I can't remember a time where I have liked or subscribed when someone asked me to I don't know if that's true for you I think really the key to this is the Creator's personality don't let viewers know the video is coming to an end William Sims Williams is a YouTube scriptwriter who has worked on videos for the likes of Brian Johnson Olia Matt Gray and Ali Abdul in this video he's about to reveal how he works on these scripts to create strong hooks improve viewer retention and engagement how we can instantly get better at writing
our scripts and how to use chat gbt to elevate your videos enjoy so for the majority of people that are watching this right now they're probably just getting started with YouTube or they've made a couple of videos but they're struggling with the writing their YouTube scripts what advice would you give them and what are some of the common mistakes to avoid when writing YouTube videos I think my main advice would be don't sit down and write a whole script if you've never done a YouTube video before don't do it all word for word and then
talk into the teleprompter like this following all the words that's there are a few problems with that first I think it's easier to find your voice if you talk to camera a bit beforehand if you've made a few more relaxed videos you become confident with how you sound on camera normally when it's just words coming from your brain that way you have something to compare with how you sound when you're reading from a script because even people who are really good performers on camera they're like natural talents when you stick a script in front of
them for the first few times they can sound wooden they can think I really don't like this screw scripting it just doesn't work for me so yeah I would say make sure that you've done a little bit of work on camera before you turn to scripts so once you've done that I think a good way to dip your toes into script writing is just make a bullet point list all the things you want to cover in your video that's the next step so have a think about what you're going to say don't write it out
word for word but have a bullet points and then sub bullet points for each kind of section once you've done that I think you can then move on to writing your Your Hooks word for word so the first 30 seconds in the video is the most high stakes impactful that's when people decide whether they're going to click or not that's when the most drop-off happens so if you can make that bit as tightly scripted and planned out as you can that will give you the highest I guess return on investment in terms of scripting and
once you're comfortable with scripting hooks that work go more into fully scripting your videos what are some of the things that you see a lot of YouTube creators do in that hook that is just completely wrong how can they improve that I think a really valuable lesson comes from Johnny Harris and his his approach is you always want to be giving some sort of visual context for what you're talking about even maybe before you're talking about it so his classic technique is look at this bridge in Colombia there are thousands of people crossing this bridge
every single day looking for work in a neighboring country why are they doing that there is some information in that but it's not really kind of dense like recent kind of migration crises between Colombia and the neighboring Country Have Made It really difficult for people to find work and this has led to blah blah blah that you see how the first one is more interesting because you've immediately given some people something tangible to kind of look at and be immersed in and kind of understand on a very Primal level so I think that's a mistake
that YouTubers can make is diving too much into giving lots of dense information about what they're going to do without having hooked the viewer with an interesting visual or an idea or just an image that they can that that will kind of light up those kind of lizard parts of their brain yeah it sounds like the the goal of a hook is really to be as concise as as possible and to ignite those questions that make someone really want to know why people are crossing that bridge as opposed to having all of this context that
is not necessarily needed and you can probably provide that later in the video between the the scripting process and potentially when you're reading a bullet pointed script when you're actually recording the video how do you know what's needed in the script and what isn't because I think sometimes YouTubers are so close to the script because they are the ones that wrote it that it's a little bit hard to see the forest from the trees whereas a scriptwriter they see it from a third-party objective perspective where they know exactly what's needed and what's not how do
you work with YouTubers in that regard and for those that aren't working with a scriptwriter and are doing this themselves how can people get better at developing that skill to be able to self-edit and know exactly what needs to be within a script well yeah I think that's one of the nice things about working with a scriptwriter is that you just you have two brains instead of one and that immediately makes things easier if you think about it if you're Sat by yourself with a video or a script and you're thinking do I need to
include this sometimes just having another person saying this bit is kind of boring right shall we cut it is enough for you to be like yeah you know what you're right um and the more expertise that person has and the more scripts they've read and the more videos they've watched I think the better their their opinion on that is going to be obviously it's different for different niches you you as the Creator usually understand your audience best and if you've made hundreds of videos you you will probably start developing like a sixth sense for what
people are gonna enjoy and what they're not gonna enjoy tips for people who don't have access to scriptwriters for self-editing I think there's a balance to be struck between filming too much and filming too little if you film too little and you just get the bare minimum without adding in maybe a little bit more than you need to that can make it feel in the when you're sat down editing you can feel very easily oh I I wish I'd expanded on that point a little bit more so you do need to give yourself a little
