I scripted 1,000 YouTube videos in the past 12 months I've written for 40 plus educational channels initi ranging from weight loss all the way to finance videos and I've been fortunate enough to write scripts for big names like vid IQ daav fogy and instantly Ai and during that time I've learned the script writing secrets that top 1% of YouTubers are hiding from you to make fire content that's why in this video I'm going to review everything that you need to know about how to script a viral video without wanting to rip your hair out wasting
hours and hours scripting or procrastinating endlessly letting your Channel with her like a sad little piece of what I found after talking to hundreds of YouTubers is that the reason that most people have such difficulty writing their scripts it's not because they're bad at writing but it's actually because they are failed multitaskers let me explain as humans for some reason we think that we can cook dinner wash our clothes watch TV and write a script all at the same time but Studies have proven time and time again that's simply not true when we multitask all
Focus gets split 100 different ways and a task that was meant to take 2 hours suddenly becomes a 10-hour AUD deal and that's a mistake that every beginner YouTuber makes they'll try to write the first half of the script while outlining the second half and do research for the hook all at the same time so you end up being unclear what you should prioritize when writing a script and this leads to decision fatigue if you want to write a viral script in just a few hours effortlessly you need to completely finish phase one of writing
any script the research phase during the research phase your job is to get all the information that you need to write your script and if your research is staro you won't have to score between 50 different websites searching for one piece of information while writing your hook or fleshing out the body I spend half my time writing my script in the research phase because I know that if I miss even a single piece of information it's going to take me twice as long to complete a video so there are two parts to researching a YouTube
video the first part is finding information that you want to include in the video this part's not too complicated if you write scripts you're probably doing some form of research already whether it's to get information or to find clips that you want to include in the edit but the second part of research is often overlooked and that is figuring out the existing supply of content it's super important to know what kind of videos have already been made in your Niche because you don't want to repeat what everyone else is saying if you repeat what everyone
is saying you won't stand out your video won't go viral that's it when you're scripting your video a Sure Fire way to make sure that you never go viral is to say the same thing as everyone else in your Niche let me tell you this you cannot be a parent if you want your content to actually stand out you need to have unique insights that other people don't have and when I'm talking about unique insights I'm talking about having a personal story or having a different way of presenting the same type of information and I'm
going to give you a couple examples right now a good example of this would be Alex osi's most viewed video on how to get so rich you question the meaning of money where he talks about the idea of Leverage in such a clear and concise way while adding personal stories so the way that he scripts it is so clear that just a simple presentation you know just doing PowerPoint on stage ended up becoming his most viewed video so because I want to get the same results as Alex mosy does with his YouTube when I'm doing
phase two of research I'm always spending time looking around other channels in my Niche to either figure out what hasn't been said before or how I can improve want a piece of content and then from there I'll create a thesis on how the video can be executed in a different or better way and let me say this again your video needs to be either different or better and when I think about making a video better it's with either better storytelling better analogies or better information for example one way that I'm making this video better is
that I don't see any videos on YouTube giving actionable scriptwriting advice and also most videos on script writing are less than 10 minutes long so I decided that I wanted to make a longer video so that I can pretty much give away all my scriptwriting knowledge which is exactly the goal of this Channel and if I'm thinking of making a video that's vastly different from the existing content I want to make sure that what I'm about to create has never been done before for example this video posted by Mason titled the YouTube growth Niche was
criticizing you know the YouTube growth Niche and talked about how people go into cycles of watching YouTube growth videos but never actually improved from watching them this video was super unique because no one had really came out and did some commentary on the YouTube growth Niche so this was completely different from what everyone else was doing and right now his video sitting at 100x outlier pretty good for a new channel now let's move on to the next step which is literally the most important part of writing a script yet everyone overlooks it and no I'm
not going to tell you that the hook is the most important part of the video because you already know that I'm talking about something that no one talks about when fleshing out the core content of the video too many times I see YouTubers jump straight from doing research to writing the full script and because of that they end up stressed out when they realize that the sequence of points doesn't really make sense when you're scripting out a long formam video that is 10 to 40 minutes long one of the most difficult things to do is
