Hello and welcome to the YouTube Success podcast.
My name is Matt Hughes, King of Video.
This episode is all about planning.
I'm so excited to talk about planning for a number of reasons, but I'm just going to
let you know that it's a planning episode.
I am going to talk about five ways in which you can plan your YouTube videos.
It's kind of planning and research, I would say, but the other thing
to notice is that, or other thing to note is that we have a Planning
Workshop that happens inside of the academy, My King of Video Academy.
The link is in the description of this episode to show notes.
It's kingofvideoacademy.com, and if you go there and you register for a free account,
you can sign up for this workshop.
Workshop is 90 minutes.
It's a planning workshop.
It's a really great workshop, and I talk about these five ways you can plan
your youtube videos, but I also give you loads of other good advice as well.
So head over to kingofvideoacademy.com, grab yourself a free account and
sign up for a workshop with a free community account, it will
send you the next workshop when it happens And with planning, I want
you to know that like with anything that's worth having, you need to be
strategic with your planning, right?
You need to be strategic with the channel that you've got and that means
that you don't just film something like a live stream on Facebook and
then add YouTube as a destination and then assume that YouTube is going to
figure out that that live stream makes you a YouTuber now, and that you've
got some content or work on YouTube.
It doesn't quite work like that.
I know a lot of people, they think, well, you know, I'm doing a live stream anyway.
I'll just add it as a destination but really, if we're being strategic,
we're thinking about YouTube first.
What content are we going to have that's going to work on YouTube.
And by doing the planning research, we're going to find out the exact
content that we should create.
We're going to find out the right title that we should use.
And we're going to figure out just the small nuances when it
comes to creating the content that we know people are looking for.
And that's really what planning and research is all about on YouTube.
It's about understanding your niche and your audience and creating
content that you know they've got some kind of search intent for.
Because you've got to remember that YouTube is a search engine.
It's not somewhere that people just go and browse.
They do do that, by the way.
They do browse.
Some people love YouTube and they'll sit and look for stuff to watch, of course.
But the primary function is that it's a search engine.
People are looking for something.
They have something called a search intent.
Now, before we talk about these five places, I will say that there's this
phrase, this golden phrase, in the YouTube world that most professional
YouTubers will say and understand and it is that YouTube is trying to
show the right piece of content to the right person at the right time.
I wish I created this phrase.
I didn't, I heard this phrase first from Tim Schmoyer.
It was at a VidSummit, I think, in LA in 2018.
And when I heard this, it really made loads of sense to me.
And actually, a lot of people talk about algorithms and that kind of thing.
But if you focus on this golden phrase, that YouTube is trying to show the right
piece of content to the right person at the right time, then it kind of takes
away this idea that there's an algorithm.
That is what the algorithm is doing fundamentally.
Of course it has other things, like it understands what your habits are in
terms of what videos you watch and how long you're prepared to stay on certain
types of videos, all that kind of stuff.
But just use that golden phrase as that's what the intent of the algorithm is.
So let's talk about these five places that you can do some research.
And I'll talk about them briefly in the workshop, as I mentioned.
Of course in the workshop I go into a little bit more detail with these
particular areas, but I'm going to give it you as best as I can in audio form, and of
course on YouTube, you can see me talking about this, but I'll try to give it to
you as best as I can without demoing it.
It's hard to talk about it without demoing it, but let's
just talk about it for a second.
So the first thing I get people to do when they're planning their content for their
channel, is I ask them to think of the first 10 to 20 questions that come to mind
when somebody new, a potential client or a new client comes into your world, into
your ecosystem, your business ecosystem.
What are the 10 to 20 questions they ask you all the time?
And you can brainstorm these ideas, put them on a piece of
paper or a note taking app.
I use Notion, for example, for coming up with ideas and storing ideas.
And then once you've got those 10 to 20 ideas, the brainstormed ideas, you
can then start doing some research and the best place to do this is on Google.
Now if you use Chrome like I do and you go and search for some of these
topics, there's a great plugin, Chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere.
What keywords Everywhere does is when you search for stuff, it shows
you the search volume for that.
So for example, if I put the search phrase, how to get your first
1000 subscribers on YouTube, it would show me that that search
phrase has 2,400 searches a month.
Keywords everywhere shows me that inside of the feed.
As I said, it's hard to show you this without actually
showing you what it looks like.
But the reason why this is important because it's not only does it show you
the search volume so you can start to compare different phrases, different
types of words, different ways to phrase that particular title and you
can see that changing one word takes it from a 2400 search volume per month
to an 80 search volume per month.
And of course, the one that's searched most often is probably
the one you want to go after.
Not entirely always true.
A guy I know called Justin Brown from Primal Video.
He goes after some of the lower search phrases as well.
And his idea is that if the search volume is quite low, not many people
will be going for it And so if he shows up they're more likely to watch
his videos, and then see some of his more popular ones as well, which will
then boost him up in the algorithm.
