How I ACTUALLY plan my YouTube videos (to grow my channel!)

the most important though also most often overlooked step in creating a YouTube video that's actually going to do well in the algorithm and help your channel grow is planning many beginner creators get excited have an idea for a video and immediately pick up their camera and start filming and then usually later in the editing they end up realizing that they missed getting a lot of footage and maybe what they're saying doesn't quite make sense the best way to be efficient and to create videos that are going to perform well for your channel every single time

is to invest your time into pre-production the most successful YouTubers have a solid video planning routine and system that they Implement every time they go to create a new video and that's exactly what I'm going to be sharing with you in today's video I'm going to walk you through exactly what I do to plan out my YouTube videos to make sure that I'm optimizing for high clickthrough rate and long average view duration so that I can get as many videos as possible to show up on the homepage and help to grow my audience so let's

go plan a video so let's start with the hardest part coming up with an idea sometimes Amazing Ideas just come to you I feel like shower thoughts are always the best YouTube video ideas or maybe you're inspired by something that you're reading or another video that you watched and you just have this like lightning strike idea I'll be honest these usually make the best videos but this is also the hardest thing to control you can't just like generate an incredible idea out of thin air and so when these things come along the rare times that

they do we embrace them we make videos about them but when they don't we implement the steps I'm about to share to try to come up with you know good ideas great ideas are something you can't really control they come to you and they come to you but good ideas are something that you can generate and sometimes you just need to create good content consistently if you wait around for a great idea lightning to strike you'll probably hardly ever post a video so my first source of good ideas is my notion database so when those

great ideas strike or when just general ideas come to me about potential videos I could make I list them in my notion database so that when it comes time for me to make my next weekly YouTube video I can reference this list and pick something from it or it at least gives me a starting point generally I would recommend that any content creator keeps a running list like this because you're going to end up having ideas that you can't Implement immediately so make sure you store them somewhere so you can come back to them later

next inso source is the comment section and my DMs when I'm trying to think of what video I should make next I always want to turn to the audience to the community and see what kind of requests I'm getting and it's not even that people will message me saying can you please make a video about this I mean they do sometimes but that's not the most frequent thing what you want to do more so rather than just look for literal requests is try to read between the lines of what people are struggling with and what

people are most interested in so if you're getting a lot of questions that are specific specifically about one topic or you just see people in the comment section really connecting with a certain theme that you've shared these are really good indicators of what your audience might want to see next from you so it's really important that you learn to kind of do a Vibe check of your comments and your DMs because that's very valuable information that can give you a great idea for a video other important places that you can check for ideas inside YouTube

studio if you go to your analytics Tab and then you click on audience along the top there if you scroll down AIT you'll see that there are two really helpful boxes one of them is the channels that your audience watches here you'll see a round up of three pages of channels that a lot of your subscribers watch in addition to your own you can look through these channels see what types of videos these creators make and get inspiration from them if you're seeing creators that you know kind of make very similar stuff to yourself I

wouldn't recommend necessarily going through their content and ging ideas from that because you don't want to end up just being a copycat but where I think this section of YouTube Studio cat actually be really helpful is when you stumble across channels that might surprise you you might not realize that your subscribers are also interested in these new or different topics and that's where you can really gain inspiration for maybe trying out a new format incorporating a different subject matter or style even more helpful than this other channels your audience watches is the box right below

it which is labeled what your audience watches and and this is basically a list of videos so not necessarily specific channels but videos from across several channels that your audience has shown interested this is really great insight to see what other types of videos what other type of content your audience is interested in seeing again this might encourage you to step outside of your comfort zone a little bit do something outside of the box and it's also just a really great place to kind of keep your finger on the pulse of of what your audience

is interested in in this moment okay so once I've checked all these places and I've found some pretty good title ideas that I think I might want to run with there's two different places that I like to check my titles in so the first one is with this browser extension called tube buddy inside tubebuddy there's a tool called keyword Explorer and basically it allows you to input a potential YouTube title and it'll give you a score based on the SEO optimization of that title honestly I'm not overly concerned with making my titles perfectly SEO friendly

but by going through this keyword Explorer step I'm able to see the other search results that come up when I put in my title so I can get a brief look at how other creators have been approaching this topic and I might start to get some ideas about how I could design my own thumbnail to make sure that it stands out from the other search results ideally you'd like your two bu score to be like 80 up to 100 but like I said it's not just all about SEO optimization the next step is maybe even