to make sure that the information flows from one point to another if at any point what you're saying does doesn't connect you will lose the viewers interest because they will think that it is poorly researched and the only reason why your script would not flow from one section to another is because you didn't outline the script before fleshing it out so that's why you need to freaking outline your script and when I'm talking about the outline the outline is basically a rough skeleton of the body which gives you an idea of what happens in the
start middle and end of the video what most people do is that they will just write a rough outline with some simple bullet points maybe they'll chbt a couple lines and call it a day but the problem with doing this is that you'll run into problems when you you are flushing out the script with chuty points most of the time the content will still be disconnected because you're not paying enough attention to whether each point makes sense literally everyone skips this step but you need to spend time outlining and not rely on some plug andplay
template because if you spend an hour or two outlining the script in bullet points visually you'll be able to see where the line one flows to line two and where the line two flows to line three and so on and so forth when you are reading the bullets you have an idea of how the video will flow if you are reading the outline and you can't imagine how the script will hit the length that you want it to be that just means you have not fleshed out enough this is an example outline look at how
in-depth it is I literally go through every single bullet every single point it's very clear how it flows from one point to another so when you're writing your own outline I'm not telling you to copy paste chunks from your research document and put into bullet points that's way too simple right and it doesn't make sense you want to be conscious of what information is relevant to your audience you cannot brain up information on your viewer you want to make sure that the information that you give the viewer is just enough for them to want to
keep on watching but not too much so they're overwhelmed for example in this video that I scripted one of the things that I noticed in phase two of researching other existing documentaries on Lou is that all of them have redundant information that pulls away from the main story so for some context the core story of Louis was he was a retired man who didn't have much purpose and was depressed but one day he went to the casino got excited when he touched the casino token for the first time so he went on this journey to
counterfeit the token and he was successful made a ton of money but then he got caught by the police and if you would to really boil it down that's the main story but all of these other existing documentaries talked about his girlfriend and Other Side characters which I personally felt Stripped Away from the main story and made it less effective so when I was outlining my own version of this story I decided to remove any details that took away from the intensity of the main story and only write in bullet points the relevant information and
I firmly believe because I actually spent time in the outlining phase this video ended up getting 300K views on a completely new channel if that's not proof of why you need to outline your video I don't know what is so by now you are 2 to 3 hours into writing your script which means it's time to start putting the bullet points into words which of course starts with the hook of which I spend 50% of my remaining time refining your hook is put simply what convinces the viewer to watch the rest of the video but
there is a terrible mistake that I see in the hook that even the top YouTubers make and this is more for Education videos you know let's hope for entertainment but the conventional advice in entertainment videos is that your hook wants to do three things validate The Click establish contexts and set expectations for the rest of the video if you watch other YouTube growth videos they talk about this three-step framework but but if you're making educational videos teaching people how to start a business or how to grow a YouTube channel this advice doesn't necessarily apply because
of two main reasons number one there isn't really context to establish in the video so 99% of the time there isn't something life or death on the line so really don't need to establish context and number two it can be difficult to set expectations for the video because the content that you usually talk about is so indepth and complex so it's kind of hard to summarize what you're going to talk about in the video in just you know 5 to 10 seconds so that's kind of the difficulty that I had I was writing for a
bunch of educational channels but all of the information out there on how to write a great script how to write a great Hook was only on how to write a great entertainment hook not education hook so that's why after working on scripts for 40 plus educational channels I've came up with these three elements that every education video should have in their Hook and the tree are proof desire value literally no one talks about how to script a hook for an educational video I to come up with this out of thin air so listen up right
