WRITING EXTREMELY CLICKABLE VIDEO TITLES – FULL GUIDE (5 STEPS)
You know why video titles are important. If it weren’t for the title, you wouldn’t be watching this video right now. But how you do a good video title, that is a skill you can learn starting now howdy howdy everyone. Nate here. I’m going to show you what I’ve been doing here. I just released a brand new lesson and indepth tool guide in my program project 24 outlining this times 10. So what I’ve done here is I’ve broken down writing extremely clickable video titles into five distinct steps they build on each other.
And this comes from looking at. Thousands and thousands and thousands of video titles across a huge variety of niches. All right. So the very first thing that you and I are going to do when we’re writing extremely clickable video titles is we’re. Going to start with a good idea. The foundation of any good title starts with the good idea, because the title comes second. And let me just tell you, if you don’t start with a good video idea, you’re going to be scrambling for the rest of the marketing, your title, and your thumbnail especially. It’s almost like trying to put patches on a piece of fabric when what you really need is just a new piece of fabric, a new good idea to start you outright.
Now that is easier said than done, and good video ideas can’t be one of the most important skills. To building a successful YouTube channel. I think you know that. But on this point of step one, starting with a good video idea, the only thing I wrote in here is fail point, because this is the make or break before you do the rest of this content. All right, moving on to the next step. This is Step 2.
This is where you’re defining what your title is targeting, what kind of audience you’re looking to attract with your title. Now let me explain what I mean here. There’s three primary categories I put this into. Are you targeting search? Are you trying to get traffic from search? Are you targeting your current audience? Primarily or are you targeting new audience through the browse or suggested engines on Youtube Now, the second step is a bigger deal than you might think.
You might just think, well, Nate, I want to target all three of those things. Can I just do all three at once? And in some cases, yes. However, the way you structure your title will have a huge impact on what type of traffic you’re trying to get to your video. Let me show you at my desk what I mean. So I didn’t want to leave it just as saying, hey, there’s three things you can target search, current audience or new audience. I wanted to give real examples. You see the way you. Demptively decide what type of traffic you’re primarily targeting will, in great form determine the type of words and structure that you use in your title.
Let me give you some examples. If I were targeting search, I may use a title like how to clean out a sync disposal. Why would I do that? Because someone might go onto Youtube or on Google search and search. How do I clean out my sink disposal? It’s clogged. How to clean out a clogged sink disposal. In that case, that video is much more likely to do well in search because it’s directly answering a question. Let’s talk about if you’re going for new audience and perhaps going more for browse traffic or maybe suggested traffic. In that case, the title of the video might look something along the lines of 6 ridiculously easy ways to clean a sink disposal.
Is that different than how to clean out a sink disposal? Yes, it is. Does it have a bit more broad appeal? Yes, it does, because we included the. In there, ridiculously easy. And if you were to combine that with a very visually appealing or interesting thumbnail showing one of those steps, or one of the ways to clean out your sync disposal, then there’s a possibility that new audience, if they were to see that on browse or suggested, would be more likely to watch your video.
And that brings us to the last type of target for audience traffic. And that is for current audience. This is where you’re primarily targeting people who already know who you are and your content. It might look something along the lines of my disposal broke period. Again, period you see, that type of title is different because if I didn’t know anything about that creator and I saw a title like that, I’d be less likely to watch it because I don’t know who you are.
I don’t really care about your content yet, and yet some of those titles can be extremely effective for getting your current audience to click quickly. Now, what bears mentioning here that it’s never going to be 100 % of your traffic from one of those traffic sources. Search a new audience or current audience, just like it’s never going to be 100 % browse 100 % suggested. What I’m saying here is preemptively to. Deciding which traffic source you’re going to target primarily will greatly affect how you structure your title. All right. And we are back at the blackboard. We’re moving on to step three and this is what I call language match.
You see, up to this point we’ve got a good idea. We’ve decided what type of traffic we’re primarily targeting and next step is what types of words are we going to use in the title itself. And actually if there’s one of the best ways to hone in this point for you watching this, it would be with a story you see back at university I was a little. Bit odd, and I wanted to do some extra things. One of those things was on Saturdays. I wanted to go to the university and invite my fellow classmates and teach them some studying skills because I saw a lot of them struggling and so I wanted to help them out with some things that I had learned.
