something we get asked essentially every week and this won't surprise you is how do I get more views on YouTube that's kind of what our whole channel is about so I guess that makes sense but there are a lot of people trying to figure this out for themselves who have been at it for a very long time they've been on the grind and they are just not getting the results they want so even though I've answered this question a thousand times in the past I thought it was time to sit down and do a video
with some more up-to-date advice I want to go over three key elements to help you get more views I want to keep it as simple as possible so this can work for any channel of any size so let's get started the first thing we're going to discuss are titles going forward you should be looking to optimize your titles to the best of your ability because they can honestly be make or break so what makes a good title how do you find that information out in the first place well what I like to do is first
start by searching for videos that are in the niche that I'm in to see how they're titling their videos now the goal here isn't to just rip off somebody's title verbatim but it's actually to dive a little bit deeper and understand what is this audience interested in and what are they clicking on and surely you've seen creators across this platform borrowing specific titles or entire ideas from one another but the important thing here is that you're going to bring your own spin no matter what you're doing bringing your own spin to something isn't just the
right thing to do but it can also help you stand out you wouldn't want to make the same exact video as somebody else because everyone's already seen that one do your thing as you're doing research on titles and topics you're going to start to identify channels that are kind of your competition keeping a close eye on these channels is how you can better identify more opportunities in the future especially if a new trend comes up and we actually have a tool that will help you track your comp competitors and keep them all in one place
so you can get a nice Bird's eyee View and see what everyone's up to the link for that is down below but let's move on in my opinion there are two different types of titles on YouTube you have your search based titles and you have your browse based titles the difference between these two is as such the browse based titles are the ones that are going to appear in the YouTube home feed these are videos that people aren't actively searching for but the title is just so compelling that people keep clicking on it and YouTube
is just sharing it more and more the search based titles are a little more obvious right these are titles that are designed to get people to find them when they have a specific question or problem they're trying to solve so they use the search bar even though the line between search and browse is a bit blurry there is still a difference and here's an example let's say you're a cooking channel and you want to teach people how to make a burger well a great title for you in search might be how to make the perfect
burger it's clear it's simple and it's straight to the point however competing in that space topic-wise is a bit of a nightmare it's very very competitive so for the sake of your video and finding some new viewers let's dive a little bit deeper and say how to make the perfect keto Burger now these are both still very competitive spaces but I wanted to give a nice easy example to understand in one case you had a video that was about something very basic and in another case you were just a little more specific you had a
little more intent at the type of audience you were trying to capture and we saw that the results were better what we've basically just done is niched down and I'm going to go more into niche in a second but I also want to leave you with a browse example on this topic let's say you're a channel that makes burgers and you want to Target browse maybe your goal isn't to teach anybody anything What If instead you focused more on a story entertainment people could learn something along the way but what about a title like I
tried keto burgers for 30 days when you're targeting brows your goal might be to entertain and a good example of a Title Here might be I only ate keto burgers for 30 days no one would ever type this into search that's preposterous this video is designed to show up in the home feed and be framed as an entertaining challenge all right with titles done let's go back to Niche because I did mention it a couple times a niche is basically a particular audience on YouTube that you are trying to speak to when you make a
video if your entire channel can follow one particular Niche it can build a lot of momentum as long as there's an audience for what you're talking about that's because if one person watches one of your videos and they like it YouTube will typically recommend videos in your back catalog to them so if you talk a lot about the same type of topic or you talk about a lot of different topics but the same type of way or the same framing people might click on your older videos too this builds a watch history with the viewers
and now every time you upload people whether they subscribe or not are getting recommended your content because you are consistently in one particular Niche niches can be incredibly specific or they can be more Broad and it's really up to you how you approach how you're going to talk about topics on YouTube the best thing you can do is research more often than not whatever it is you're trying to do on YouTube is going to have already been done by somebody else this however is a good thing because it establishes a niche it means there is
an audience for that top and that's why those other channels are so successful so once you do that research you can see how people are titling those specific videos you can see how they cover topics and then you can determine what you can do to stand out in your Niche you don't want to do the same exact thing they're doing but some niches you don't have to try too hard to reinvent the wheel either sometimes niches are popular because people like to watch a lot of different creators give different takes and perspectives on a specific
topic so when you hear any of us in the YouTube growth space talk about Niche I don't want you to feel boxed in but if is important that you don't make a video about taking your dog for a walk one day and a video about fixing your car the next your channel should always be for a specific type of viewer starting smalla with a niche can be a great way to grow and then you can maybe be that person that is the first to kind of a new idea and you can be a Pioneer for