bit of breathing room remember you can cut stuff down in the edit what you don't want to do is to Ramble On for so long that when it comes to the editing time you you're almost having to put in hours and hours of efforts to make it feel as if it was tightly scripted and filmed that's that I think is a waste of everyone's time and probably leads to a worse quality result because I think people can tell if you are moving naturally from one point to another or if there is like a 10 hole
minutes that was cut out yeah I think one of the the interesting things that you mentioned there was around making so many videos that you kind of inherently understand your audience how important would you say is understanding your audience in script writing and how do you recommend beginners learn about Their audience I think I could give probably value to most YouTubers in any genre because there are some basics of Storytelling and script writing that apply everywhere but I wouldn't feel as confident diving into totally different genre that I've never worked in before and that I
don't watch myself just because everything has its uh yeah every genre has its Norms my advice for creators would be try to watch as much other videos in your genre as possible to get an idea for what your V what your viewers enjoy and watch videos outside of your genre in order to get interesting ideas for how to frame things that maybe your viewers haven't seen but they would really enjoy so let's say you have a makeup Channel you do makeup tutorials you show people how the makeup looks most people do all this sat down
at home with with good Lighting in a stationary environment you've gone and like watched some Casey neistat Vlogs and you're like oh I kind of like this guy's weird vibe maybe do one video where you experiment and you see what it's like to again maybe this exists already I don't I don't know that the makeup genre but if you decide to make a video where you are going around town being more active letting people see how it looks in a more kind of gritty real life engaging way like Casey does and that is a way
to inject kind of new new life into your genre even while you understand your viewers okay so shifting gears a little bit here could you walk us through your process from the hook to the call of action at the end of the video I really want to understand how you structure a YouTube video from the very beginning I'm guessing that would be the research and understanding what's needs what needs to go into the video then the structure then actually writing the script yeah so I think the first step is research that that is talking to
the Creator about what is what are all the elements that you want to put into the script ideally we'd like have a call or they'd put a list of bullet points maybe they'd be like well I generally want to talk about x y and z so then I come up with a structure so I think the video could look like this and yeah they sign off on on that structure and then the writing work begins so generally I think you can split YouTube videos into the hook the first 30 seconds when you're making that sales
pitch you're getting people interested it's usually a lot of thought goes into that then you have the introduction which can be the same as the hook but I would say is usually the first maybe 45 seconds that's when you're expanding a little bit on your original idea the story is getting started and yeah by the end of the introduction the viewer should have everything they need to understand what is going to happen next they should be fully invested then you have I guess what I think about as I think this is kind of the middle
section of the script this is where you I think have you have a lot of creative freedom with hook and introduction but the middle section is when you deliver the the basic content that you want to get across so if it's a listicle if it's like say my daily skin routine this is the point where you'd be saying okay so first thing I do is X the second thing I do is y then I use a moisturizer and then finally I use a cleanser that's yeah that's the middle section then finally you have the ending
the closing of the video I my preferred method for closing out a video is to end as soon as possible don't have a long outro don't let viewers know that the video is coming to an end what you want to avoid is saying a minute or two before the video ends so guys I really hope you enjoyed that video or so yeah that's it that's my skincare routine because then retention will tank I you you should either be providing more entertainment or context or you should be saying alright guys thanks for watching uh and then
the final part of the video is the call to action uh right at the end where you'll usually either point someone towards one of your other videos or you'll simply say thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one something like that my preference is either to finish the video in a really sudden way or to pitch give someone a mini pitch maybe 10 seconds on why they should watch another one of your videos so this video is all about skin care my general skincare routine but the thing that's I found that really works
for wrinkles under the eyes is this thing that I talk about in this video here that I think creates a good bridge for someone to go and watch more of your content on your channel get more invested in what you're talking about and it also sends a signal to YouTube that this was a good video not only did the person watching enjoy it and watch it all the way to the end because remember at the end most people have left the people who are still with you are people who are invested enough to watch all
the way to the end but yeah you're also telling YouTube these people then go and they watch more stuff on my channel so please spread the word via the algorithm that people should watch more yeah that's completely right the more that you can keep someone on YouTube watching as many of your videos in a chain as possible always helps your YouTube channel to be pushed by YouTube a little bit more so you mentioned a few times in your answer there around incorporating course of actions and how you can best do that at the end of
