Choosing topics for your Youtube channel week-on-week can be quite a daunting task. It’s more of a process than just another item that you can just tick off from your checklist! It is not as easy as just putting out an idea and deciding to make a video on it. The first question you need to ask yourself: “Is it something that my community would be interested in watching?”
What comes first? Chicken or the egg? There’s no right or wrong answer, right? The same is the case with YouTube videos and their titles.
Some of the best YouTubers like Nick Nimmin set their titles before they even begin to script the video. It may sound a little extreme but if you’re hoping to get more views on your videos and make it search-friendly, it most definitely is one of the crucial steps to getting there.
Here Are the Two Approaches Nick Nimmin Uses to Get His Youtube Videos the Views It Deserves:
While Nick doesn’t have a fixed rule about how he goes about it, he has two approaches that keep him on track for ensuring that he is creating an interesting video for his community.
The first approach ensures that you rank in the search list when someone is looking for the content you are creating. For this, you start with the title first and not with the video. To do that, you look for keywords that your potential audience will be typing in a search. You can use Youtube’s search and discovery system that will show you the results for videos that have similar content and understand what people type in to get that content. You can either use the whole or part of the key phrase in your title to increase YouTube views.
Let’s take an example. If your video is about a simple Pad Thai noodles recipe, your title can either be “Pad Thai Noodles Recipe” or to make it more interesting, you can also write “Quick & Easy Pad Thai Noodles Recipe” or “10-minute Pad Thai Noodles Recipe”.
This makes your content more discoverable to get more views on YouTube.
There are many tools you can use to search for keywords apart from manually searching on YouTube’s search and discovery system. TubeBuddy is one of the tools Nick uses himself. However, he is also a strong campaigner for manually searching keywords for two reasons.
First, when you manually search, you discover your competition and videos that YouTube is recommending in the same space you plan to create. You can understand a lot about your potential audience and community from how your competitor packages his videos with the title and thumbnail. You can also go through the comments section to get an insight into how the viewers reacted if they wanted something more that you could add to your video.
Secondly, when you manually search for a keyword, you’re putting yourself in the viewer’s shoe and understanding his process of clicking on a video. This makes for a good opportunity to ask tough questions like what about your competitor’s video made you click on it, how long did you watch it before losing interest, and did you feel well-informed after consuming the content?
These insights will go a long way in creating a direct mind map of what and how your community thinks and responds to – a key metric that no software tool can offer.
It is also important to understand the purpose of your channel. If your channel is based on storytelling or current events, your keywords are event-dependent and may not be the most crucial aspect of your title. In this case, your title must be able to communicate precisely what the video is about. For example, look at any news media channel on YouTube.
If your channel makes search-based videos like how-tos, recipes, reviews, etc., you will be more dependent on keywords to ensure that you are picked up and recommended by YouTube.
Now talking about the second approach: if you are set on the theme of your video and really feel connected to the topic, the title will most likely come to you during the process of research or writing.
This often works for YouTubers who are well connected to their audience and know what their communities need. It may also be an option for an experimental video that you are doing on your channel to gauge your audience’s response.
What we suggest is you do a bit of both. Use tools as a starting point to get your keywords and understand the related keywords but always do manual research after. Manual research is imperative to get important insights from your target audience, giving you an edge at acing the YouTube game.
Once you have zeroed down on the topic, it’s time for you to figure out how to package your YouTube video with the relevant tags, an interactive description, and an engaging thumbnail.