a whole bunch of other people taking inspiration from your video let's take a look at Elliot Roberts who typically does video essays a lot of it has to do with the music industry but sometimes they even talk about movies as well over the last three years they have seen massive growth given their very unique approach to the topics they discuss in their Niche a great example is this video essay on love and mercy which is a movie about the founder of the Beach Boys Brian Wilson that movie released over eight years before Elliot put out
this video so we're talking about a very Niche idea that still managed to get over half a million views and Counting so why did this happen well it does help that Elliot has been building up trust for years now with their audience Elliot has created a very unique style and personality all always shines through in these videos it really shows passion for what's being discussed and earlier I did mention watch History it also helps that Elliot's content is very bingeable so people are probably watching more than one video at a time when they go to
Elliot's Channel but with half a million views I'm certain a lot of viewers to this video were brand new to the entire channel so how does a movie that's over 8 years old get all of this attention so many years later well for starters it does help that Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys have surged in popularity over the last few years this is because Nostalgia for older music is starting to become a thing so Elliot understands there's a lot of people searching for information about the band but not a lot of people are talking
about this movie which means they may not even know it exists and this one video isn't really a one-off for Elliot he's done this multiple times across multiple videos you might look at 's Channel and think okay got it it's about the Beatles and Elvis and beach boys so artists from a long time ago okay cool I understand the niche well not so fast just because you're in a niche doesn't mean you can't take your Unique Style and experiment with an entirely different topic that's just kind of outside of what you would normally do when
Elliot did just that it turned out to be very very successful with titles and Niche out of the way it is now time to discuss thumbnails thumbnails can be a bit scary because there's a lot of creators out there who feel as though they need a specific set of design skills they're going to have to learn a whole bunch thumbnails are the way to Market your content a lot of times when people don't click on your video that means the only experience they ever had with your content was the thumbnail and the title The the
packaging of the whole thing so how do you design an eye-catching thumbnail even if you lack a typical design skill set well the way I Learned was trying to emulate what's working for other channels on YouTube what I did is that I picked a thumbnail software that I wanted to learn more about and once I kind of got my basic tutorials out of the way I would look at a thumbnail and I would try and recreate it with my own face and messaging that I wanted on it my thumbnail never turned out as good as
the source material that I was looking at but over time I would get better and better and when I would discover a roadblock in the software I was using I would look up a quick tutorial on how to overcome that roadblock and then I would learn something but that's just a quick tip on how to get a little bit better at using the software you really don't need to take this too too far let's look at Danny Gonzalez who has an incredibly successful Channel with over 6 million subscribers he's in the commentary Niche his thumbnails
are incredibly simple and yet intriguing and eye-catching for example a recent video he did was titled I made a fake AI this video already has 5 million views and no doubt the thumbnail played a massive part in the success of the video for from a design perspective there's just a few key elements you have Danny's face and he's looking very devious you have a fake like chat window open and then you have an arrow that says me and it's pointing at his phone faces on a thumbnail aren't always required but they can be very very
captivating they create an emotional connection and they can help explain the tone of the overall video after setting the tone you have the side of the thumbnail that is telling you what to expect in the video itself now you probably saw thumbnails like this when chat GPT first launch right A lot of people using a fake chat window where they'd ask chat GPT a ridiculous question and it would give a ridiculous answer but here Dany has turned that idea on its head in this thumbnail Danny is saying that he is the AI so it's a
familiar concept but with a new twist so think of thumbnails as a bit of extra real estate in this case the title says exactly what the video is about and the thumbnail is that extra bit of real estate that starts to get you into the content before you've even clicked on the video it gets your imagination going and you're already being introduced to the concepts that he's going to cover in the video before you've even given it a chance and that is the mark of a really really powerful way of packaging a video so if
you're going to use text make sure you're just not repeating the same exact words that are in the title you can use it to drive even more curiosity it's extra real estate so use it but to make this more confusing just like faces aren't always necessary text is also not always necessary this one from Danny has no text because it simply doesn't need it in this example he's showing not telling he's taking his face making an expression and then he's using a very well-known person Pedro Pascal to help start to build that Curiosity and the
title is Pedro Pascal in a terrible game ad a lot of people know who this is and so their eyes might be drawn to the title to see why a video is being made about him most important thing you can do when you're starting to learn how to design better thumbnails is to try and get out of the habit of making a thumbnail collage I say this because it's one of the biggest mistakes I see creators doing when they ask us how do I get more views on YouTube you take one look at their thumbnails
and a lot of them try to explain the entire video using the thumbnail keep it so so simple you want to explain the video enough to build Intrigue but you don't need to explain the entire video with every little pixel of that thumbnail think of it this way if you can only choose one thing about your video what is the one thing people absolutely need to know to actually click and watch the rest and that is how I answer that question when I get asked every single time except I have to be a lot quicker
so I hope this video was helpful the next video you want to watch is this one because as you start to get more views on YouTube you're probably going to want to know how do you get to 1,000 subscribers so there's even more tips in here for that