the video to get someone to watch another video a lot of YouTubers still like to include you know be sure to like And subscribe and and all of those kind of things you know hit the notification Bell in the middle of the video and the clients I work with whenever they've done that you you just see like a huge dip in retention what are your thoughts on that do you think we should cut them out completely or have you found a way to include all of that within your scripts without disrupting the flow of content
for that viewing experience what I'm saying right now is not very data driven but never have I I think I I can't remember a time where I have liked or subscribed when someone asked me to I don't know if that's true for you like I don't know if that's true for viewers YouTube doesn't give us a a way to tell if you know at what point in the video Someone clicked like or subscribe it would be really interesting if they did but yeah I generally advise people to not include it in the scripts I think
it breaks the immersion it takes up a few valuable seconds maybe it works better for some niches than others in a really tight-knit Community like one single video game that's a bit more Niche if you say hi guys it would mean a lot to me if you liked and subscribed to my channel so I can carry on making this content for free then maybe a lot more people would be like you know what let's let's give this person some credit Let's help them out that I think is fine but if you're making videos that are
targeted at a more General audience I would say don't bother and if you are going to do it please don't do it at the start before you've delivered any value just I would save it for maybe the middle or sort of the last third of your video when you when you can maybe quickly say hi guys I really hope you're enjoying these tips if you if you want to like or subscribe that would be amazing so you can see more of my content okay on to the next point something like that that's how I would
approach it so I've never actually subscribed to anyone who has said hey be sure to subscribe and like and hit notification Bell and I do find that that seems to be the case with a lot of the clients I work for um but I do find that the clients I work for are more in like the education Niche Their audience is a little bit older and like their their 20s their 30s their 40s onwards but actually when I was a YouTuber uh 10 years ago on a gaming YouTube channel I actually found that children because
there was like children and teenagers who are watching my my Minecraft content they would actually like And subscribe and I don't know maybe they're just more susceptible to believing like oh if we hit 10 000 likes you know I'll upload a new video uh this weekend I would always get 10 000 likes and so I guess it really depends on like the target audience and and I know Mr Beast was used to this all of the time right but if you subscribe you win a free cookie which I don't know how Mr Beast is going
to get free cookies to like 10 million people when he was uh uploading videos you know a couple years back but it used to work he always used to get like subscribers and likes because of and he has mentioned before that incentivizing his audience in that way did result in a lot more like certainly and comments and subscribers and things like that so I think it really depends on how well you know your audience and and the type of audience that you have but I know for me like children and teenagers really do love that
stuff but I think if you are in your 20s or above and that is your target audience they're most likely not going to like And subscribe and if you spend even just like 20 seconds talking about that I've always seen people who just skip ahead in your video which obviously harms retention and it's such a minor little thing um you know losing 10 seconds or 20 seconds here but well if you know it's something that is going to harm the retention just don't do it you know just cut it out because it's it's just minor
but every little helps and so I I always kind of recommend to people that there's no point having the like And subscribe and hit notification Bell in the middle of the video and likewise review link the current video that you have to another video on your channel that is also going to be of value to someone and there is a natural link where they can continue to binge watch all of your content yeah I I saw Mr Beast using a bit of the dark arts recently I think on the Colin Samir podcast or maybe it
was another video I can't quite remember but he was saying at the beginning I remember guys you have to watch the whole thing otherwise you'll have seven years of bad luck or something like that which you know maybe you don't believe it but it gives that little extra bit of incentive for you to watch a bit longer right which I find scary I think I think something else you can do to to increase engagement is just ask a genuine question like hey guys if you have got experience of this yourself or you have recommendation for
me can you please leave it in the comments because I would love to read that and I read all of my comments something like that I think because YouTube tracks how much people are engaging with your video in terms of comments as well as likes and um and Views so I think that's that's useful for someone who's struggling to get good at writing scripts are there any mindset shifts or ways of thinking about scripts that could help them to see the writing process in a new way that can really help them to get better at
writing really clear and concise scripts what really helped me when I was just starting out was to remind myself that I am writing this down on on a screen so it might look like an essay or an article but it is not going to be an essay or an article someone is going to be reading this out and it's going to be on video you want to try and write as as if you were saying it out loud obviously that's classic writing advice it's way harder to actually it's way easy to actually say than do
so what I would recommend is after you've written something out read it out loud even if you're writing for someone else just read it out loud and see if it sounds natural or not you can even use AI like chat gbt to simplify your writing or to um yeah replace longer more complicated words with shorter ones if that works works well that's what I would mainly recommend if someone is trying to shift their mindset is just try and think of it as words you will be saying not words that someone will ever be reading off
