if you want to increase your views on YouTube all you have to do is Master this one concept and you're guaranteed to see results so in this video we're going to go over what that concept is and how you can apply it to your upcoming videos as always time stamps and resources used for this video are down below use them if you need them and let's just jump right in the concept we're going to be diving into is the packaging of your video packaging can refer to many things in video creation but here we are
referring to the ultimate power Duo of the title thumbnail combo these two elements when working together make up the package that will either convince someone to click or not click on your video why is this important simply speaking if you can't get somebody to click on your video you're not getting views so if you're wondering oh why am I not getting views it's probably not an algorithm problem and it's likely because of the packaging of that video not being interesting or intriguing enough to your audience so what makes good video packaging good video packaging happens
when you can create a strong curiosity Gap with your title and thumbnail that's too big for the viewer to ignore what is a curiosity Gap the term curiosity Gap was coined by Carnegie melon University researcher George Lowenstein in 1994 to describe the gap between what a person knows and what they want to know so this Theory leverages the viewers curiosity to make them click on your video since our brains are wild to Crave closure if you could create a curiosity Gap that's strong enough the viewer will have to click on your video to get that
closure that their brain is craving now this isn't some New Concept that I've just discovered there are literally hundreds of videos and interviews where thumbnail editors for famous YouTubers like Preston and Mr Beast say to create curiosity in your thumbnails this makes you very intrigued and makes you think this is what you are actually going to see in the video and we hear Ed haers all the time give this advice as well my personal favorite being a YouTuber April Lynn who created the most amazing thumbnail Deep dive video that I have ever watched in my
entire life I literally send it to my students all the time because she just breaks everything down and explains things so so so well so I'll link her video in the card above and in the description if you want to watch that one next so first let's take a look at some examples of thumbnails that create a strong curiosity Gap and then let's jump into practical tips that you can start applying to your own title thumbnail combos today a creator that I really like to look at who has super strong thumbnails that creates a strong
curiosity Gap is Ryan Tran Ryan Tran probably one of my favorite YouTubers both him and his wife Haley so we're going to look at this thumbnail here first our attention is drawn to the Yelp review so you see one star and it says no hats allowed and then after that your attention kind of expands to to the rest of the thumbnail you see Ryan sitting wearing a hat doing the exact opposite of what that review says from there your attention goes to the title where you see I tested one star restaurants so already there's a
strong curiosity Gap that has been created you know that Ryan will be testing onear restaurants it says that there's a restaurant that doesn't allow hats yet Ryan shows up wearing a hat so now you're curious what's going to happen with the rest that story line is he going to get in trouble is he going to get kicked out what's going to happen here and because you're so curious about what's going to happen you immediately want to click on that video now let's take a look at this thumbnail from Haley she's a YouTuber and booktuber and
in this thumbnail behind her you see kind of a screenshot of her conversation with a famous author this video is from over a year ago so obviously at that time Colleen Hoover was very popular popping off and you see Hale sent a text asking this famous author what book should I read and then you see that those three dots the little bubble that Colleen's getting ready to type back the title of the video is I asked my favorite authors to recommend me a book and Haley's face is a face of like anticipation like oh my
gosh she's replying what are we going to be reading and so immediately the Curiosity here is okay what is Colleen Hoover reply back to Haley what other favorite authors does she message on Instagram to ask for book recommendations what book recommendations will they be giving so there's a lot of curiosity happening with this thumbnail title combo making a viewer especially her target audience definitely want to click so if you learn one new thing by the end of this video I would love for you to give this video a thumbs up is going to make sure
that other people like you find this video easily on YouTube and if you learn two new things by the end of this video I invite you to subscribe to my channel where I post weekly videos teaching inspiring content creators how to organically grow online and make money while doing it so how can you start practicing video packaging I have a few tips for you starting with tip number one how to narrow down on your video title I'm going to share with you the process that I do for every single one of my videos and what
you can do too so you're going to start with a fullon list of all the YouTube video ideas that you have I have dozens if not hundreds of video ideas ready for me to grab them over on my clickup space so I have plenty of options to choose from but if you're somebody that needs help coming up with video ideas I have plenty of resources over on my channel and I also have a free interactive Workshop that teaches creators how to come up with four months of content in one hour and it's not just like
oh content woo Yay good ideas no these are how to pick videos that your audience would actually be really interested in and find highly engaging whether you want to grow on YouTube Tik Tok Instagram that Workshop is going to help you come up with four months of content ideas so I'll be sure to link that below if you're interested once you have your big list you're going to sort through it and narrow it down to the top five or 10 videos that you think your audience would be the most interested in or the video that
