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How long should your YouTube videos really be? Some say the shorter the better, while others say having longer videos will get more people’s attention. In this podcast, Nate Woodbury shares his take on the matter. Stay tuned to find out how you can get people to watch your YouTube videos all the way to the end!
Welcome back. How do you make your videos longer on YouTube? Right? And why do we want to make them longer? Because we’ve been told shorter is better. But you’re going to learn some things why you want them to be longer. How long and how you can do that. How you can come up with the content so that your videos are exciting for that length of time. The quick answer is 10 to 12 minutes. You want your videos to be 10 to 12 minutes long. So we’re first going to talk about why that is. Why 10 to 12 minutes? Then we’re going to talk about your gold, your secrets. How much of your secret should you share, and is there anything that you should hold back? Then I’m going to introduce a way that you can actually simplify your process. Make it really really easy to narrow down your content but also make sure that it’s 10 to 12 minutes in length. We’re going to talk about repetition when it’s bad and when it’s good. We’re going to talk about stories, and then we’re also going to talk about having multiple tripods. Now, what do I mean by that? Wait a minute. What just happened? Okay, that was weird. We’re going to talk about why we use multiple tripods. And we’ll wrap up the videos talking about tightening up your video. How to actually shorten it to make sure that it’s really good but yet still long enough. So, why 10 to 12 minutes? YouTube recommends between 7 and 16. I like 10 to 12. 10 to 12 is kind of the good round number that people are expecting. That’s the experience that a lot of consumers of YouTube videos have. Most channels kind of hone in on that. And here’s some logic behind that: YouTube posts a new ad every 10 minutes. So, the longer you can keep people on YouTube, the more ads will be able to show to them. And YouTube wants to make money. The cool thing is they pay half that revenue to us. That’s a topic for another conversation. Like I’ll link that up here how to make money on YouTube. But that’s one of the main reasons why to have your videos that long as you want good watch time. The more watch time you have, the better your channel will perform. Now, the other reason for going 10 to 12 minutes – and this is a huge one. That’s how long it really takes to build a connection and cover most topics thoroughly. Now, the next point I want to cover is, do you give away your gold or how much you share. You know what? I’m going to say it right now. Give away everything. Give them your gold. Now, how can you do that in a 10- or 12-minute episode, right? Because all this knowledge, all this experience; how can you just give them everything? Well, you narrow it down to a very very niche Pacific topic. So, let me give you an example. Paul Jenkins, he makes a lot of videos on parenting. But we did keyword research, and we found questions like “How to get kids to listen without yelling?” Or “How to get kids to go to bed on time?” You know those are so specific. And if Paul were just to make videos on parenting and how to be a better parent, it’s like how do you narrow that down, right? And how do you get specific enough? You could just talk and talk and talk and yet not be focused on anything. But if the title of our video is “How to get kids to listen without yelling?” Imagine having just focused 10 minutes of content on that exact question. That’s going to be a really valuable video. But now you’re probably asking yourself, “Well, wait. If I give away everything…” Right? You’re just giving it in these 10- or 12-minute chunks. But if you’re just sharing all your secrets on YouTube, are people still gonna hire you? Are they still going to want to buy your courses or go through your programs? And the answer is absolutely. The more you give away on YouTube, the more value they will get, right? The more that they will value you and like and trust you, in their mind, they’re going to think, “Wow. This channel is so valuable, and he’s giving me all this for free. I can only imagine what his course is going to be like or what her course or her program or her event is going to be like.” Here’s the other reality: You can give them everything on YouTube, but a very small fraction of a fraction of a fraction are actually going to implement it. They’re just internalizing it. They’re just opening their minds to it. They’re kind of having this paradigm shift of recognizing, “I could do this.” When they’re ready to take action, that’s when they click the link and go to your website and find out how to work with you. They don’t want to do it themselves. Now that they understand this, they see the value in it. Now they want to hire you. Now, you’re going to deliver the same content but packaged quite differently. It’s not going to be packaged in 10-minute episodes that answer their specific questions. On YouTube, each episode you’re answering a specific question. In a course, you’re going to take them sequentially through your content. You’re going to give them assignments. They’re going to be taking action. And here’s the other interesting part: YouTube, they didn’t pay money for. So, there’s nothing holding them accountable. There’s no exchange of value, right? They haven’t committed themselves to anything. But if they pay a couple thousand dollars for your course, now they’re committed. They’re going to implement it, right? They’re going to take action. They’re going to take it more seriously. They’re going to start to act on this knowledge that they get from you. Now, can you be repetitive? Is there