a page a question I want to ask you is that on YouTube there tends to be two types of contents you have the entertainers and you also have the Educators and there are some people who are a bit of a blend in between the two which a lot of people refer to as edutainment YouTubers how do you go about balancing information and entertainment within a script because I think it's it's quite a hard thing to do for a lot of YouTubers to really understand how can I provide value but make this in an interesting and
fun way that keeps people engaged without it resulting in skits and gags and jokes and props and all sorts of things is there some sort of formula that you you follow or is there any kind of advice that you can give to people regarding that I think really the key to this is the Creator's personality Tom Scott's personality is different to say the veritasium guy's personality that is so one might be a little bit more serious the other one might be a little bit more light-hearted or just have a maybe like a slightly sarcastic delivery
or something like this I think the very first thing you can do to make your videos more entertaining is to maybe lean a bit into that personality amp it up a bit if you naturally tend towards a certain type of humor just try to include a little bit more of that on the fly when you're reading things out you don't need to set up gags and jokes for example to include humor I think to bring up Casey neistat again as an example his stuff is often very funny but it's quite it's not that he's joking
around all the time he's just he puts himself in weird interesting situations and his then totally deadpan about it so I think a good way approaching this is as your your foundation most YouTube channels have someone who's presenting the main kind of talent and I think really zero in on what their sense of humor is if you want to include humor what do they find entertaining or interesting to do so in terms of injecting entertainment into a script when you're writing it I think again just the main thing to remember is what are the stakes
why should people care if you want to look at uh say if you want to look at some interesting scientific phenomenon in the Antarctic you need to really make people care and maybe describe why this is such a big deal or why no one else has ever filmed it why you are scared about going to film it because there's maybe some risk to yourself describe how difficult it was to get out there when you're when you're there in the Antarctic which you obviously have the budget to do make it clear that you are um having
a crazy time and this is the the the the the maddest thing that's ever happened to you all of that stuff you can work into a script you can just put a bullet point and say describe how I am feeling right now that type of thing will add a lot of entertainment value to your video even if you're sticking purely to factual things so when it comes to scriptwriting at the moment there seems to be two caps there seems to be those that will write a script which isn't really a script it's just a couple
of bullet points that they look at and then look at their camera talk look back at the bullet points and do that throughout the video and a lot of that is kind of off the cuff it's it's you know the bullet points are there to kind of keep them Loosely on track but really it comes off the Dome whenever they're talking and then you have the second Camp which are those that read from a teleprompter the scripts are written word for word either by themselves or by a scriptwriter in your view how important are teleprompter
word for words scripts compared to bullet point scripts where people really just freestyle I think it's a time and place for both I think teleprompter scripts are very useful if you have so much to say on a topic that you could just go on and on forever you could do a Five Hour podcast on it if you're filming a video that is like my journey from being broke to being a millionaire you know how are you gonna how are you going to say all that you could sit down and you could speak off the top
of your head and sure you would probably often have really good sound bites that you could edit into a video if you took the time but where where teleprompting really comes into its own is honing that down into a really concise story where you can sit down talk the camera for 30 minutes and have as you're saying like a really tightly crafted story that respects the audience's time and delivers a maximum in information or entertainment per minute I think equally scripting is really useful if it's a very information dense script so as you mentioned productive
skin care routine there's a lot of information and data and names of products if you were always looking down at a laptop to look at the bullet points and look at the data and try to translate that into something you can say for the camera that would take up a lot of time when you're filming it would also come across less smoothly because there would be lots of cuts and it would be a bit jarring and it would also be more draining for you as the talent talking to the camera because you're having to think
rather than just being able to focus on giving a good performance that said I think it's a waste of time to script out videos that you know like the back of your hand so if you want to review the new Macbook Air and and you want to make it a fairly low-key video and you have five points of things you like about it Five Points things you don't like about it and you know that you can stick to those points without waffling I don't think you necessarily need to script that out word for word because
the the time investment probably doesn't translate into a concision of the video yeah I found that to be the case when I write scripts for my own videos sometimes I have used the bullet point method and easy to write those scripts and I find that I enjoy writing those videos more I say writing but it's literally just putting out 15 different bullet points um but but what tends to happen I find is sometimes when it gets to the edit part of the video content creation process I realized oh like there would have been better some
context there or I'm not sure if you know someone understood that part because I was assuming something in my own brain that I didn't verbalize whereas when I'm having to write a word for word script it really forces me to think what are the foundational points here that I can build upon to get someone to understand what it is that I'm making in the video and I think potentially it might be a case of having a 50 50 blend of the two where you try and write a a rough first draft that is as close