Now, in order to do that, I needed to rent A room at the university that wasn’t being used on Saturdays because most of the classes took place during the week. So what did I do? I went to the office where you can request a room and rent out that room. And when I went to them, this part’s important. I said something along the lines of. Hey, I want to give a presentation in one of your classrooms on Saturdays for classmates now. Their response was shocking to me. They said something to the effect of why. That’s just a little bit weird.
Why are you requesting a room to do presentations for fellow classmates? That’s a little odd. So I turned around and I went out. They basically said no to me and I was just thinking to myself, what the heck? Like, I’m trying to help your students. Why are you not getting the message I’m trying to give you? Now what I’ve seen a lot of Youtube channel makers do is they create a good clickable title, but they don’t. Make sure that it matches the language of the audience that they are targeting. So what happens is very similar to my experience with that university office. Your potential viewers will see your title on your video and they’ll think, ah, that’s not for me.
And they’ll keep scrolling. Now back to the story. Luckily, I hadn’t gone too far before I realized, Oh my goodness. I need to speak their language. I need to use the words that they are thinking. So what I do, I turn around and I walked right back into the office and I said OK, I think I didn’t explain myself well the last time. Let me explain it again. What I would like to do is do short presentations on Saturdays to improve the study skills of your students and help them do better on their tests.
Now obviously I’m paraphrasing going off of memory here, but the response was night and day difference because I used words that were important to them and because of that the response was an immediate oh, of course you can do that. So This is why I said this is far too often overlooked, because the same thing could potentially be happening with your audience. Yes, you watching this, I don’t care how big your audience is. If you are not applying this understanding of using the right language, speaking their language, and not just talking about English or Spanish. I’m talking about the words that they use to think about the topic that you’re portraying for them.
If you’re not using that language, there’s a good chance that they are just leaving because it doesn’t resonate with them. So that’s what I’m talking about when I say. Sure, you match the language. That’s the story I shared. And then the last thing is the format of the title itself. There’s a lot of different title formats that you can use on your own videos, which is why as part of the new project 24 lesson, I created a massive list of format examples, as well as why they work and pointers for applying them to your specific niche.
Now I think it’s time to address the question about this step three, and that is, well, how do you do it? I’m going to go back to my desk and we’re back at the desk. The first thing I’m going to say is if this video is being helpful or useful to you thus far, I would love if you would boop the light. Button so it can spread to more people. I appreciate it. Thank you. But now we need to answer that question.
How do you find the right language or how do you get good at knowing the right language for your audience? The 1st place I look is in the comments of your videos. What is the language they are using? What are they saying? What are the questions they’re using? What’s the language they’re using? That’s the first place I would look. The next place I would look is other creators or elsewhere on Youtube that are creating content for a similar audience to what you are targeting. What kinds of words are they using? What kind of language are they using? And which videos perform better versus worse based on the titles of the videos? In fact, if I were to show you one of the recent videos on my channel, I’d show you this 1-9 mistakes that destroy your video engagement with parentheses.
Real examples. This was not the original title for this video because I figured out that some of the language I was using in the original title was just not resonating with my audience. But more on that here in a bit. And here we have it. The Step 4, the infamous step 4I purposely made this one bigger than all the other steps because this is where we act. Actually get to constructing the title itself. I wanted to give you some rules to abide by in your own titles. These are the general rules. Learn these rules first before you break them. The first target you’re going for is using 50 or less characters within the title itself.
Now I know YouTube gives us up to 100 or double that, but in most cases the 1st 50 characters are the most important and therefore if we at least get the 1st 50 characters dialed in and exactly very appealing to our target audience, then if we do. Choose to add additional beyond that it will be bonus. The other reason for trying to stay below 50 characters on your titles is because on most devices we aren’t shown the entire 100 characters and you have to hover over it on desktop or you have to actually click through on the video to see the entire title.
Which brings me to the next rule. If you can use as few words as possible and still deliver the same idea in your title, that is superior. Because here’s why and I’ll let you in on an insider secret here. When you use fewer words, it’s easier to understand, even if it’s just the perception, the subconscious perception of your video title. And when people feel like it’s an easier concept to understand, they are more likely to click through.