So I like Justin's approach is that is the first person I saw taking this
approach of not just going for the most searched phrases, but also going for
some of the lower search phrases as well.
But Keywords Everywhere gives you that so that's great.
I think it's a great little Chrome extension.
What also happens is in your browser, as you're searching for stuff, you'll
see related phrases on the right hand side as you sort of scroll down.
This is really great.
So if you think about those 10 to 20 phrases those 10 to 20
questions that you've been asked.
All of a sudden you start to get some other ideas as well.
And in that example, I gave you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers.
I noticed when I was searching for that, it would say things like how
to get your first 1000 subscribers in a day or in a week or fast.
So even though the topic and the content of those questions are probably the same
I could create three different videos, hit those three different audiences
and just tweak the videos a little bit.
You know, some people say to me, Oh, when I come to YouTube, the problem
I have is I feel like I'm saying the same thing over and over again.
Well, this allows you to say the same thing over and over again, but just
aim at a slightly different audience, a slightly different group of people that
are searching for those different phrases.
And it means that you don't have to feel like you're
repeating yourself all the time.
If I had 10 to 20 topics, and I looked at the research from Google and
saw that there was a few variations of that topic, I might find two,
three variations per topic, right?
So that gives me 60 versions of those videos to create.
And of course, everyone will be different.
Each time you film, it will be different.
If you publish one, let's say there's three variations of that, how to
get to 1,000 subscribers topic, I might publish one in January.
I might publish another one in September.
and another one the following year.
If I'm doing one video per week, which is the standard strategy, the
basic strategy for YouTube, then having those 60 videos is over a
year's worth of content, but it's all stuck in those first 20 questions.
And of course you can do advanced versions of those all sorts as
well, but let's stay on topic.
So Google research is the way to do it.
Use that Chrome extension Keywords Everywhere.
It costs about $1, about $2, something like 150, something
like that, per month to get these results in Keywords Everywhere.
So it's worth the investment, I think.
So the second place then is YouTube research.
So now you've taken a look at the phrases in Google.
Yes, it will give you some results, but now you can head over to YouTube
and there's a couple of things I want you to think about when you
go to YouTube to do this research.
Firstly is look at the title.
So if I do that same phrase, how to get your first 1000 subscribers on YouTube.
I'm just not going to say that again, just assume that that's
the phrase I'm talking about.
So if I search for that particular phrase, then what happens is the
results that I get don't necessarily have that phrase in the title.
This is a great indication that the titles are not the only way
in which YouTube understands who you are and your search intent.
It knows that you might be looking for the first 'how to
get your first 1,000 subscribers.
But based on what other people have watched, it says that actually the video
that you want to watch is 'how to get a thousand subscribers fast' or 'how to
get thousand subscribers in seven days'.
So it starts to show you some results that are different.
Again, you can use those titles to create different types of videos
I want you to look at YouTube and be curious about the results.
I want you to look at things like the thumbnails, which
thumbnails jump out at you.
When we're doing this planning research, we start to think about what we actually
click because click-through rate is one of the metrics that YouTube uses.
It's so important.
And so take a look at the thumbnail.
Look at the ones that you like.
Look at the different times.
When I did this particular search for that phrase, I found
things like before and afters.
So there was one where there was a graphic of a person in the middle and then it
would have zero days, and then it would have seven days and the zero was kind
of like black and dingy and the seven days was like green with confetti on it.
So it was showing you that there's a before and after.
These are great thumbnails.
If you can do before and afters in your channel and use thumbnails
in that way, they're going to capture people's attention.
They can see straight away from the thumbnail without any text on it, even
though it might say Day 0, Day 1, Day 7, whatever, with very little text, I should
say, you get kind of get an idea of what the video is going to show you, whilst
we're talking to that, a lot of the kind of key amount of words, something that
people ask me all the time is how many words should I have in my thumbnail.
3 to 5 is kind of the generally accepted amount of words that you should have.
So if you've only got a few words to use, then use the really key words that
you're going to have in those thumbnails.
You definitely shouldn't have the title of the video in your thumbnail.
And the title of the video is, think about it as two different
opportunities to reach the audience.
One is the title that clearly demonstrates what's in the video.
The other is a thumbnail, which elicits some kind of curiosity,
but also gives a good indication of what's might be in the video, right?
That's the key, eliciting the curiosity bit, because you don't want to give
it just clearly what's there unless like that, you know, Day 0, Day 7 one,
shows what's actually going to happen.
There's still some curiosity about how it happened.
I suppose that's the point there.
But think about it all the time.
And when I talk about curiosity, I'm saying to people in my academy,
my membership, like being a curious creator is so important.
Oh, I love the word curious creator.
Curious creator.
Immediately after this, after this episode, I'm going to
go and buy that domain name.
Because I'm a, I love a domain name, right?
Who doesn't love a domain name?
Let me know in the comments if you've got a million domain names.