you think would give them the most value once you have your top five to 10 then you're going to narrow it down to one pick one that you're going to start outlining scripting working on the the way that I pick that one video is if I can think of a really good thumbnail idea for it that's the video idea that I'm going to move forward with personally I love Deep dive videos and that's one that I've been itching to do for a while but it wasn't until I like had thumbnail inspo where I was like
yes that's a bomb thumbnail let's move forward with this idea and craft a title to go with it how do I come up with my thumbnail ideas usually it's just scrolling on YouTube I'm a YouTube consumer day by day that is my form of entertainment I'm always watching YouTube and so anytime I just open my app I'm just aware of cool thumbnails I'm like oh that's a cool thumbnail I'll screenshot it and save it to an album in my phone called cool thumbnails and then when I have an idea and I'm like wait if I
Chang this thumbnail to do this this this oh my gosh we have a magic combo sometimes you can have like a really really Dope video idea and it's such a cool idea but but if you can't think of a good clickable exciting curiosity Gap creating thumbnail it might not be the right time for you to create that video or spend energy on that video yet so I literally won't make a video Until I know I have a good thumbnail idea for it and then with that idea because it was just like oh I'm going to
do shorts Deep dive video that's not really a title you know if somebody titled their video shorts Deep dive video probably wouldn't click on it so what I did was I wrote out as many title variations as I possibly could think of that I think my audience would find interesting and then as I wrote down as many ideas as I could that the title would start to come together now let me just say sometimes the title comes together before you make the video like this video you're watching right now I already know what the title
is before I even scripted the video but with the shorts video I had a bunch of ideas but I wasn't sure which way the script would go and the end result of the video would be so I didn't finalize that title until after the video was scripted and I was like oh this is the direction it went okay this sounds really good with this okay let's use this thumbnail so it kind of like the puzzle pieces come together at different times for different videos so that's just kind of my process for making sure the title
thumbnail combo or Doo works really well together this process is something that takes a lot of practice all you have to do is start getting in the habit of doing it it doesn't have to be easy in the beginning but if you just start taking intentional action to make time for it every single time you do it the more and more natural it will become so give yourself some Grace and just like start going through the motions tip number two is stop leaving your thumbnail as the last task before you upload your video because I
know what all of y'all are doing over there you film your video you edit it you schedule it to YouTube you're getting ready to post it and you're like I need a thumbnail so what do you do you screenshot a random frame from the video slap some text onto it and call it a day yeah I know busted and the reason I know that though is because that was me guilty I've been there I've done that as you can see here and I know hundreds and hundreds of creators that do that too but unfortunately that
is actually one of the worst things to do and could probably be one of the big reasons you aren't getting any clicks or views so what are we going to do instead prioritize thumbnails wow good job I wish there could be like a a little kid's voice that says prioritize thumbnails like Dora the Explorer that'd be funny so what are we going to do instead prioritize thumbnails wow good job the best creators in the world look at thumbnails as a priority Mr Beast said in an interview if he can't think of a good thumbnail that
his audience would want to click on even if it is his best idea he's ever had he will not spend time filming that video because at the end of the day it's about the videos packaging and getting clicks your title and thumbnail set expectations and at the very beginning of the video to minimize drop off you want to assure them that those expectations are being met YouTube themselves stated that 90% of the best performing videos have cut custom thumbnails created so knowing all of that why would you wait till the last minute to work on
something that heavily determines the results of your video I know for me thumbnails they used to be the last task like I said I would get ready to upload the video go whoops forgot but I flipped it so what I did thumbnail conception is part of those first few steps then on film day film day hi hello I take all my thumbnail photos before I film my videos so I prioritize okay take your thumbnail photos set up the thumbnail shot okay how what poses are we doing where's the text going to go I do that
first and then I film my video after so that I know I didn't forget cuz if I if I film my video first I'm going to forget to do the thumbnail so I got to start with it that's just my flow you're going to be able to create your own flow as a YouTuber so just find where it fits for you because some of y'all are going to be doing Vlogs where maybe you don't know the storyline you don't know where the video is going to go so maybe you do start filming before you make
your thumbnail and if that works for you and you see great results from it great fantastic you're seeing results you're getting views you're seeing subscribers wonderful but whether you're vlogging or not the same importance of thumbnails apply so after you Vlog after you finish your video if you want your video to perform the best that it can have the best chance that it can you want to make sure you're allocating intentional unrushed Thor rough time on thumbnail research and thumbnail editing for thumbnail research you could simply go to YouTube type in your video idea in