more important and that's putting your title idea into this online app called thumbs up.tv really all thumbs up.tv is is a site where you can get a preview of what your title and thumbnail will look like at the different sizes that the YouTube website will display it at really the reason why I love this site is because you can see whether or not your title is going to be truncated or shortened on YouTube at this stage in the planning I don't have a thumbnail ready yet so usually I'll just drag in an image like maybe

a thumbnail from a past video all I'm really testing here is how does my title look at these different sizes that YouTube will display you really want to make sure that the most enticing or interesting part of your title is not going to get cut off and that it's still going to be really intriguing and clickable in these different ways it'll be displayed now that you've got your titled solidified the next crucial step is determining what your thumbnail design is going to be by the way please ignore my massive stack of cardboard boxes in the

background I've got some Ikea furniture to assemble I've actually got some big plans for like home office Creator Studio upgrades so like let me know if you'd want to see a video on that anyway when it comes to thumbnails sometimes I might like sketch it out on my iPad or on a piece of paper or something like that to start to almost storyboard it like just figure out what the general placement of everything is going to be but more often than not I'll just make a few notes for myself about how I visualize it in

my mind which works cuz I'm not trying to communicate this to anybody else I'm the only one making it so I might just write down something like Katie on left third of frame holding up laptop with Premiere Pro on screen like that kind of thing now when it comes to coming up with a solid thumbnail design I think one really great place to start is back with those tubebuddy search results or even if you don't have tuddy just searching your title in YouTube and seeing what the results look like and taking a look at those

thumbnails and thinking about how you can make yours stand out from the rest when it comes to my thumbnail design in general I like to think that I take a little bit more of like a soft and natural and like aesthetic approach than some other like YouTube tips or social media tips videos that are a lot more like Graphics heavy and like Punchy just cuz that's my vibe uh but you know it's about a balance of personal branding and then also making your stuff stand out from the other options that a potential viewer might face

when they're looking for your video in general though you want to take the title that you've come up with and really ask yourself how can I visually represent this title especially doing it in a way that has a slight different approach or slightly different flavor to it than your title did because your title and thumbnail are kind of both opportunities for you to capture the attention of a potential viewer so you don't want to kind of waste one of them on just duplicating the other and if you can throw an additional little twist into your

thumbnail that just adds a little bit more curiosity that is going to be a real recipe for Success so let's talk about one of my recent videos which I think is a good example of this cuz it was kind of my top performer in the last little a while and that's this video that I made titled the lie you've been told about YouTube growth now the thumbnail is quite minimalist quite straightforward it's me holding up a vlogging camera and then the text behind me says don't Niche down so here's the twist of this thumbnail when

you see the title the lie you've been told about YouTube growth and then you see text that accompanies it saying don't Niche down it's not exactly clear is the lie don't Niche down or is the lie you've been told Niche down and I'm like telling you not to because that's a lie you've been told it seems fairly simple but this little twist of unclear wording leaves the viewer wondering what the answer is what is the lie I've been told about YouTube growth what is the correct approach when it comes to having a niche so with

this title and thumbnail pairing I've been able to generate more questions that I've answered which makes people more likely to click on the video cuz they want the answers now so when you're designing your thumbnail try to think about how you can generate more questions that you will answer in the video that'll make people want to click a well design thumbnail is such a crucial part of the success of your YouTube video so if you're not feeling overly confident about your design skills then I highly recommend you check out the sponsor of today's video skillshare

skillshare is the largest online learning platform with thousands of classes for creatives on topics that range from videography to design to product itivity and freelancing if you want to develop your graphic design skills in particular so that you can improve your YouTube thumbnails then I highly recommend that you check out great graphic design create emotional gripping typographic art by Sophia yesi Sophia dives into all the basic principles that are going to help you improve as a designer and therefore make some really fire thumbnails visual design skills are honestly so crucial for so many aspects of

being a content creator not just in making thumbnails so it's a really essential foundation and the best part is you can try out skillshare class by Sophia totally for free when you use the link in my description the first 500 people to use my link will get one month free of skillshare so make sure you go check that out linked below and as always thanks so much to skillshare for sponsoring today's video all right now that we have our title and thumbnail decided on it's time to actually outline our video and decide on our talking

points for me almost every video I make is based on having three to four maybe five at most main talking points this can take many different formats for example you could make a list like this video seven things I wish I knew before I started on YouTube but it doesn't have to be it could also be a step-by-step process like this video is an example of that or it could just be three totally separate ideas or strategies or advice or whatever that fits along a similar theme but the point is for me I feel like