to word for word as possible and then you turn that into bullet points you know maybe even potentially running through that very rough first draft through chat gbt and saying hey can you summarize this into 15 bullet points and then that is what you go with when you're recording your video something else that really helps that scripting really helps with is it makes you really think what am I saying do I know what I'm saying do I know all the points I'm gonna make really it's very easy to look at your five bullet points and
think yeah I got this I I know basically what I'm gonna say here but when it comes to time for filming you sit down you're like oh I don't know if this all hangs together actually and if you are a one-man band you're filming in your bedroom with your camera you don't have a whole team hanging around your studio the stakes are not as high but if you're suddenly sat there with a videographer a YouTube producer as well maybe the editor is expecting like a few videos that you're going to film that day because you're
batch filming and you're suddenly sat around trying to think Hmm how am I going to say this really suddenly you're wasting a lot of time and it becomes really frustrating for you so yeah scripting is a way of getting that out of the way as soon as possible and just making filming a breeze that said I think there are definitely creators who should not script out things word for word um at least not the whole video so or where it just doesn't make sense for them to do that so someone like Emma Chamberlain for example
does a vlog of like a her whole day or maybe big sections of her day her whole thing is getting content out fairly quickly being really off the cuff talking about whatever is happening right now maybe she does a few takes I'm not entirely sure but if she was trying to script out her thoughts or a vlog every day that would just never work similarly creators like there's one I really like guy called Beau miles he's this Australian um Outdoor Adventure type guy all he needs to do for his videos to work is to have
a really interesting premise like I'm gonna run a marathon one mile an hour for 26 hours right that's just such an interesting idea what he then needs to nail is the production so is there someone there with a camera to film him capture all the interesting stuff that's going to happen and yeah he just needs to focus on um being in the moment talking to the camera being authentic capturing his real feelings he doesn't need to script that out that would be ridiculous um and so yeah I think that's something to bear in mind when
you're thinking should I script or should I not script is how much of your videos dependent on how you are feeling in the moment are you responding to things that are happening in real time or you just sat down in a closed off environment where it's just your thoughts and the camera and scripting probably works better for the second so one of the things we have touched on uh just a moment ago was chat GPT and since you started writing scripts for YouTubers chat gbt has just taken over absolutely everything how has that affected you
and how can YouTubers best use something like Chachi BT to help them write better scripts or would you say you know stay away from it use your own brain and try and write your own Scripts one thing interesting I came across an interview with Sam Altman the the founder of openai who who created champ gbt was saying his biggest use case for champ GPT by by a long way is summarization chat GPT and other AI tools that are similar to it are really good for well I say really good they often mess up but they're
useful for feeding a lot of data and text to and getting them to give you their summary of what's going on I treat chat GPT more as like a writing companion like a really erratic strange writing companion who has really weird thoughts most of the time or very generic thoughts most of the time but 10 of the time it's something that's interesting or useful that I can incorporate into my script if you were to write a whole script just using chat GPT if you were to just write in um hi please write me a script
about X you'd get a pretty basic outcome and that is when most people stop they're like oh this thing is rubbish it just gives me this really generic basic content if you spend a little bit more time doing the prompts if you say I want a review of the MacBook new Macbook Pro here are all of its specs I want this review written in the style of Ali abdal I want it to be 2 000 words long I want you to include a balance of humor and sarcasm and I want you to wrap up by
pointing towards this video of mine then you get a more interesting result the thing is the more prompting you do the more you are in a sense writing out the video yourself so how's it affected my work I would say it's made research in some ways more easier because I can summarize things I can ask it for summaries of whole YouTube videos if I paste in the transcript I think it's also useful as a second opinion once I've gotten a script written I can easily ask chatgpt hey can you rewrite this section or can you
simplify this section for me it will give me suggestions on how to simplify it or use different wording and often I'll think ah yeah that is actually a simpler faster more elegant way of saying it I'll just use that but for actually constructing how a script is going to flow and forgetting wording that works right for the specific Creator I think that is still really useful to have a scriptwriter on board cool so thanks so much for providing us with your script writing wisdom gwilliam um why can people find you yeah so uh I'm on
Twitter that's my main uh it's at William SW and I'm also I've also got a website which is goodmsw.com so you can find me there amazing well thanks so much for coming along and speaking to us and we'll uh we'll catch you over on Twitter thanks Jimmy if you enjoyed that video with guillem consider subscribing and if you'd like to improve your YouTube scripts even more check out this episode with George Blackman who breaks down the scripts he has written for the likes of Mike Shake film Booth Alia