the search bar and look at what other people are doing typically what I'm looking for when I need inspiration I'm looking for a video that has more views than the Channel's number of subscribers and it was posted within the last year maybe two years this shows me that that thumbnail has recently performed well and their packaging was so good more than that person's subscribers clicked on that video tip number three don't repeat yourself this is one of the most common mistakes I see creators make with their thumbnails and that's using it to repeat the same
thing that you said in your title and this is something that I am guilty of as well so if you go back on some of my videos and you see this mistake or this thing that I'm doing just don't look at it as inspo okay that was before I learned an example of this this is a video how to grow on Instagram right if the video's title is how to grow on Instagram and then the thumbnail says how to grow on Instagram that's what I mean by you're repeating yourself both in the title thumbnail so
how do we get titles and thumbnails to work together think of your thumbnails as the visual that will get somebody to stop scrolling it will grab their attention by appealing to relatability peing curiosity whatever but it's the one thing among all the other thumbnails that will get them to stop scrolling and then after you grab somebody's attention with that image with that thumbnail then and only then will they continue to read the video title to see if it's a video that they even want to watch so thumbnail stops the scroll grab somebody's attention and title
explains your video or creates even more curiosity to the viewer with that said if repeating the same words in the title thumbnail is the mistake what do you do instead option one you could use your thumbnail as extra real estate for your title let's look back at my how to grow on Instagram example when I did my title brain dump a few other titles that I played with was how to grow 10K followers on Instagram in 30 days fast it kind of felt mumbly kind of crowded with lots of words and I knew that I
wanted how to grow on Instagram that that keyword phrase I wanted that in my title so the extra phrases or emphasis words that I didn't get to use in my title I can now use them in my thumbnail so maybe the title is how to grow on Instagram and the thumbnail now is 10K followers in 30 days that visual somebody seeing 10,000 followers in 30 days definitely would stop their scroll and then when they read the title they learn oh this is a how-to video where I can learn how to get 10,000 followers in 30
days heck yeah yes I want to learn that that's the perfect title thumbnail combo option two is to Peak curiosity we've talked about this before and there are a million ways to Peak somebody's curiosity so I'll just give a few examples you could lean into showing a transformation that the video Promises you could show a result that somebody could achieve after they watch your video you could do a sneak peek into the storyline and so much more so let's again apply that to our example how to grow on inst St how can we show how
to grow on Instagram as a transformation well maybe on the left side of the thumbnail I have the before and on the right I have the after the before I'm bummed I have zero followers oh my gosh so sad and then on the other side I'm like oh my gosh excited 100K followers that shows the transformation that somebody can achieve when they watch my video another option is to show the result so maybe with this thumbnail I could show a chart or some sort of visual showing the graph of rapid growth that somebody could unlock
when they learn the steps to properly grow on Instagram with these examples you could also see how I'm not repeating myself in the thumbnail neither of these thumbnails say how to grow on Instagram they're just visually showing what that would look like for somebody now I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and say like wow it's so easy just use this on minute hack and this one concept and you're an overnight success sorry that's not how it goes if you're that has a hard time with this that's okay that's part of the
process the pain of being a YouTuber but it's also the joy of learning new things as being a YouTuber packaging is something that you will always get to play with as a Creator it's something that I'm still studying and trying to learn with every single video I make I don't think I'm perfect at it but I do believe it's like a muscle where the more you use it the more natural it'll feel for you over time but what I can say is even though it's hard at first it is worth learning because ever since I
started focusing on this strategy with every video on my channel and seeing my students also implement this concept you see the results for themselves it can be hard but it can also be fun if you choose to find the joy in the process of coming up with these fun exciting ideas that's I don't know that's what all the the big YouTubers do you know just think of your favorite YouTuber go to their Channel and admire the work that they do with their title thumbnails and you get to learn that you get to be that to
somebody someday so for me yes it takes extra time and yes sometimes it could be a pain when I have a really good video idea but I can't think of a freaking thumbnail for it but it's part of the process of being a YouTuber and it is so rewarding so much fun so don't give up keep going and keep finding joy in that process so how about everybody drops a word of encouragement to each other to fellow YouTube creators below because you will see that you are not alone in this process and if you're somebody
who is currently working on growing your YouTube channel be sure to watch this video next because I break down what I would do if I had to start from zero on YouTube using a realistic and organic growth strategy thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one follow your joy bye
