deliver whole bunch of information. Psychologically give us all excited and whatnot in a short amount of time. We’re not going to sit there for a 10-minute commercial on something that doesn’t really imply to us, right? However, we’re not talking about commercials. We’re talking about making how-to content. Content that people are searching for contents that are going to change their lives. On YouTube, people are really accustomed and expect videos to be on the 10 to 12-minute range. The more specific the topic is, it actually makes it easier to make your videos in that 10 to 12-minute range. Let me just give you an example. My friend Katie Gutierrez, she’s an interior designer, and she could talk a lot of interior designs. So, if we go out into one of our categories, let’s say, “living room design,” she could probably talk about living room design for an hour if we wanted to narrow it down and make it to 10 to 12-minute episode. She could easily do that. But like how to make it really valuable? She could say, “Well, what are my top tips?” Okay, I’ll make a top tip video. I’ll share my top 5 tips.” And right then we film and we go from there. But what if we did keyword research, and we found the phrase, “How to design a living room with a corner fireplace?” Oh! Then all of a sudden, she got great ideas. “Well, yeah, if you got a corner fireplace, you’ve got to do this…” And I have no idea what the answer to this. But “You got to make sure that you balance it out with a nice rock feature or fountain, or then you got to put your couch here, and you got to make sure that the lighting does this. And that your artwork, you got to have different colors.” Whatever it is, if there’s a specific scenario, I know that Katie’s minor goal right to work to know exactly what to do. Does that make sense? And because you’re narrowing it down, I mean you’re cutting away all of the extra stuff that isn’t relevant to this specific answer, and yet, you can go deep. And I’ve found that 10 to 12-minute range or video like this is perfect. If you get to like to 5 or 7-minute mark and you think, “I’m done. I can’t think of anything else to share.” Well, then, definitely stop your video there. You don’t just want to ramble on. If you just repeat or if you just summarize what you’ve already covered, people are going to leave anyway. So, you might as well not do the remaining several minutes. What about longer than 12 minutes? Yeah, you can longer. If you’re keeping people’s attention, go ahead and keep going. Just know that if you make a video that’s like 30 minutes long, that’s kind of a turn of for some people to click on the video. They’re like, “Ooh! This is perfect. Oh, wait, this is 30 minutes?” Does that make sense? You got to be careful with that as well. The biggest secret I share and why people pay me a thousand dollars per hour for consulting time is to teach them this principle of keyword research before filming. Yeah, that’s it. You got to do your keyword research before you hit record on your camera. Before you plan your content, do that keyword research first. It actually take a load off of your shoulders because you know of a huge variety of topics. You’re not going to run out of information. You can get way more specific and targeted and feel like your talking to just one person. Because you don’t want to talk to everybody and like, “Hey, everybody! Thanks for watching this video. I’m going to share some general advice, and hopefully, it applies to you.” You can talk to just one person. The person that’s got that corner fireplace or that person who’s strep throat and wants a remedy without antibiotics, right? Now here’s another amazing thing that this does. It eliminates all the competition. Because all your competition is going after the broad category. They want the most traffic. They want to rank and beat everybody. Challenges, when you make a video like that, there’s hundreds of other videos out there like that, and you can’t compete. I mean maybe if your Steven Spielberg, you can do that and you can make a cinema production quality. And yours will be the best. You know what? Just do keyword research. Find a question, answer that question. And you’ll rank instantly. Here’s why this works. The YouTube algorithm likes good engagement and likes a long average duration or a long retention rate. Okay? So, if you have a really specific video, such as how to design a living room with a corner fireplace, the people that are searching for that and they find your video, they’re going to watch it all the way to the end, right? Because that’s exactly for them. Why would they only watch a part of it? They have that question. They’re going to watch it all the way to the end. And the algorithm sees that and says, “Wow, I know that only 50 people have watched this video this month, but all those 50 people watched it all the way to the end. Let’s find 0 more or 200 more people like these 50.” So YouTube starts to show your video to new audiences. And not only do you get the next 50 the next month. But you’re also starting to get other views from YouTube suggesting it and promoting your content. Isn’t that awesome? By just doing keyword research before filming, you’re really laying a solid foundation of having a channel that the YouTube algorithm likes. And it’ll find more and more people that are good match for your videos. Now that you understand this strategy of what to talk about on your YouTube videos, you definitely need to learn how to do this research. The good news is I’ve made a video all about that specific part. It’s my leaf strategy video. You’ll find it linked right there. In that video, I talk about how to do that keyword research. It’s actually really simple. There’s a tool that I show you how to use where you can type in category, and it will pull up all the questions the people are asking. You basically just pick these questions and say, “Oh, that will make a good title. Oh, that’s a good title.” You just plan out all of your videos.