Titles

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No one wants to click on your video with a bad title. You want to create clickable titles that create interest or highlight what the video is about without giving away everything or being click bait.

Where do titles show up?

When someone is browsing their home page

Being suggested next after watching a video

When someone performs a search for a video

60 Character Limit: When you’re writing your titles you want to keep them under 60 characters. This is because on different devices the titles will cut off if you have a longer title and you’re viewers will see a …

The Best Way To Get Started: When you’re first starting out or starting to learn proper structures for titles you should look to creators who are already successful and getting views.

Model your titles off of videos that are already working.

Come up with a list of 50-100 Creators and use their titles as a guide to start writing your own

You don’t need to only look at titles within your niche. Often the best title ideas come from whats working in another niche.

For example if you see the title “7 Biggest Mistakes You’re Making in Your Garden” (home gardening niche) then try that title structure for your niche. “7 Biggest Mistakes You’re Making with your Gimbal” (filmmaking niche)

How to look for good titles. Youtube gives you the view count and date published. Use this to find outlier videos which are an indication of a potential good title. Keep a google sheet and jot down the info as you’re doing this research

Title, Date Published, Link to Video, Emotion Evoked, Keyword Used

More about Outlier Videos

Outlier Videos

Create For a Human: One of the key elements is creating titles that are for a person reading it vs just stuffing a bunch of keywords into a title. Often when you are trying to create videos for the search algorithm you will want to just add a bunch of keywords but you want to avoid keyword stuffing and only put one or two in.

Emotions to tap into: Curiosity, Fear & Desire.

You want to try and have every title evoke one or more of these emotions from your viewer because then it will be more clickable

Often times you want to combine 2 so either Curiosity and Fear or Curiosity and Desire.

Curiosity creates an open loop for the viewer. If you have 10 secrets then what are those 10 secrets? The viewer will need to click to find out.

People want to get away from fear so tapping into that emotion will trigger people. What is the fear or pain that the target audience for your video is going through.

MISTAKE 1: Modeling off the BIGGEST creators…. When you look at some of the top creators you might want to use their titles as a guide and make something similar. The problem is with those big creators sometimes their titles work because they already have an established following who already know enough that a simple title makes sense. These titles wont work for you.

Look for creators that are a little bigger than you and model off their best performing videos. If you’re starting out look at channels that are in the 5-50k range. If you’re in the 100k range then model off the creators in the 200k-500k range.

When you’re getting started all the answers are there from the similar creators in you’re niche. When you see a outlier video look at the title they used and use it as a guide for a video you can potentially do on your channel.

Titles Targeting a Keyword: Depending on your niche you might have the opportunity to leverage keywords to get viewers interested in your videos and often times you need to use keywords. One of the goals with Keywords is ranking in the search algorithm so that you pop up first when someone is searching on google. For educational channels you’ll want to use keywords so that your viewer can find what they’re looking for. The cool thing with YouTube is that if you can get a video to rank in search then the video also has the potential to show up in Google search results as well.

How to do Keyword Research: This comes from the keyword research that you do when you’re coming up with your video topics.

Keyword Research

Put the keyword early on in the title. For example “5 Secrets that will help you get better footage with the DJI Pocket 3” might not be as effective as “DJI Pocket 3 - 5 Secrets for Better Footage” Since you are targeting someone who owns a DJI Pocket 3, it is important to ensure that you attract the right viewers. The first version of the title might receive clicks from people who do not own this camera, resulting in them quickly clicking off because the content does not apply to them.

Keywords are important to make sure you’re getting the right viewer for the video and also pre-qualify the viewer.

For example if you use the title “The Best Camera” it is way too broad of a topic rather than if you used the title “The Best Camera For Filming Documentaries”. Instantly you’re weeding out the viewers to only those who are interested in filming documentaries.

Keywords sometimes have a shelf life. If you’re working with a new product that was just released there will be a ton of buzz around that keyword but in a year there won’t be very many searches around that topic. When targeting keywords sometimes you’ll want to think if you want to make a piece of content that is topical or evergreen.

What is the longevity of your video?