now proof just means proof that you are someone worth listening to and your proof line is what tells the viewer why you are not just another yapper on the internet so to establish some proof you could be talking about how much you made from your business or the client results that you've gotten but you want to be careful to not give too many credentials you definitely don't want to come off as a douche for example in the hook that I wrote for this video my proof was that I've written for 40 plus educational channels initiat
ranging from weight loss all the way to finance videos and I've been fortunate enough to write scripts for big names like vid IQ Davy fogy and instantly AI you can model something like that but most importantly the proof must be something that your audience cares about and desire means telling the viewer that this video will get them their dream outcome so when you clicked on this video my promise to you was that I was going to teach you how to make fire content which if you're watching this video to this point you probably do want
to make fire content so if you're teaching your audience how to make money online the desire you mention is that after watching the video your viewer will learn how to hit their first 10K per month or it could be how to buy their dream car and the last part of this treep equation is value which means what kind of value is the viewer going to get from watching the video and this could be simply from repeating the title like how I did in the last line of the hook where I said something like in this
video I'm going to review everything that you need to know about how to script a viral video without wanting to rip your hair out wasting hours and hours scripting or procrastinating endlessly letting your channel wither like a sad little piece of sh so just to recap proof desire value are the tree elements every hook needs to have so I want you to take out your notepad and write this down because this isn't just some tree part checklist where you can have just two out of three elements if you miss out on any one of them
you will not make it you will not go viral now we're going to talk about something that literally everyone says is super important but no one has any idea how to execute on except for the top 1% of YouTubers whether you recognize it or not storytelling dominates YouTube Mr Beast has become the king of YouTube storytelling in the past few months after getting tons of feedback that people didn't like him yelling at the camera for 10 minutes straight but the problem that I've realized with most YouTube videos explaining what YouTube storytelling is is that no
one tells you how to actually tell a great story a lot of descripting advice that I found is that you want your character to go through a hero's journey and if you've seen the hero's journey chart there's literally 12 parts to it you look at it you don't even know what elements you should include what you should omit you don't even know okay my story doesn't have everything what should I do right now so it's kind of complicated but what most people don't tell you about storytelling is that It ultimately boils down to two words
and two words only intention and obstacle every story is the intersection between intention and obstacle and in fact I have the saying I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle and if that sounds really smart it's because I stole it from Aaron suin who is famous screenwriter who wrote The Social Network Moneyball West swing and I don't know like 50 other movies and in his quote when he says intention he means the want of the character while obstacle just refers to the main thing that is in the way of the main character getting their
desired outcome and the core of the story should be the journey and the struggle of the main character in overcoming all of the obstacles and problems thrown at him and at the end of the story if you follow a stand the hero's Journeys Arc hopefully the hero wins and you know comes out on top and when you apply this to YouTube if you look at Mr BEAST's videos he clearly outlines the intention of the main characters in The First 5 Seconds which is usually to make a ton of money $100,000 $200,000 and then he puts
them through a ton of obstacles in order to reach the grand prize that is intentioned on a large scale with very high stakes with a lot of money on the line but what if you don't have $100,000 to give away every single video well with storytelling you can also have intention and obstacles in a low stake scenario it can be as simple as me wanting to get really good at YouTube scriptwriting so that I could learn how to make videos that go viral over and over again but I wasn't very good at the start I
was was also in the military more trying to learn script writing so really if you look at the obstacle there is that I had a job I was super low on time so really I had to use all of my spare time to learn YouTube script writing and when I had downtime in the military I would literally write scripts on my phone for an hour or two and then when I got home I barely even had time to eat dinner all I did was work work work work and then if you look at the resolution
of that story it's that now I'm a professional script writer living my best life traveling the world and recording YouTube videos intention and obstacle is my favorite way of thinking about YouTube storytelling because it's it strips away all the Minor Details that doesn't matter and puts all the focus on the main character what the main character wants and what is stopping them from achieving their goals so if you're confused about what is important in your story the best thing that you can do is simplify cut out all the characters and moments that don't add value