Complexity breeds confusion, which breeds. No views on your videos. So what are we trying to go for when we’re using fewer words? I like to think of it as one step above cave speak. If you can eliminate any words out of that title and still get the idea across, do it. Now, a few of you have had questions about title tools or tools that help you generate titles for your videos, I’m going to speak on that here in a moment. I wanted to jump to the next point of making sure that when you use these words, you are using this language match you’re using.
You’re speaking the language of your audience and using the right verbs or nouns that match. How they think about the topic of your channel as well as and get this the right words that communicate the benefits for the audience. The things that they want to get out of watching your videos. Make sure you’re using those words when you construct your title. Now this will look dramatically different depending on what type of niche that your audience is, what type of channel you’re creating. Next rule I wanted to talk about is capitalization and emojis. Now capitalization in your title should be used sparingly. I get there. There’s going to be differing opinions on this, but in most.
Cases, what is capitalization appear to the audience as being shouting. It’s you’re shouting something. You’re emphasize something in your title. And so if you use a lot of capitalization, or you use it really often, it’s easy for that to become mundane so that you almost have the opposite effect and your audience starts feeling like, well, they feel like all their titles are super, really important. By using all caps all the time, therefore, it loses the potency that in all caps, word within a title can have.
So when you choose to capitalize a word within your title, make sure it’s the word that you want. To emphasize the most. In fact, if you want an example, look at the title of this video, the next pointer on emojis. I would use them also very sparingly and never create a title that couldn’t stand alone without the emojis. The reason for that is people will be viewing Youtube on a variety of different devices, but in some cases the device can’t recognize the emoji that’s being used, therefore rendering your title unable to be read.
All right, let’s look at some of the tools that I mentioned now. Most tools are not sufficient for creating good, effective Youtube titles. Most of the time I just got to come back to that because it’s better that you have that skill set than that you rely heavily on a tool. Let me show you why this tools on sumo.com for slash kick ass dash headline dash generator.
Now I was having fun with this one because it gave me a few options, numberless how to strong, controversial, and others depending on what type of video I’m producing and it tries to put it together in a formulaic way. With this, for example, the topic I put mowing your lawn, your desired outcome get green grass, precious things are green grass undesirable alcone. Dry grass. The audience is homeowners and something that could affect the outcome is your fertilizer. And when you input those things it outputs some things like this. The Fear Monger headline warning are you sabotaging your green grass? The rally cry headline let’s start mowing your lawn or the negative rally cry headline let’s stop dry grass.
But then it starts to breakdown. At that point. The question headline one why are you dry grass? Or the question headline 2 are you still dry grass? But then we come back with a little bit better the fortune teller headline. You won’t be able to get green grass in 2022 so you can have some fun with that tool, just know there will be issues with it. Now when it comes to making sure that your title is the right length, you can use a simple tool like Word counter.
Dot net. I use this quite often before I’ve inputted into the actual Youtube UI. I’ll just go in here and I’ll paste a title and it will give me 8 words, 53 characters. It will also give me some keyword density, some other interesting data, but it is nice. If you don’t have something additional to see before you even publish, how many characters is your title? And that brings me to the next point, which is a lot will come down to the next step. This is where you don’t stop. You constructed your title, you publish your video between step four and five. You’re good, you publish the video, but you’re not done because the next step is where you test the title and you watch how the audience responds to it.
Now, why is this so vitally important? Because if you’re not actively learning and acquiring skill sets. Especially around the realms of titles, you’re not getting better. But really, I wanted to give a real example from this channel. I created a series of videos that I considered extremely valuable. The audience response was, yeah, these are really good, but they weren’t watched as many times because I was using the words video roast in the title. Now the concept of the video was, I’m going to take a individual piece of content and I’m going to roast. I’m going to tear it apart. I’m going to point out all the things that was doing wrong and all the things it was doing right.
It was something that I wasn’t seeing a lot on Youtube the language I was using. Back to Step 3. Here was video roast and a lot of people were not understanding what that was about. And I found when I used video roast in the title of those videos, they didn’t perform as well. So what did I do? Because of step five, I watched the performance of the video. I started testing different variants on titles and I think I’m still in the process of testing and learning, but I found ways to make it more effective and more appealing to the audience.
