Ross Zeiger explains the 60/40 rule: assume 60% of viewers are new to your channel and 40% are returning. Keep spoken intros brief with just your name and credibility, use Descript layouts for visual intro slides instead, and save clickable links for the last 20 seconds where YouTube allows them.
I just was watching the layout tutorial and I get that intros and outros are going to be all about adding the layout to a scene before and a scene after. So what do I do with— do I do the same intro for everyone? Could you give me a little bit of a tutorial about what to do with intros?
Yeah.
Another thing is, I guess, you want people to click through, but I don't even know if YouTube lets you have hotlinks, so that, I guess that's a kind of an add-on question.
Yeah, well, I can start with that. You can't have hotlinks throughout most of the video. The exception is end screens. The last 20 seconds of the video, you can. And actually there is one, one other exception, which is cards. Cards appear in the top right corner and they can link to another video, but pretty limited. And then regarding intros and outros, it depends. Like some people use them, some people don't, and typically they don't help from a, like a, the performance of the video perspective. It can help to just have like a standard phrase about who you are and what you do, like how you help people, that kind of thing. Because you should always assume with every video that The viewer's finding you for the first time, let's say 60/40, like 60% are finding you for the first time and 40% have been watching your other videos. So assume they don't know who you are, they don't know what you do, they don't know how you can help them. Like if you have like a quick thing that's, I'm Jerry, I've been helping authors for 30 years with their memoirs, you know, like a quick thing that establishes your credibility and who you are and how you help. That could be a good idea. And that could also be written. So this is where the layout would come into play. Is that kind of information. Actually, Ted does this where Ted has the university you went to, right? And your, uh, years of experience and all that. So you could have like a thing like that in the form of a title.
Not bothering to narrate it just so they could kind of read it. So it's not repetitively drilling into their brains every time they look at one of your pieces.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And that, that's true for like subscribe buttons. If you just have like a quick popup rather than mentioning it, different things like that, that are visual rather than you explicitly saying them. Actually, what I'll show you instead is Descript has some intros built in. If I go to properties and then I click on the layouts section, they have a whole section called intro. And if you click for more, some of these are title only. Some of them are the talking head on the right side and the text on the back. So these are just starting points. If I click on that one, so I could have here like, oh, and AI automatically populated it for me. The topic of the video and then my head right there. Mm-hmm. So that's, that's what the layout intro slides specifically look like, the built-in ones. And you can make your own, change the, change the color, change the font.
That's, that's for this particular video. But what about, you know, an I'm Jerry Wexler, maybe break in like a minute in and say, hey, I'm Jerry Wexler, with a little sort of introductory thing.
Yeah. Yeah, that's good to do deeper into the video. Like, you don't want to put it right at the beginning because you'll probably lose people.
Um, right, right, right.
But for that, if you go to the layout section again, there's these speaker lines. So if I click on speaker, that puts the name right there, and then it puts your title, which I didn't provide. I didn't mention any title. I didn't say like, I have a business teaching this or something. It just put in like the topic of the video, but it'll, AI will auto-populate it there is the main point. So if you say, I'm Jerry Wexler, I do this, then that's what it'll get. Populated there. So that's one option. I'm gonna make another scene. Another option are text, the text type of layouts. If I click two more, like this one here, for example, this puts a little box right there relevant to what you're talking about. So in the case of you introducing yourself, it would say Again, your name, how long you've been doing it, whatever you decide to say. So does that make sense?
Like, yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah. Just get, getting good at layouts basically. Yeah.
And like anything you can imagine would be helpful for the viewer or a way to illustrate what you're saying is valid. You could, you could do it here. These are just ideas and examples. But yeah, it's also helpful to just see what other people are doing. Like most people don't do anything. They just jump straight into the video. So it might be something you only do for like very long videos. If you have any videos that are 20 minutes or long, like introduce yourself on those, but not on the short ones, that kind of thing.
Okay. Or maybe even do the intro on the, on the, on the outro, introduce myself on the outro. That way they made it through the whole thing.
Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Some people do that, like, uh, yeah, basically introduce themselves and I have 100 more videos like this, so click this one next. And then the outro feeds them to the next video.
All right. Okay, well.
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