on youtube there is a wealth of information to help creators grow their channels but most of it is a dangerous distraction from what really matters arguments about tags and wondering if you should or shouldn't ask people to subscribe and not fixes for your problem getting better viewer attention is so if you're sitting there frustrated that everything you do seems to change nothing then it's time to shift all of your focus to making videos that keep your viewers eyes glued to the screen now i'm not going to sit here and say i have 80 retention on
every video because that's just not true but it is possible and just knowing that information is the important part of this because retention should be about always trying to improve your videos not just aiming for a single magic number so i set out to try and find a way to show you some of the best retention tips going and that's when i remembered a youtuber with 1.6 million subscribers someone who smashes out hit after hit and is one of the best at keeping you interested in her content and her name shelby church now whether you've
heard of shelby or not pulling apart her videos with me are going to let you in on some of the top retention techniques big youtube channels use all of the time without you even realizing but right now you're probably wondering what is a good retention percentage for a video i'm afraid to say a good percentage isn't 50 or 60 it's 85 in the case of mr beast what i want you to realize is this number doesn't matter at all what matters is how you react to this number when you see it a good audience retention
percentage is always about trying to beat your previous personal best so i dedicated quite a lot of time to watch one of shelby's videos over and over again to analyze what it is that she does to make such engrossing content and the first thing that stuck out more than anything else is that shelby is an epic storyteller story is incredibly important when it comes to getting a high viewer retention percentage and keeping people interested now you can simply tell a story by just saying one like i did at the start of this remember this but
just telling a story is only scratching the surface of what's possible here really you need to show it the shelby way so to learn more about retention i focused on one of shelby's videos that she made about how to make money using the writing platform medium because she managed to make a really impressive video without leaving her bedroom which meant i had to watch the same video over and over again so let's kick this off by analyzing how shelby creates intros and in particular her hook these days with everyone being stuck at home you might
be looking for a way to make money online so the line here is these days of everyone being stuck at home you might be looking for a way to make more money online now i mentioned in my watch time video that you want to work out what your viewers really care about within the video you are making and shelby's intro hits her viewers interest hard because it was released at the start of the pandemic when people were worried about making money so to the viewer it's like she's reading their minds but not only that by
watching her videos there was clearly another layer to her storytelling and that's that she tells her story using b-roll so let me get you up to speed with what b-roll is exactly me right now talking to you this is known as a-roll it's the narrative part of the video b-roll is the footage that goes on top of the a-roll and that helps to tell a story the important thing here is your b-roll needs to work with what's being said by the a-roll so the opening line these days with everyone being stuck at home you might
be looking for ways to make money then show shelby at home looking a bit worried also what i love about this shot is the way she's sat on her chair kind of isolated makes it feel like she's more alone and this is how a lot of people would have been feeling it could have been about the 10th time of watching the videos intro when something else stuck out like a sore pair of eyes that have been watching the same video over and over again and that was the pace shelby has 10 different changes of scene
in the first 20 seconds in fact one shot is never on screen for more than three seconds and the second part of her intro sets up her viewers to what the channel is about now this is often a place that kills retention and slows things down because people feel the need to elaborate as to what their channel is about and then some people love to show logo stingers and a montage of video clips that just get in the way of what your viewers care about here shelby does exactly what those kind of stingers attempt to
do but in a way that's really interesting and useful and she says on my channel we've already gone over a bunch of ways people do this with youtube podcasts amazon even airbnb by talking about the past what she was really doing was letting people know not just what she's about but what else is on her channel that they can watch after too now the next thing about this intro which might surprise you is that in the first 60 seconds shelby's only on camera talking for 18 seconds everything else is b-roll in fact there are 19
clips of b-roll in the first 60 seconds here so almost two-thirds of her opening minute she's not on screen talking which tells you just how important it is to add other video clips and keep things going so that's the first thing i want you to try and do to boost your attention is to film footage that helps you tell a visual story which you are then going to add to your a-roll and then try to get as close as you can to only ever being on screen for a third of the video so i felt
like 20 views of the first 60 seconds of this video was probably enough and i moved on to the main part of the video to find out how exactly shelby kept our attention for the rest of it now if you were hoping that you would only need to do 60 seconds of non-stop footage changes but i'm afraid it's not that easy this shelby maintains her storytelling and b-roll at the same pace throughout the entire video the next 10 and a half minutes use the same techniques as the first 60 seconds and the thing that makes
this style so genius is it never feels like you're watching an educational video not once i kept watching the video and the next thing that stuck out was how shelby's retention busting video was a personal journey too and viewers love a journey so four minutes 36 seconds into the video this is the part where the story really kicks off and i just love what she does to hold your attention watch this first things first time to write something we need something to write about i decided to just transcribe one of my videos that's already done
really well on youtube did you notice that i'm gonna play it again but this is something shelby absolutely dominates with okay first things first time to write something we need something to write about i decided to just transcribe one of my videos that's already done really well what shelby does is she has a clip in the past and in the past she's wearing a different colored outfit and it's a different camera angle to what we've seen so far and she says okay first things first time to start writing something so the viewers suddenly transported back
