Back in 2022, I hired a YouTube consultant to audit my travel vlog so I could finally figure out what was holding my channel back after it had previously exploded.
Like a lot of YouTubers, I was on a journey where I was watching every YouTube growth video that I could get my hands on. I was mimicking trending video topics, copying popular thumbnail and title packages, and I was using every graphic under the sun.
In the process, I was losing my originality and not seeing the results I hoped for.
I expected the consultant to give me some complicated plan for all the videos I should create, who I should collaborate with, and all the settings I should change.
Instead, he just said:
“Your intros suck.”
Actually, he was nicer than that, but he basically asked me why I wasn’t dealing with the steep drop off I had at my intros? I guess I assumed that was normal and there was nothing I could do about it.
So, for the next 6 months, I deep dove into intros. I studied all the biggest YouTubers and made notes about what information they included, in what order, and for how long.
Problem is with studying the biggest YouTubers is that they aren’t always following best practice. Sometimes they are big because they have many of the characteristics in the Vlogger’s Formula.
So, I studied for a while, didn’t see the results I wanted, and shrugged off the consultant’s advice.
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Fast forward to a few months later and I accidentally ran across George Blackman, a scriptwriter for some of the biggest YouTubers out there. He used to analyse retention graphs and write a newsletter about it (now is more focused on scriptwriting).
As a result, I got to see hundreds of YouTuber’s retention graphs, and a lot of them didn’t have such a steep drop off at their intros. And when they did, George always pointed out the, now obvious, reason why.
As I started to see the importance of the intro, I started to notice where YouTubers were getting it right and where they were getting it wrong. Once of the biggest mistakes I noticed is that the intros didn’t match the promise of the packaging (thumbnail and title).
In the end, I signed up for George’s course, and suddenly I was surrounded by heaps of other creators, some of them with massive followings. What was interesting is they were all talking about the same four things:
- Storytelling
- Packaging
- Intros
- Outros
i.e. The basics.
The simple concepts I learned at the beginning of my YouTube journey…
“Story is King”. “Thumbnail and title are crucial”. “Make sure you get people to binge”.
Suddenly I was struck by how so many of us go on this YouTube journey where we are trying to hack the algorithm, when the reality is, we need to study the basics…
over…
and over….
and over again.
And when you think about how many damned things we have to learn, it shouldn’t surprise us that we didn’t get it right the first time we studied.
Action
Stop wasting your time studying the algorithm and trends. Instead, study the basics over and over again. In YouTube’s own words:
“Our algorithm doesn’t pay attention to videos, it pays attention to viewers. So, rather than trying to make videos that’ll make an algorithm happy, focus on making videos that make your viewers happy,”
Learn more about my winning intro formula, which has helped my clients 10-20x their views!