What are the most important things to watch in the performance in analytics wise? What are the most important things? First thing views, second is clickthrough rate and 3rd is average view duration views because it’s the overall performance and measure of how interested an audience was in your video. It’s the analytic that trumps all others. Clicker rate is how well your thumbnail and title performed, and then average view duration is how well that video delivered on the promise in the title and thumbnail. All right, so you remember that video I showed you a little while back where the title was very different than what the original title was? This 1-9 mistakes that destroy your video engagement real exam samples so I’m going to pull up the notes on that video and show you what the original title was.
You see, the original title was you won’t believe what’s wrong with this video. And then parentheses video roast. Now what I found was when I published the video, it wasn’t getting the traction that I knew that video deserved. I knew the content was good. I knew it was right for the audience. So I knew something was often in this case, I said it’s got to be the title. So what did I do? I wrote down some other examples.
I said, you’re destroying your watch time with these mistakes. Here’s how to fix them. Your audience is leaving your videos because of these mistakes. Nine mistakes that destroy your video engagement. Until I finally came to 9. Mistakes that destroy your video engagement with real examples. And that is the title that I settled on for that video. South the principle you’re looking at here is watch the real time of how that video performs. And one of the most important things that you can change after you publish that video is the title. And again, we’re talking about titles here. So here’s what I’m going to recommend.
Have a few title variants lined up before you even publish that video. That will allow you to adapt quickly when you see a video isn’t performing. You want it to now beyond the analytics that I already shared. Normally I’d say look at your comments for feedback on your titles. Except that I have rarely ever had people comment on the title of the video and say, hey, that was a great title or I came here because of the title.
Rarely has that been the case. Much more often it’s because of the thumbnail. People will comment on the thumbnail, what they liked versus didn’t like. But with the title and the response and comments get this. Here is what I have found to be much more effective. Watch for the emotional response in the comments. People were. Respond emotionally to the feeling they get before even watching the video. If you don’t believe me, try a really controversial title on a fairly mundane or like middle of the road video. Just try this. Create a video that’s really reasonable and helpful to people, and then make the title extremely controversial.
People are going to come into the comments of your video. Swing in ready to fight because of the title, and I do need to know there. I’m not promoting controversy by any means, it’s just I have seen that far too often to not say. The title has some big effect on that before they even watch the video and we’re back at the blackboard. Perhaps you’re wondering, aside from my sketchy art down here at the bottom, what these percentages were, this is roughly how much focus I would put on each of these steps.
So video idea about 20 % of your focus when you’re constructing the title of your video, 20 % is OK was this a good video idea to start with? Next on the traffic target about 10 % of your focus and then on to the language match, again a 10 % and then on to. Actually constructing the title, about 40 % of your focus and you saw as some examples where I shared.
Sometimes I have multiple titles lined up because I’m experimenting with a lot of things before I’m even publishing. So about 40 % of the focus and then another 20 % of your focus being in post after publishing the video and while you’re testing variants to learn how and why the video performed the way it did based on your video title. So I’m back at my desk. I’m going to record a short little video for you see, this is actually right here.
This is where I do all of the zoom calls. I just open up zoom here and I do all of the zoom calls for the masterminds in Project 24 I just wanted to show you to make it more real. I am literally sitting here at my desk when I am doing calls with you in Project 24 Often I’ll pull off my webcam and I’ll show you around if I’m showing something on my desk, specific examples or I will share my screen and pull up your channel.
While I’m looking at your channel, I just wanted to show you what it looks like behind the scenes and then beyond that, where’s the next place you should go? Well, first of all, I’m going to recommend you go to channelmakers.com go just check it out. Now see what’s in there, see all the value that I packed into it? Because when you’re at the point that you need additional help on your channel, I am there for you.
I built it specifically for that. So go check that out and also get working on your video titles. You’ve got your notes, you’ve taken some notes. Start applying them right now. I mean that seriously. Don’t let this be a video that you just watched and then just kind of let it slide by. Actually, on your next video, apply several of the principles that we discussed in this video right now on your very next title. Go do that and we’ll. See you next time.