Curious creator, I love that.
So be a curious creator because we want to kind of understand a little bit more about
this as we're doing our planning research.
This is really us getting deep into the research phase with this.
So that's YouTube.
Last thing I'll say about the YouTube research is that I want you to look
at the, you'll see a whole bunch of results where there's like millions of
subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views every now and again, you'll
see a YouTuber that's got a small number of subscribers and views like
use that as inspiration because a lot of the time, we're looking at this stuff
and we think, well how can we compete against all these people in the Top 10?
But you'll see that youtube still gives us smaller creators a chance in the Top 10.
It says if you're creating content consistently, and if you're publishing
new content, well, with all this old content, maybe your new fresher
content, even though you've got less subscribers, less views, could be
something that people are looking for.
Maybe they want that new relevant content.
So use that as inspiration, aspiration of you being a YouTuber
and getting your content out there.
So we've done three so far.
Brainstorming, Google Research, YouTube Research.
The next one I want to talk about is Answer the Public.
So, again, let me know in the comments if you've heard of Answer the Public.
I know it's quite a popular one now.
It's not so good anymore, I would say.
But if you're from Neil Patel's team, you're going to hate me for saying it.
But since Neil Patel bought it, all they want to do is monetise it.
They try to make you purchase a subscription to it all the time.
So it used to be really good.
It gives you loads of results, but it doesn't give you as many anymore,
unless you purchase a subscription.
But maybe worth purchasing the subscription, even if it's for a month
to go and do your research, to give you loads of ideas and what answer the
public is, you can put in a phrase.
So let's say for me, I might just put 1000 subscribers.
So I kind of shortened the phrase that I did before, not the long tail
phrase that we talked about earlier.
So I put 1000 subscribers.
And then it gives me all the prepositions.
So how to get 1000 subscribers.
When will I get 1000 subscribers?
And all the who's, you know, who, what, when, where, why that's the point,
who, what, when, where, why it gives you all of those prepositions and it
gives you all the different types of search phrases that people use with
those who, what, when, where, why, okay.
And it gives you in this nice little wheel and you can take a look at the
wheel or you can get it in a table format and you can export the table.
So you don't even have to know what the phrase is.
It will give you all of those ideas.
I would say that Keywords Everywhere gives you a similar sort of result set, right?
So you could do this with Keywords Everywhere.
I just think Answer The Public positions it in a better way, even though
that's now a paid product as well.
Okay.
So that's number four, Answer The Public.
And the last one that I think is super important, very valuable
and people still don't know about it and still not using it enough.
And that is of course ChatGPT, using AI.
So again, let me know in the comments if you've used ChatGPT for this.
So the way I use ChatGPT for ideas is I'll say, I am a YouTube mentor and video
expert and I teach businesses how to launch and grow their YouTube channels.
Please give me 10 video ideas that I can use to create, to
attract my ideal clients, right?
Some kind of prompt like that.
When you type in a phrase into ChatGPT, it's called a prompt.
So you put in some kind of prompt like that.
It will give you 10 ideas and then you could say things like act as a YouTube
and SEO expert or act as a copywriter or act as my ideal client or you can tell
it to act like a certain type of person in order to give you the results as well.
So that's really useful.
You can also do great things like I can say, I need a YouTube planner to
plan my videos and it will give you a nice little Excel planner that you can
use to keep note of all your videos.
I really like that.
It's been very useful for us in the past.
So, I just want to summarise those things, those five areas.
Like I said, we do this in a 90 minute workshop, so much more detail.
I give you loads more YouTube tips and stuff, but I just want
to talk about those five things.
So the first one is using your own expertise, your own expert
status to understand the 10 to 20 ideas that people come up with.
The second one is going into Google.
One thing I didn't mention is if you do a search phrase, so 'how to get your first
1,000 subscribers', if I remove the how to get and put 1,000 subscribers and then I
put an underscore before the word 1,000, you know the 1,000 in numbers, it will
give me all the prepositions as well, and it'll give me a bunch of different ideas
So that's another little tip for you.
See, there's loads more.
They all come to me randomly
brainstorming, Google Research, YouTube research.
So in YouTube research, we're gonna be more curious.
We're gonna get some more ideas from there.
We've got Answer The Public as research, and then we've got ChatGPT as research.
And when you do all of those things and put all those things together, you
could quite easily find a year's worth of content just by doing that research
in those different places, right?
If you do this.
And it helps you get to the next step, please go and leave me a comment.
Please, if you're listening to this in audio format, go and leave me a review.
A positive review, please, on the platforms.
I'm going to send this video to anybody that asks me about planning from
now on because I think the advice in here is great and I hope you agree.
All right.
Thanks so much for watching.
Thanks so much for listening.
Don't forget to follow me, go and subscribe to my YouTube channel and
I'll see you next or you will hear me in the next podcast episode.
My name's Matt Hughes, King of Video.
See you then.