a time and place to be redundant or just repeat your content or give it a summary? And the answer is definitely yes, and definitely no. Within the same episode, you do not want to be redundant. You do not want to go back and summarize and review everything that you’ve talked about in the video. Why not? Because people will leave. Okay? If they feel like, “Oh, I’ve gotten everything that’s been trained.” In this video, the remaining 5 minutes or 3 minutes is just a summary, just a review. They’ll leave and go to the next video. Or they’ll leave and walk away. So, as a default rule, never do a summary at the end of your video. And if you run out of content, just end the video there. Don’t get repetitive or redundant. If you want to keep people on the video longer, then share another story. Stories are always good. Stories are fun. Stories are entertaining, and it takes the information that you’ve shared and makes it applicable. Here’s what you can do, though, from episode 1 to episode 5 or episode 15. You can repeat the same principles. You can teach the same content. You can have a lot of content overlap. In fact, that’s a good idea. Because people that are watching all of your videos will really learn those principles from lots of different angles. Most of the people who are watching these videos haven’t seen the other ones. They’re being brought to you from YouTube. They’ve never heard of you before. They’re watching a brand new video. So you don’t have to be hesitant about them seeing something in a previous episode. They probably haven’t. Now, to talk about stories a little bit more, a story can definitely help make your video longer. But it makes the video better. Here’s an example. Here’s a story that I can share about a video that we made that’s 20 minutes long. First I filmed a video with Kris Krohn called “How to invest your money in your 2o’s” It’s about a six-minute video. We made this a few years ago. The video got up to about 60,000 views, and when I looked in the analytics, I saw that most of these views came from suggested views. That means YouTube was suggesting our video to other viewers to watch after the previous video. When you see stuff like that, you notice that there’s an opportunity. And so Kris and I decided to do a second video with that same title, it’s called a sequel. But we wanted to make it better. We wanted to make it longer. So, in addition to telling the same story, Kris thought of other things that he could share to make the content a little bit longer. I also filmed it in another way. Instead of just sitting still on his pool table where it was in the first video, we decided to walk around and have the intro start differently. So, I had him pull up in his BMW i8. The wing door went up. He climbed out, and I followed him with my glide cam. So, he’s talking as he’s walking into his house he’s kind of explaining things as he’s going and pointing out things as cleaning lady happy to be vacuuming. We weren’t planning on the video being 20 minutes, but that’s how long the video was. And it actually has a really high retention rate. People are watching a lot of that video. Because YouTube likes long watched time, this video is done really really well. it’s had over 5 million views. Now, you notice I was just sitting, but now I’m standing. I’m looking into the same camera. But I’ve got a tripod set up right here pointed at a chair over there. So, I’m just moving the camera back and forth from one tripod to the next so that we go from location 1, location 2, location 1, location 2. That mixes things up. It gives variety, and it keeps people’s attention. When I prepare the outline of my content, I’ll prepare it in bullet points so it allows me to make the move back and forth really easy. That’s another great strategy for making your content long enough. Now, right now, when I look at the time on my camera, it says that I’ve been recording for about 16 minutes. I’ve actually been seeing a lot of ahm’s and ah’s. I’ve been doing a lot of restarts. You haven’t heard those things because my editing team does a really good job of tightening it up. So what I mean by tightening it up is they’ll edit out the pauses they’ll edit out those ahm’s, and they’ll edit out the restarts. And sometimes, they’ll do a zoom edit or a crop edit like this. So, see now I’m a lot closer to you. And if I were to make a mistake, okay. Watch this. I’m going to do a little test. I’m gonna say a sentence with the word elephant in it. But I’m gonna have my editing team edit out that word but do a crop edit so that you don’t know that that word is even missing. Some of my favorite animals are tigers, leopards, zebras. There’s lots of other animals that I like. Now, for my editing team, they followed my instructions there. Then you didn’t hear me say the word elephant. But when I recorded this, I said elephant in the middle of those animals that I listed. The reason that you didn’t really notice that there was a word missing is because they changed the zoom. So, do things like that to tighten up your video. And we’ve been talking about how to make your videos longer, but you’ve got to keep their attention. So take out that “ahm’s” and “ahh’s.” Take out the pauses. Take out the restarts so that your video moves along as quick. Use two tripods to keep their attention. That way, you can keep people watching all the way to the end of your ten- to twelve-minute video. Now, they have a good foundation on how to make your videos longer. You definitely need to watch my leaf strategy video. This is the pivotal way to get people to find your videos. These are people that have never heard of you before. Just by following this simple strategy, they’re going to be able to find your videos. And now you know how to keep them watching all the way until the end.