to the main narrative and focus on making the want and the Obstacle of the character stronger because the stronger the intention and the stronger the obstacle the more powerful the story is storytelling aside this brings me to my next point which is perhaps the most underrated writing skill and it's something that I took for granted for a long time as a YouTuber or content creator there's a constant pressure to record your next video and it can feel like the entire process is rushed so that's why most people go from script to recording as fast as
possible and they completely miss out on this crucial step what happens is that most YouTubers will get on camera look at the script and realize that there a ton of grammar and structural mistakes and they end up editing the script on the go as they record so their recording sessions end up becoming 4 to 5 hours long and I say this from experience of making my own videos and having worked to 40 plus creators in the past 8 months taking 4 to 5 hours to record a video is not sustainable by any means if you
want to post content consistently and also those videos usually end up coming out totally what most YouTubers don't talk about is that editing your script is where you find gold for a video like this that you are watching which will be about 10 to 20 minutes long it's not uncommon for me to go through five to six rounds of complete revisions to get the final draft literally no one's tells you this but the first draft will be absolutely terrible so you need to be ruthless with your edits and critical of your own work and after
editing 1,000 YouTube scripts of my own and fellow YouTubers I've put together a three-step system that I believe to be the most thorough way to weed out as many writing mistakes in as short amount of time as possible step one make comments on the script so I personally don't dive straight into making changes what I do is I'll look at the script from an Outsiders perspective and make comments on it absolutely roasting it if I find certain phrases that I'm not confident about I'll highlight it and look back at it later and if there are
small edits that I made to the phrasing I turn on suggesting mode on google doc and only resolve them in step two let me tell you this you cannot skip the commenting stage because this will give you a high level overview of the script where you can spot errors that you would otherwise miss when directly editing your script immediately and when making comments these are the main writing mistakes that I look out for number one structural errors so does the points flow from one to another number two sentence structures can I vary the way that
I say something so if there are too many sentences in a row with a noun too many times can I change it to an adverb or an adjective to mix it up number three grammar errors so structureal errors sentence structures and grammar errors are relatively self-explanatory but number four claims is a sin that I see literally every writer make and I only realized that this was a huge problem when I started training writers one-on-one when you make a claim in your script you need to substantiate it you need to explain why you make such a
claim what I see most Writers Do Is that they'll say something like to go viral you need the start of an idea and then they immediately go on and talk about how to do ideation but when you make a claim as bold as every good video starts with an idea you need to back it up either with log evidence statistics or personal story one of these four but the problem with most beginner writers is that they will make claim after claim after claim after claim and they won't elaborate on any of them so when you
read the script it ends up looking like a hot mess because you are trying to say too many things at once you're jumping from one idea to another and you're not fully developing a single idea you need to look at each line of your script and ask yourself whether you are introducing a new idea or you are making a new claim and if you catch yourself introducing too many ideas one after another you know that you either need to start cutting back on those claims or start elaborating on them and only once you've commented on
your script for these four things can you start step two which is to make quick edits and resolve simple comments that way you have a cleaner draft to look at so all of the grammar errors the spelling errors those quick mistakes that you can quickly resolve you want to do it immediately in step two so that way in step three you don't have too many mistakes to resolve and you can focus on the more critical ones and step three is to just enjoy your life for a little go out for a long walk and then
come back and edit the rest of your script that way you can see the script with a completely fresh pair of eyes when you try to do major edits to your scripts immediately after commenting it's like trying to watch the TV with a pair of dirty glasses you can't see afterwards you will have something completely new something completely fresh that is totally different from your very first draft and just like that that's everything that you need to know about how to write a great script or is it you know that I don't have time to
give you all the source in this short video so that's why I put together a full 1.5h hour course on script writing one section that I've gotten great feedback on is the live script breakdowns where I tear my scripts to shreds to explain why I wrote each part in a certain way if you're curious click over here to check it out thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one