in time to the start of her personal journey where she's going to try and write an article for obedient and then straight after that her voice comes in as the narrator and fills you in with what happened after that the whole video just keeps jumping back and forth between past tense and present narrative so it's multi-dimensional content and that is just a beast for your attention because it's not predictable now it's not easy to do i've been trying to do it in this video and i don't know if i've pulled it off so the next
thing to try for retention is to develop a personal story within your content record yourself doing the thing you were trying to teach and talk to the camera during it to discuss what you're doing and what stage you're at and then jump in and record a voiceover and narrate what actually happened after to speed the story up and fill in the gaps of course using b-roll the whole way to make it more interesting i don't actually wear glasses but there was still one thing on my mind how can you guys make videos like this so
i mentioned earlier that shelby made this without leaving her home so she does an amazing job of keeping this visually interesting without really having much to show and that's where i'm going to start by looking at her set with you now with all respect to shelby there's nothing special about this setup but at the same time that's exactly why it's fantastic for you because i think anyone could get this great look without it being overly complicated so here there's two doors behind them we know from another shot that her bed's in this room too so
it's not a big room that's important because most people don't have giant filming spaces but there are also no distractions it's tidy it's minimal it's real and she's not even hitting her wires or hard drives if you're spending ages on your setup every time you film you're worried about all the finest details spend that time on working out how to tell your story instead because it's clearly more important so that's her set what kind of kit do you need to make this work well the good news is shelby's not actually using a really expensive camera
here at all she shot this on the panasonic gh5 but actually there's some things shelby does that you can do no matter what the camera you have is or your budget that's going to help you with your attention and the first thing i want to talk to you about is how she uses movement now what you'll notice a lot about shelby's footage is there is always movement you see that there it's very slight when it comes to retention this slight movement does keep people interested i'll give you an example to show you what i mean
with three static clips followed by the same clicks with some movement the first thing you're going to notice is the static look okay and when people watch them you won't offend them but when you just add a tiny bit of movement to them like this you can see straight away that suddenly the clips just look better right so try this when you have your b-roll put it into your editing software and animate it slightly you can do this on almost all editing software if yours can't i'm afraid it's time to upgrade if you're serious about
this enlarge your image by about 15 to 20 so it doesn't lose too much quality and then you can add what's called a keyframe here shuffle down the clip add another keyframe here and then on this last keyframe move the b-roll to the right or the left if we watch that back you can see there's a very subtle movement the other option is to zoom in a little too so you hit the keyframe and shuffle down the clip a little and then zoom in and you get this very subtle movement in again now don't rush
this movement you want it to be slow and steady if it looks fast it looks rubbish now as i watched shelby's video one thing stuck out as very smart she clearly didn't have many options to film because there's a pandemic going on and she's got to stay at home so when you don't have things to film you have to get creative so instead she filmed herself in action and acted out some scenes so if you don't have anything that interesting to film for b-roll act out your own scenarios to tell the visual story now your
camera angles are the next thing that are going to help you make your content more interesting and boost retention now i'm not going to go into cinematography here but what i want you to think about is how you can get more for less so the amount of b-roll shelby uses is pretty epic and you might not have enough time to get all of this so the first thing to do is to always shoot a wide and a close of your setup you can then in the edit jump between these two and that's going to help
keep people interested and tell your story and this is another retention attention keeper so shelby's screenshots and graphics are really well put together and the great news is they're actually pretty simple to achieve if we look at her first screenshot she's using it to help tell a story but you can see that the text gives it the interest and that movement now i've taken that clip and i've added a little bit of movement to it which personally i prefer and i think it just takes it to another level the next thing here could actually just
be a photo and in the edit it looks like they've just added some movement to it so remember you don't always have to film stuff you can just take photos and add that motion and they're great for helping tell a story next how shelby uses text is something that really works too she uses it to give you the timeline of a story by telling you what day she's on and by the way i don't want to ruin this for you we don't actually need to film this over multiple days shelby might have but it's way
easier to make a video like this that tells a story if you just film it all on the same day change outfits and then act out the whole thing sorry if i'm ruining the magic of youtube here but it really does save a lot of time the text also backs up big points and she fills the screen with it it's another element that keeps it visual and moving what become apparent with shelby's videos was that the story in the timeline was really the tough part to grasp so i think the way that shelby uses music
throughout her whole piece also adds to the interest and the retention she's just got this chilled beat going on and it gives it a little bit more energy so it's not just one song on repeat but like a film it's got its own little soundtrack importantly though it never interferes with the narrative now that's a lot of work right and really you have to make a decision this will take you a lot more time but you need to start trying new things and leveling up your videos because if you keep just making videos and wishing
people watched for longer and never really change anything then nothing's going to change and if you spend all your time trying to work out how youtube works and you don't focus on your content you're going to learn a lot about youtube but you're still not going to make great videos because you can't hack quality in my next video i'm going to show you how to increase audience retention after you have uploaded your video