Tentpole vs Evergreen Topics

Mistake 2: Focusing on Features and not Benefits. Key is figuring out why something is useful and not just telling what exactly you’ll learn

Sample “This Smartphone Gimbal Has Subject Tracking” vs “Get Cinematic Footage Easier while Tracking with this Smartphone Gimbal”

Mistake 3: Revealing the Payoff in the Video. If you tell the viewer exactly what will happen in the video then why would the viewer want to click and watch? You want to avoid revealing exactly what will happen and use an open loop to get someone to click.

Sample “I got Lost in the Jungle but a Local Helped Me out” vs “Surviving 5 Nights Alone Lost in the Jungle”

How Does This Video Help the Viewer? You want to figure out how the viewers will benefit from watching this video and include that in the title. Rather than just telling a viewer what the video is you want to show them why its important.

Analyzing Your Titles

The importance for a title is to get the click and have someone start watching your video. Now title alone wont be the only factor that gets the click. Its all of your packaging, title, thumbnail and overall idea.

Metric to Analyze: The key data point to watch is your Click Through Rate. This is how often someone clicks on your video when it appears in front of that viewer (called an impression). So if you get 1000 impressions with a CTR or 4.3% then that means 43 people out of 1000 watched your video.

Goal is to get a higher CTR

There is no “Right” CTR. It depends on your niche and past performance on your videos.

High CTR doesn’t mean good performance overall. If you use Clickbait then you might be able to get a higher CTR but you have to have a good video once they click on it

CTR is the rate of someone clicking but more important is the watch time and this is calculated based on AVD

A/B Testing Titles: Currently there is no tool built into YouTube that allows you to A/B test however you can use TubeBuddy to do these tests. If you want to improve your CTR based on titles then you can test titles against eachother then see which one improves CTR and Watchtime.

Approaches to Try with Your Titles

Adding Authority: When someone is a professional then they are going to know more than you. Creating titles with a sense of authority gives the viewer a reason to click. They want to know the info that you have or the pros have and they don’t want to miss out.

Sample: Knowledge that you need to about which plants to grow

Call out a Specific Audience: In the title focus in on one specific audience. This becomes a magnet for that type of viewer. Yes this will eliminate people from wanting to click but also it creates more drive for those that are the target for that video.

Sample: Targeting a specific age group within the creator niche

Speaking to the Beginner: This is a tactic I often use in my videos. There is more beginners than there are pros. So if someone wants to learn about a topic it helps to add beginner into the title in some way to make it more clickable. Beginners want to learn and they’re the most insecure so they will want to get the information that you have in your video.

Sample: A viewer wants to know how to use a specific product. DJI Mini 2

Identify a Problem and Solve it: Figure out a problem that your viewer has and write the title in a way that coveys you’re going to solve that problem.

Sample: Someone has a flat tire on their car

Creating A Timeframe: Using time is a great way to get people to click because they want to learn something fast. Often you can use time as a way to drive more viewers to click a video because if they were offered 2 videos one is 50 minutes and one is 5 minutes then they would rather get the info faster because everyone is always in a rush

Sample. Learning to draw a person in 5 minutes.

Ask a Question: There are questions that the viewers in your niche have so create titles that are those questions. The video then has the answers to that question.

Sample. I was wondering how much water I should put on my lawn

Create a Action: By watching the video you viewer is going to be given a specific thing to do that is going to help them towards their goals.

Sample: I want to get in shape

What has worked for me

Now let’s go through a few samples of titles that work for me personally, these are title concepts that I’ve used over and over and have continued to perform well. Now, keep in mind my channel is an educational channel for creators, and so many of my titles, target, keyword and search base traffic, however, these titles also perform super well in suggested and browse, and the ones that get the most views get more views from suggested browser than search

Beginners guides: I do various beginners guides based on specific products or specific styles of video creating, and I use the term beginner In these videos.

VS: Comparing two products or two ideas seems to be a very clickable title so often I’ll take two keywords, which are typically two products that I’m testing against each other, and I put them right in the title.

Fear/Mistakes: One thing that’s worked well for me in various topics has been using the word mistakes And plain to the fears of my target audience.

How To: One tactic that works super well for my channel is to use the term how to and then follow up with what I’m teaching so it’s just that simple indicator that this is a tutorial that you’re gonna learn exactly this one topic

Listicle: One thing that performs over and over again for me is by creating a list in the title