there's a good balance of having like three or four talking points it makes the video feel full and complete and it just kind of gives me a structure to get started with by the way if you're curious I do plan out all of my videos with my viral YouTube video template in notion basically this template just ensures that I don't skip any of the crucial planning steps and that I've really thought of everything that I can do to make my video as successful as possible in the algorithm if you want to use this template for

yourself I'm going to have it linked in the description below but if you're watching this through my membership hi Creator club members then you already get it for free so you can check out the description for that too all right so once you figured out what your three kind of main talking points are going to be it's time to actually dive in and write this script you always got to start with a Snappy intro I really believe you want your intro to be like 30 seconds Max you want to dive in immediately to what people

are curious about why they clicked so address what you teed up in the title and thumbnail cuz if you don't people are going to think it's clickbait and they probably won't stick around very long and you also just want to be as concise into the point as possible don't dive in with hey everybody what's up how's it going it's a beautiful day of today blah blah you can bring in the personality you can bring in the Life updates later once you've already hooked them and crucially in this step if you can you really want to

set up a further question or kind of tee up your next Point like yeah but the most important thing is actually this and in addition to keeping things really concise into the point you also want to if you can open up another question another piece of curiosity to to keep people watching to the next point so you address what you brought up in the title and thumbnail and then you say but wait there's more actually the most important thing is what I'm going to talk about next or whatever so usually I write out my intros

word for word because I want to be as concise as possible and I want to make sure those first 30 seconds are as effective as they can be at keeping people watching but then as I move into the further talking points in the video I'm just going to make bullet point notes about it cuz for me personally I just think it comes across as more natural and a bit more engaging when I'm just kind of talking off the top of my head but I have my notes so I'm like I'm staying on track here but

I'm not trying to read a lines from a script but I think that's going to very person to person like if you feel really awkward trying to just come up with stuff as you go then maybe you want to have it more scripted but for me I just feel better knowing like okay this is the point I'm trying to get across now I'm going to just like add lib to talk about it okay and finally for your outro you want to write something that's actually going to lead your viewers into your next video this is

really important because the success of Any Given video in the algorithm yes it's about click-through rate yes it's about retention but it's also about keeping people on the platform in general so not just about individual view duration but about watch session duration so if you can keep people watching your videos like your videos will be rewarded in the algorithm because you're keeping people on YouTube longer and of course just like straightforwardly it will give that video that you promoted another view cuz you're sending people over there to watch it if you do this really successfully

people can end up binging your channel and then that's how they end up being a returning viewer if they actually watch your video and then go ahead and watch more videos from you and so on they'll see more and more videos from you on the homepage that's how you grow your audience in general the next step is to polish your script read through your entire script from start to finish and make any additions that you think are necessary and take out any sections that you think might be repetitive or just drag on a little bit

this is also the stage where you want to start adding in plans for potential b-roll Graphics that you might create for the video any animations in the template that I use I have a secondary column that's titled shot list but essentially what it is is just notes about the visuals that I intend to include with that segment of the video so this is when I go through and I read the script to myself and I really try to visualize like what does this look like in video form I almost try to have the video playing

in my mind as I read through my notes and so as I am mentioning certain things certain visuals come to mind for me let's take the B segment at the beginning of this video for example as I'm reading through my script and I'm saying stuff like oh you know new YouTubers get excited they pick up the camera right away in my mind I'm seeing okay I'm going to show myself looking enthusiastic picking up a camera and then to end it off I'm going to show myself sitting at the computer seeing seeming a little bit frustrated

and disappointed cuz I didn't do the planning I needed to do so you can see how you can apply this to any circumstance like anytime you're describing something or you're talking about something that could be shown in a visual manner write down your notes now about what that Boll can be so then you remember to film it when you're filming your video during this part of the process too you could make a few notes on where you want to film each segment like as you can tell I like to film different sections of the video

in different locations so you can make some notes about that as well once you have your video scripted first of all congrats because I think you've just overcome the hardest part of the YouTube creation process but you're not finished quite yet because now it's time to film and there are some crucial steps that you're going to want to implement that you can make the most out of your filming process and create the best video possible to help grow your channel in this video I take you through my personal filming process so you can see how

I set up my camera I get my angles I film in all of my different areas of my apartment I give you some variety so if you want to see exactly how I go about this including dealing with making mistakes starting from the top you know all that good stuff watch this video next I really do think it'll make you feel better about your filming process that's what I've heard from a lot of people H cuz nobody gets it perfect the first time so don't stress about that all right so go ahead watch this video

next so you can see how to film the lovely script that you've just created and as always thank you so much for watching I hope that you're having adventures and following your dreams and I hope that my little nasy sick voice hasn't been too annoying in this video and I'll see you in the next one bye